Poisoned

In January 1993, a lot of children started showing up at Seattle Children’s Hospital with the same unusual symptoms. Doctors didn't know what was going on – until they realized that most of the children had recently eaten at the same restaurant: Jack in the Box. Jeff Benedict’s book is Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  How much more would you get done with a personal assistant in your pocket?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Life's too short to be like manually filing insurance claims and like being on hold waiting for like the lab tests that the, you know, that the doctor did. Like, I don't know, I feel like it's allowing me to show up in ways that I've always wished I could show up. I just, I'm so strapped for time.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  What we gain and give up when AI agents enter the picture. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Listen to new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  This episode discusses the death of several children. Please use discretion.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  We saw some blood in a stool and we were also noticing decreased urine output. And, but the bloody, the bloody diarrhea was, I mean, that was, as you can imagine, that was alarming.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  This is Darren Detwiler. In early 1993, he was living just north of Seattle with his wife and their two children. In late January, their 16-month-old, Riley, got sick and they took him to the hospital.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  They started on IV fluids and, you know, just sitting there in that hospital, which strangely was across the street from his daycare center. Sitting there with him, holding him on my lap for much of this when he was, you know, with his IV. And there was a sense of, oh, this is gonna be fine. We're just gonna pump through it full of fluids and it'll be fine. But everything escalated so quickly.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Riley wasn't getting any better. The doctors decided that he should be airlifted to Seattle Children's Hospital.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  I wanted to go up to the helicopter pad and they wouldn't, you know, our protocols won't allow this, you know, and I could, I could, I could understand that. Believe me, I can understand that. But the craziest thing was that by this time, the local news had been notified of this. And him being taken on a stretcher on the helicopter pad and loaded onto the helicopter was being covered live on the television. And so his mother and I are still down in his hospital room where the nurses were basically processing us out so we could leave to drive down.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  It's about an hour and a half drive down to the children's hospital. And we turn around and we're watching this being covered live on the local news. And there's my son, there, he's under a silver space blanket. I could see his face, I could, he's dwarfed by this huge teddy bear, but I could see this tuft of hair and I can see his eyes wider than you would ever imagine as he's being loaded onto this helicopter.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Earlier that month, within a span of 24 hours, nine kids had shown up at Seattle Children's Hospital with symptoms just like Riley's.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  And one of the primary doctors at Children's Hospital in Seattle, when he saw that there were a number of children that had come in with these symptoms, mainly in their stomach and the throwing up, the diarrhea, the bloody diarrhea, he was immediately alarmed because of the number and they kept coming.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  This is writer Jeff Benedict. The doctor at the hospital got in touch with the state health department and reported that he'd never seen anything like this before. Nine sick kids with E. coli in 24 hours made him worry that there were going to be a lot more.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  This was on a Tuesday, and by Friday, the number was up to 37. A few of the children had been moved to the ICU. Doctors were trying to figure out what was going on.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  One of the things that helped them early was the recognition that the victims who were showing up at the hospital were all children. And that tells you something. And it's like trying to solve a puzzle, and you start looking backwards. Okay, where did these children eat? And it didn't take them long to start turning their focus to fast food restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, particularly around the greater Seattle area. And step by step, they got to Jack in the Box.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Jack in the Box is one of the oldest fast food chains in the country. 27 of the 37 sick children had eaten there. The top public health official in the state, a man named John Kobayashi, contacted Jack in the Box headquarters and said they had a problem: a potential E. coli outbreak. At that time, what is known about E. coli?

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Very little. If you took a poll at that time on any public street in any major city in the US and asked, "What is E. coli?", most people would just look at you like, "What?". They'd never even heard the term.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  E. coli is a kind of bacteria that can be found in the intestines of people and animals. There are many different strains of E. coli, and many don't cause any harm, but some can be deadly, including one called E. coli 0157H7.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Back then, there hadn't really been a national outbreak of E. coli. There'd been a few very small cases that had been studied by the medical profession, but most people, including the medical establishment, were unfamiliar with this. And so the hospital is sort of scrambling around, but they don't really know what they're dealing with.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  One of the few things that they did know was that most people at the time got E. coli from eating undercooked ground beef. State epidemiologist John Kobayashi asked Jack in the Box how they cooked their hamburgers. They said that they made sure to cook them to an internal temperature of 140 degrees, which was the federal regulation. But one year earlier, John Kobayashi had raised the Washington state required cooking temperature for ground beef from 140 degrees to 155 degrees. And Jack in the Box had just admitted that they hadn't been doing that.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  At the time, what was the USDA doing in terms of food safety?

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Not much. If you think about it in today's terms, you can go to a grocery store in any state in America, and if you buy meat or poultry, there's stickers on the outside that warn you to cook them to the proper temperature and handling instructions and all that. I mean, at Thanksgiving, when you buy a turkey, there's warnings on the outside about, you know, the things that can make you sick if you don't store it and cook it properly. That's-- the federal government does that well now, but then, those things didn't exist.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Jack in the Box temporarily shut down their 66 locations in the state, and John Kobayashi issued a statement officially naming Jack in the Box as the source of the outbreak.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  By January 28th, two children at Seattle Children's Hospital had died from E. coli, and there were over 200 confirmed cases. Jack in the Box's CEO, Bob Nugent, was called to Washington DC to testify in front of the Senate.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  He was a relatively young CEO, and he had two children, he had two daughters. And he felt guilty. He actually wanted to testify. He wanted to talk against the better judgment of his attorneys. And he said things that were essentially incriminating because he was, I don't know that he thought about it this way, but he was basically acknowledging that Jack in the Box had screwed up.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Bob Nugent acknowledged that their Washington restaurants hadn't been meeting the state mandatory cooking temperature, and said, quote, "I wish I had known about the Washington state regulation when it was established. I didn't." He also said, "It is important to note that the contaminated meat that was infected with the E. coli bacteria before delivery to our restaurants had passed all USDA inspections."

• 9:57Speaker 04

  But his intention was, he was trying to take responsibility. And he was also trying to protect his own company, but he, you know, he just, when I say as a journalist, he was too honest. What I mean by that is, he was pretty raw. I think by that point, he knew that his company had made an enormous mistake. And the only thing he was really focused on at that point was trying to figure out how to make sure that it never happened again.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Darren Detweiler had heard about the outbreak before his 16-month-old son Riley got sick. Their family hadn't eaten at Jack in the Box. But they later learned that it was possible to get E. coli just from being in contact with someone who had it.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  When Riley was airlifted to Seattle Children's Hospital, Darren Detwiler and his wife, followed by car.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  It took us about, I would say, two hours in all to get down to Children's Hospital, and it was a very quiet drive. We got there, and we weren't initially able to go in because the doctors weren't ready for us to go in and see him. And we were talking about a full-blown pediatric intensive care unit in Children's Hospital. And by the time a doctor and a nurse brought us into that room, you almost couldn't even see him. He was completely dwarfed by wires and tubes and monitors. And you can't explain that. How do you explain this to a 60-month-old? You can't. And I'll never forget

• 11:43Speaker 03

  when he kind of looked up and he pointed at the IV bag hanging from a pole, and he said, "Baba." Because in a way, with the markings and there was liquid in it, it kind of looked like a bottle. I could see that. And, you know, we were able to kind of brush his hair a little bit and tell we're here for him. But they ultimately proceeded to say, "We need to get him into surgery immediately," calling it exploratory surgery, and warning us, you know, that the longer they wait, the more damage, you know, could take place. And they took him in for the surgery. When he came out,

• 12:27Speaker 03

  he was on a ventilator. And the first thing they did is explain to us how he was medically induced into a coma. And then finally, a surgeon came in and explained that they had to remove the majority of his intestines because they were completely destroyed by this pathogen. And we spent the next two to three weeks as we were being explained what every single monitor was and what was being measured and what this number meant, and that they wanted this number to go up, or they wanted this number to go down, or whatever it was, watching them get worse day after day after day. And

• 13:10Speaker 03

  What started as "we're worried about these numbers" became a "now we're worried about the oxygen deprivation to his brain." And there was a day where they came in and said that there was no turning back in terms of the oxygen deprivation to his brain, and that they had already continued beyond what they normally would have in terms of keeping him on life support, and that essentially, he was not going to survive.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Darren and his wife consulted as many doctors as they could, but everyone came to the same conclusion. So they agreed to take Riley off life support.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  And the nurses and the doctors removed him from everything, and they wrapped him up in a blanket. And I'll never, ever forget being asked to sit in a rocking chair and having him put into my arms, and hold him, and I could smell his hair again, and hold him tight, and in my eyes and in my mind, his chest was rising and falling, but it wasn't.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Riley Detweiler died on February 20, 1993, after over 20 days in the hospital.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  We'll be right back.

• 15:17Speaker 02

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• 17:32Speaker 02

  In the same hospital where Riley Detweiler had been treated, a 10-year-old named Brienne Kiner had been in the ICU for weeks in a coma with similar symptoms as the other sick kids. Writer Jeff Benedict.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  And from everything that they were seeing with the way that the E. coli had attacked her, unfortunately, was that her chances of survival were were very low. And the doctors felt like she was one of the ones that they weren't going to be able to save.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Here's lawyer Bill Marler.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  You know, I remember the media was covering, you know, day 37 of Brienne Kiner's coma. You know, the doctors were telling the Kiners that there was no hope, that they should actually remove her from life support.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Brienne's mother, Suzanne, wanted to speak with her pastor before she signed the forms authorizing the hospital to take Brienne off life support. She left her daughter's room to find a payphone. During her phone conversation, Suzanne heard her name being called on the public address system. And as she was hanging up, doctors ran towards her. Brienne was awake.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  And at the time, it was portrayed as a miracle. Because, you know, from the doctor's perspective, they didn't really have any precedent for this. And granted, there hadn't been a lot of cases to look back on. But this was a big abnormality in the, you know, in the outbreak, for sure. But the damage to her was was pretty catastrophic. Like, they they knew.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  At that point that, you know, a couple of her vital organs were, she was, she'd already lost, and that there would be things like she'd never be able to have children. I mean, she's a, she's a child at this point, and you already know things like that, that her, her physical growth is going to be stunted. She's going to be under medical care for the rest of her life.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Brienne's mother Suzanne realized she should get a lawyer. She met with several, including Bill Marler, who came to meet her and Brienne in the hospital.

• 20:07Speaker 05

  She'd been, you know, in a hospital bed by then, probably three and a half months. So she was incredibly weak and you could kind of hardly see her because she was so small and shriveled. I mean, this is, you know, her body was a pincushion. It was a very, as a father, it was a really frightening experience to see a kid like that. And it was so overwhelming, I just sort of backed up, walked out the door and, you know, I was pretty emotional. And I wound up still talking to the Mrs. Kiner afterwards, but I was pretty confident that they weren't going to hire me because

• 20:48Speaker 05

  how many, you know, how many times you're going to hire a lawyer that breaks into tears?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Bill also knew that he didn't have as much experience as some of the other lawyers Suzanne was considering. So he was surprised when she called him and said she wanted to hire him. Suzanne later told Jeff Benedict, quote, "I wanted someone who'd come in and spend 15 minutes just absorbing her. Bill was the only one that could look at her." Bill Marler began looking into Brienne's case.

• 21:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was working up damages, you know, what is a long-term impacts of somebody with a no large intestine, or who's a diabetic, or who is on dialysis. paralysis for as long as she was or suffered a brain injury. All that had to be put together with complex medical experts who could, you know, opine about what happened to her, but also what the future held for her, which was obviously very complex.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Brienne stayed in the hospital for months. She had to have another surgery and had to relearn almost everything. Her colors, how to read, how to walk. Suzanne later told a reporter that Brienne's muscles all over her body had atrophied so much, she struggled to chew food. As Bill read about food safety standards, he learned that Jack in the Box hadn't been the only restaurant that didn't follow the new Washington state cooking temperature rule to cook ground beef to 155 degrees. Most counties in the state weren't enforcing it. There were a number of restaurant inspection reports from the weeks before the outbreak

• 22:35Speaker 02

  where state health inspectors wrote things like, remember to cook to 140.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Bill sent Jack in the Box's lawyers a formal request for any internal documents that had to do with how the restaurant stored, prepared and cooked its meat.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  And I got, you know, hundreds and hundreds of boxes of paper. You know, this was long before the internet, long before computers, long before, you know, the ability to do databases. And, you know, a truck rolled up to my office and dumped off literally several hundred boxes of paper. And I think they felt that I never would go through them. And so we started, you know, myself, my staff, the other lawyers, started going through all the documents and we started to see things like, you know, we knew that the state of

• 23:37Speaker 05

  Washington had increased cook times, but we didn't know for sure whether or not that information had gotten to Jack in the Box.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Bill spent weeks poring over the documents. While going through the files from their quality assurance department, he found a notice from the Washington State Department of Health describing the new mandatory cooking temperature for beef. According to the date on the document, Jack in the Box had received it seven months before the outbreak began.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  Jack in the Box chose to continue to cook their hamburgers at the lower level because increasing the temperature would require increasing the amount of time the hamburger cooked from 2 minutes to 2 minutes and 15 seconds. And that would have made their hamburgers less a fast food. And so they made the decision to essentially ignore the Washington State regulation and stick with the nationwide regulation.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Bill found something else. Before the outbreak, a Jack in the Box employee sent a complaint to corporate headquarters. Quote, "I think regular patties should cook longer. They don't get done, and we have customer complaints." Jack in the Box management replied, quote, "We would like to acknowledge the time and effort you have taken to contribute to the success of Jack in the Box by enclosing this pen."

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Usually you don't find smoking guns in these kinds of cases. Bill found, basically found two of them.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Jack in the Box's lawyer was a man named Bob Piper. In early 1995, he and Bill met at a hotel in Seattle along with representatives from Jack in the Box's insurance company to try and negotiate a settlement for Brian Keiner's family.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  What's interesting about Bill is he didn't have a lot of experience negotiating. And, you know, the insurance companies have, they have powerful lawyers and, and they have a lot of them. And they do settlement stuff all the time. So again, he's, he's negotiating against or with people that are also older than him, more experienced than him. They're backed by big companies. Bill's kind of out there. He's really kind of on his own. But Bill was armed with information. You know, he, he knew more than they did. About every aspect of the case, he knew more about E. coli. He knew how it worked.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  At the time, the biggest personal injury settlement in the state was $10 million. Bill was hoping to settle Brienne's case for even more, in part because he thought Brienne deserved it. And also, he wanted the food industry to finally start taking E. coli and food safety seriously. And he thought this would set a precedent they couldn't ignore. His opening demand was $100 million.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  We'll be right back.

• 27:11Speaker 02

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• 28:12Speaker 02

  Support for Criminal comes from Talkiatory. Mental health support can come in many forms, but it's not always easy to access. Talkiatory is different. It can help you find a psychiatrist, and it makes the experience simpler and more flexible. You can find someone who takes the time to get to know you and provides a clear, personalized treatment plan. Talkiatory is 100% online psychiatry practice. They provide comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more. Unlike therapy-only platforms, Talkiatory is psychiatry. That means your medical provider is qualified to diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication whenever it's appropriate.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Head to talkiatory.com/criminal to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com/criminal to get matched in minutes. Talkiatory.com/criminal. After lawyer Bill Marler made his opening demand of $100 million, Jack in the Box countered with an offer for $2 million. They went back and forth for a few days.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  And we got to a point where they had offered $14 million. And that's in 1995, and that's frankly, real money back then. And I rejected it. And I remember the mediator thinking, looking at me, he's like, "Mr. Marler, Bill, can I talk to you for a moment?" And so, he was a 65-year-old, you know, former federal judge, looking at me like, "What are you doing, you idiot?" And, you know, it was pretty frightening.

• 30:08Speaker 05

  So I went back to the room where the Kiner's were and, you know, talked to them about that. And I just told them they needed to trust me, that I would, I was confident that they would come up with more money.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Bill told the mediator, the former judge, that he wouldn't accept anything less than $16 million.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  That night, Bill decided to go directly to Jack in the Box's lawyer, Bob Piper.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  And I went to where the, they were still in their conference room. I knocked on the door and I just, and like, who is it? I said, Bill, like, what the hell you want? And I said, hey, there's a, there's this bar in the hotel called Torchies. I said, I'll meet you at Torchies, I'll buy, I'll buy cocktails. So, of course, you know, this was the 90s. People still did that more often than they do now. And we all met in the, the bar and it's after a few drinks. Some of the insurance guys were yelling at me like I was like, you're a greedy bastard. Ra, ra, ra, ra, ra. And I had my, we, you know, cell phones, uh, they were much bigger and different than they are today.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  And my cellphone rang and so I thought it was my wife and I picked it up and said, hi, honey. And it was the judge and he says, he goes, where are you? I'm like, I'm in the bar with all the insurance guys. And he was like, he goes, Bill, you cannot tell them this. But he goes, I can't get you 16 million, but I can get you 15.6 million. Will you take it?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Bill said yes. It was officially the largest personal injury settlement in Washington state history. Why did you push for such a big number?

• 32:03Speaker 05

  Primarily because I was, she deserved it. You know, she, she was gonna face, you know, lifetime complications and, and a lot of it is you just didn't know what you didn't know. And I had a fear of like waking up 20 years from now with Brienne not having enough money and needing it.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  After graduating from high school, Brienne spent some time working as a clerk for Bill's law practice. Today, she's 43, and Bill says she's doing well. In all, over 700 people got sick in the Jack in the Box outbreak, mostly children. Four kids died. Riley Detweiler was the fourth. Darren Detweiler and his then-wife filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Jack in the Box's parent company. It was settled in March of 1993 for an undisclosed amount. Darren Detweiler eventually became a food safety expert. He got a doctorate degree in law and policy,

• 33:15Speaker 02

  focusing on food policy, and he's been called "one of America's leading food safety advocates." No criminal charges were ever brought against Jack in the Box management. They paid around $100 million total in settlements to victims. Following the outbreak, they implemented a new food safety system in all of their restaurants. Their sales had dropped about 30%.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Jack in the Box took some pretty aggressive steps in revamping their entire protocol for how they purchased, processed, distributed, and cooked their meat. That came out of this case, and they hired people from the meat industry to come over to their side and work with them and figure out ways to... They'd love to eliminate this kind of thing ever happening again. And so I think that Jack in the Box, in the aftermath of this, was probably one of the safer places to eat because of what happened in Seattle.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  And there were a bunch of things that we now take for granted in our food safety experience that were started as a result of this case.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Some of Jack in the Box's new food safety protocols were eventually adopted by the federal government. The USDA raised the federal mandatory cooking temperature. Now all states had to cook beef to 155 degrees.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  And in 1994, E. coli was officially classified as a contaminant when found in food.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  Prior to that, it was completely legal to sell E. coli-contaminated hamburger to the consumer. You could have tested for it, found it, and still sold it.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  The USDA also implemented new rules for meat processing plants to be more proactive about preventing contamination.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Bill Marler kept practicing law and made a niche for himself in food safety law.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Back in the late, you know, in the mid 90s, late 90s, E. coli outbreaks linked to hamburger and recalls of hamburger were super common occurrences. They were happening all the time. And it just took a while for sort of the cost of that to, you know, get absorbed into the system to the point where the system finally just said, "Okay, we'll fix it." And so they started doing a variety of interventions to make hamburgers safer. They developed a vaccine that, you know, is sometimes used by some cattlemen. And essentially,

• 36:19Speaker 05

  what used to be 90-plus percent of my work became, in the early 2000s, just absolutely disappeared. And most of the E. coli cases that we see now are leafy greens, romaine lettuce. That's kept us unfortunately really busy. This pathogen, E. coli 0157, has become an environmental pathogen. It's, you know, it is in the environment and you see it in outbreaks linked to romaine lettuce and sprouts and even, you know, flour. And, you know,

• 37:01Speaker 05

  we seldom have E. coli outbreaks linked to hamburger. We seldom have recalls of hamburger linked to E. coli. They just don't happen. And, you know, it's one of those rare instances where, you know, humans saw a disaster, did something about it, and it actually has turned out better than you could have expected.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Bill Marler has represented thousands of clients over the past 30 years, cases dealing with E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, and hepatitis. Bill often says he begs the food industry to, quote, "put me out of business."

• 37:59Speaker 02

  In our next episode, the story of how a group of young men volunteered to eat food laced with things like formaldehyde, borax, and salicylic acid every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and how they paved the way for the first major food safety laws in America. They were called the Poison Squad.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Jeff Benedict's book is Poisoned, the true story of the deadly E. coli outbreak that changed the way Americans eat. We'll have a link in the show notes.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Roberson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, and Lena Silson. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes.

• 39:19Speaker 02

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• 39:44Speaker 02

  Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.