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Food

Man Says McDonald's Worker Spiked His Drink With Tide Pod

“I thought she'd spit in it and it wasn't until an hour later when I dumped it out that I realized it was much worse.”
Photo via Flickr user Steve Baker / Composite by MUNCHIES Staff

We’ll give it to Lee Graves: he knows how to write an opening line. “So how about the girl at McDonald's tried to murder me today for telling her ‘This was supposed to be a large Coke,’” he posted on his Facebook page. In 15 riveting sentences, Graves summed up his trip to McDonald’s, his subsequent stay in the hospital, introduced the Jacksonville (Florida) Sheriff’s Department as a supporting character—then wrapped it all up with a succinct “Smh.”

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According to Graves, he drove through the McDonald’s drive-through and ordered a meal and a large Coke. The McDonald’s worker gave him a small drink, so he politely corrected her and told her that he’d paid for a large. He told News4Jax that, on his way out of the parking lot, the soda started to overflow “like a darn volcano that's a science experiment that a kid would do.” He took a couple of cautionary sips to keep it from spilling all over his truck, and realized that it tasted…weird, and a little like bleach and chlorine.

“I thought my taste buds were off since I've had a bunch of dental work done this week but when I took the lid off I saw a big clump of blue goo,” he wrote. “I thought she'd spit in it and it wasn't until an hour later when I dumped it out that I realized it was much worse.” Graves saw the half-melted remnants of what, to him, looked like a Tide Pod or similar kind of detergent pod.

When he started to feel sick to his stomach, he went to UF Health Jacksonville, where he had to undergo blood work and have an EKG before being treated for bleach and chlorine poisoning. Graves said that the doctors called McDonald’s about the blue substance he’d noticed bubbling in his drink; a McEmployee claimed that the only two blue items in that restaurant were blue latex gloves and the blue bleach pods they used to wash their towels. Aaand that’s about when he reported the incident to McDonald’s, to the local health department and called the Sheriff’s Office. (According to News4Jax, when the cops called McDonald’s, the manager said that they only used cleaning pods to disinfect the frappuccino machine).

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That McDonald’s drive-thru worker said that she remembered Graves, but denied dunking a bleach pod in his drink and said she only handled the cup long enough to put the lid on it. Edgard Gerena, the owner of that location, issued a statement assuring Graves that he was “[taking] this claim very seriously and are investigating the matter.” (MUNCHIES has reached out to both McDonald’s and Graves for comment but we have not yet heard back).



Graves says that he wasn’t rude and didn’t do anything that could’ve possibly led him to deserve this. “I would like to think she was having a bad day and I was just an innocent victim, you know,” he said. “Hopefully I wasn't an intended target."

Even if you are having a bad day—or having the worst day—you don’t poison your damn customers. Smh, indeed.