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NY inmates who say they ate poisoned Thanksgiving cake get $232K settlement

A city Law Department spokeswoman said the settlement “was in the best interest of all parties involved”

By John Annese and Reuven Blau
New York Daily News

NEW YORK — Poisoned carrot cake and sweet potatoes made a group of city inmates violently ill and cost city taxpayers more than $232,000, the Daily News has learned.

Sixteen inmates settled a federal lawsuit with the de Blasio administration after they complained food they were served on Thanksgiving in 2015 was filled with rat poison and made them seriously sick.

At least three of the detainees inside the Brooklyn House of Detention took so ill they passed out and were sent to a local hospital, the court papers allege.

Four more inmates were also hospitalized, and underwent CT scans and had their stomachs pumped, said the inmates’ lawyer, Greg Zenon.

But many of the sickened inmates were forced to stay inside a locked-down day room and didn’t get any medical care for hours, Correction Department records show.

“They were purposely denied treatment,” Zenon said.

Officers also tossed most of the suspicious food before department investigators arrived, department records show. As a result, investigators were forced to take samples from the garbage.

Tests on that food showed the tainted food had high levels of Brodifacoum, a highly lethal rat poison, records show. It remains unclear who put the poison into the food.

The culinary nightmare began when an inmate who worked in pest control spotted green pellets in the carrot cake that he recognized as rat poison.

A jail officer in charge of the kitchen, known to the inmates only as “Panama,” said the inmate was wrong, and that pellets were clusters of nuts and fruit, court papers show.

The officer refused to sample the food herself, the lawsuit alleges.

Jail officials called a lockdown when they realized some inmates had phones and were trying to call 311 and 911. Then they rounded up the cake to destroy the evidence, the lawsuit alleges.

Several prisoners said they begged to go to the jail’s health clinic, but their pleas were met by jail staff with laughter and jokes.

The three inmates who received the largest settlements, $26,000 apiece, went into convulsions and lost consciousness.

Seven more inmates received $16,000 each, while another three got $10,000 each. The remaining inmates got settlements of $1,500, $750 and $500.

The inmates were seeking $1 million each in damages.

Department rules require jail staffers to report suspected food poisoning cases to higher ups within an hour.

That didn’t happen in this case. No officer appears to have been disciplined for failing to follow that rule, said Zenon.

Kimberly Joyce, a city Law Department spokeswoman, said the settlement “was in the best interest of all parties involved.”

The city paid 21 jail inmates a total of $378,000 after they filed lawsuits claiming they were sickened in March 2015 by tainted meatloaf.

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