Homeless Served Rotten Chicken At BK Shelter To File $2M Lawsuits

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — Residents of a Fort Greene homeless shelter who were rushed to the hospital after the city served them expired chicken salad will file $2 million lawsuits and demand a criminal investigation into the incident, their attorney announced Thursday.

Four residents who ate the sour chicken, which had a bogus expiration sticker pasted over the real label, filed notices this week that they will submit four $2 million lawsuits against the city for the Oct. 24 lunch meal at Fort Greene Shelter on Auburn Place.

The chicken salad had expired more than a month before and sent all four residents to the hospital with food poisoning, their attorney, Sanford Rubenstein said.

Rubenstein also sent a letter to the Brooklyn District Attorney this week demanding he investigate the shelter for reckless endangerment.

"That's what this was — recklessly endangering the health of the residents of this shelter," Rubenstein said Thursday. "In this case it's very clear the food poisoning was a result of eating rancid chicken served by the city at a shelter where the label for expiration was labeled over with a bogus expiration date."

Residents said they realized something was wrong when one of the residents peeled back the label on the individually-wrapped chicken salads and saw that under the Oct. 31 expiration label, there was the real expiration date.

"I see a '9', which is September, and little by little I started seeing the date is September 20, 2019," one resident, Pierre Landro said. "It was October 24th that we were eating food that was already expired by a month and four days."

As the four residents and several others started to violently throw up from the rancid chicken, shelter staff laughed and told them that they would have to call for help themselves, another resident Kenneth Gilmore said.

Landro, Gilmore and two others, Mauricio Caballero and Rose Rodriguez, would eventually be rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where they were diagnosed with food poisoning.

Gilmore said the incident has left him terrified to keep eating food at the shelter, but with little choice not to. The shelter changed vendors within a few days, but now most meals don't have expiration dates at all, he said.

"When I even attempt to go into the cafeteria now, I get panic attacks because I feel as though this will continue," he said. "If we didn't discover this, it would still be going on...[But] if you want to eat, you have to eat the food that's provided to you. There's nothing we can do to protect ourselves."

All four residents said they don't think this is the first time the shelter has served food with bogus expiration labels. Landro said he's thrown up two other times in the two weeks he stayed at the shelter before eating the chicken.

The city's Department of Social Services has said that the rancid chicken salad was an "isolated incident." They asked the vendors who provided and delivered the food, Sally Sherman Food and Whitsons, to put together a plan to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Rubenstein said the lawsuit will help "get to the bottom" of who exactly put the bogus label on the food.

But the residents said they were far from satisfied with how the city's staff handled the incident.

The shelter staff haven't reached out to assure residents that the food they've been served since is safe or even asked them how they are feeling when they go back from the hospital, Gilmore said.

"It's although it never happened," he said. "The reason we sought help was because we felt that we were harmed intentionally and we don't want this to happen to nobody else. We're trying to prevent this from happening to anyone else that [needs] services."