Burgers full of money, dead raccoons, and Happy Meals with a side of heroin. While these
may sound like scenes out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, it's really just a sampling of the
outlandish stuff that has actually gone down at McDonald's.
In 2013, high school senior Ryan Mash was sitting in the drive-thru at a Georgia McDonald's,
when a man behind him yelled for him to stop holding up the line. Then the guy pulled a
gun on him. Mash said the man leaned into his car window, pointing the gun at him and
yelling, "Do you know who I am?" Mash recalled,
"The second I saw the gun, I blacked out."
The man was later identified as Scott Biumi, a 25-year veteran of DeKalb County Police.
Biumi was arrested and lost his job before being placed on 10 years probation for accosting
Mash. In court, the former cop revealed a long history of mental illness, saying he
had even undergone electroshock therapy.
Another drive-thru customer, Shaneka Monique Torres, lost her cool at a Michigan McDonald's
in 2014 and popped off a gunshot into the restaurant's drive-thru. And it was all because
her bacon cheeseburger was missing one particular thing on two different occasions.
"Bacon." "Bacon?" "Bacon."
After her first order was wrong, the manager offered Torres a free burger. But when she
returned to the McDonald's at 3 a.m. for another bacon cheeseburger, the bacon was once again
missing. That's when she'd had enough and fired into the restaurant.
Torres' attorney argued that the gun went off by accident, but the jury didn't buy it.
She was sentenced to three to seven years in prison.
Anthony Andrew Gallagher obviously liked to be creative with how he pays for his Mickey
D's fix, because he tried paying for his order at the drive-thru with marijuana. Who knows
if Gallagher had successfully used weed as payment at other Port St. Lucie, Florida fast
food joints, but the McDonald's worker denied the payment and Gallagher sped off.
Anybody who's had a french fry craving knows that when McDonald's fries are on the mind,
anything else is just a poor substitute, and when Gallagher returned to the restaurant
later, police were waiting for him. He was then busted for possession and driving under
the influence.
Finding a wad of cash in your breakfast order might seem lucky, but it's also probably a
sign that something is awry. That's exactly what happened to a couple in 2013 when they
hit up a McDonald's in Hermitage, Tennessee. Stacye Terry told a local news station.
"My husband opened the bag and discovered the money inside. He said, 'You are not going
to believe this.'"
That cash turned out to be the location's bank deposit money. A presumably panicked
employee quickly discovered the mistake and caught up with the couple, who thankfully
willingly returned the money. Terry indicated the couple didn't hesitate to hand the money
back over, saying:
"There is no other way to have it. I couldn't live with myself with that."
Three years later, Dave Cook was eating with his mother at a McDonald's in Chesterfield
County, Virginia. He bit into his burger and found $20. Cook said,
"I've heard of people finding strange things in their salad, but never finding something
like this [in] a cooked burger. I was in disbelief, I was like 'is this for real?'"
Cook said he then saw two men sitting near him check under their burger buns, but of
course they were met with beefy disappointment. When pressed for how such a thing could have
happened, the restaurant's managers were bewildered and referred the incident to corporate. Talk
about an unsolved mystery.
Fast food jobs don't exactly have a reputation for paying well, so one former McDonald's
employee brought their side hustle to work. Shantia Dennis was working at a Pittsburgh
McDonald's in 2014 when she was busted in a police sting for using the drive-thru window
to sell heroin.
Customers who were looking for some extra value in their meal would pull up and say
that they wanted to order a toy — a boy's toy, specifically. That was code for a bag
of heroin, which customers would be given in a Happy Meal box at the drive-thru's first
window. A typical Happy Meal would go for $2.99, but these drug-filled Happy Meals were
selling for much more. CNN reported the cost was
"Two dollars for the toy and $80 for the heroin inside."
The undercover cops who made the bust got 10 bags of the dope inside their Happy Meal
and recovered an additional 50 bags of heroin, plus marijuana.
And that wasn't even the first time a Pennsylvania McDonald's employee was arrested for allegedly
selling heroin. Theodore Levon Upshaw was arrested for the same thing while working
at a McDonald's in Murrysville, Pennsylvania.
One precocious 8-year-old boy in Ohio was determined to do whatever was necessary to
visit his favorite restaurant in 2017. After his parents fell asleep, he went straight
to YouTube for a tutorial on how to drive a car. With his 4-year-old sister in tow,
he stole his parents' car keys and set off for the closest McDonald's.
Pranks in the McDonald's drive-thru aren't exactly a rarity, and workers assumed the
parents were hiding in the back of the car. After multiple calls came in about a kid driving
through town, police were able to catch up with the kids at the restaurant.
Shockingly, the kid was pretty much an ace behind the wheel. East Palestine patrol officer
Jacob Koehler said,
"He didn't hit a single thing on the way there. It was unreal."
And yes, the youngster ultimately got his cheeseburger, along with McNuggets and fries.
Employees and patrons of a San Francisco McDonald's were definitely not lovin' it when a man strolled
into the restaurant during breakfast carrying a dead raccoon. It hadn't been preserved through
taxidermy either — this was straight up roadkill. Customer Chris Brooks said,
"He came to the counter, and I thought it was a dog at first."
The man reportedly came in screaming for help and ignored employee demands that he leave
before carrying the animal over to a table. The raccoon was dripping blood all over the
floor, so Brooks whipped out his phone and started filming.
The police showed up to handle the situation, but the critter carcass had pretty much ruined
breakfast. The place had to be immediately closed and sanitized.
A Kansas McDonald's employee found himself in big trouble when he was accused of spiking
a police officer's drink with cleaning solution. In 2018, Trevor Hockaday was arrested and
charged with aggravated battery of a law enforcement officer for allegedly adding a peroxide-based
cleaner to an officer's beverage when serving him in the drive-thru.
Not long after consuming the drink, the police officer started having flu-like symptoms.
He didn't know what the cause was until another McDonald's employee told police that Hockaday
had added a few squirts of the cleaning agent to the beverage.
Hockaday was quickly fired, and his charges could carry up to 20 years of prison time.
Customers at a Jamaica, Queens, McDonald's in 2014 were just trying to enjoy their usual
Mickey D's order when a man casually strolled in while chatting on the phone with his family.
Nothing out of the ordinary there except, well, he did have a knife sticking out of
his back. Witness Tromaine Yancey told CBS 2,
"I heard everybody screaming and it was a lot of commotion."
Yancey added,
"The guy came and he was standing there with a knife in his back and it was a kitchen knife."
Understandably, people tend to freak out a little when another person in the restaurant
has a blade lodged in them. Other witnesses reported seeing a fight on the street several
minutes earlier that the stabbing victim was believed to have been involved in.
An incident like this has a real way of ruining an appetite, and several people in the restaurant
immediately stopped eating to try to help the man before he was taken to the hospital.
Typically, when you hear about a vehicle crashing into a storefront, it's a car or a truck.
It might not be an everyday occurrence, but this kind of thing happens more than you might
think. And there's really no telling what can happen in a drive-thru, like the driver
who crashed into a line-up of cars while trying to evade police. Yes, those all things really
happened at McDonald's.
It's a whole other level, though, when the threat of a crash comes not from the street,
but from the skies above.
In 2014, a small prop plane crashed into the parking lot of a McDonald's in Monroe, Louisiana.
Nobody on the ground was hurt, but the pilot, who was the only person in the plane, did
have to be airlifted to a hospital for his injuries. The fast food restaurant wasn't
even two miles from the airport, but the plane was having fuel problems and witnesses said
it clipped several trees before finally going down at the Golden Arches.
Straw-based violence erupted on New Year's Eve 2018 at a McDonald's in St. Petersburg,
Florida. According to CNN, a city ordinance was about to go into effect requiring that
customers would need to specifically ask for straws. McDonald's employee Yasmine James
was on her shift that night when a customer, Daniel Taylor, didn't believe there was a
new straw law. Instead, he angrily accused employees of not doing their jobs. Another
customer, Brenda Biandudi, began recording it all on her cell phone. Suddenly, Taylor
lashed out at James and grabbed her from across the counter.
James told News19 she was terrified, saying,
"I was scared, so I just wanted him to get off. It was just, get this man off me. Just
please get off me."
James fought back ferociously. According to The Shade Room, as a teenager, she took boxing
lessons. Taylor was dragged out and charged with two counts of simple battery. McDonald's
management cooperated with the investigation and granted James paid leave. Biandudi was
on the fence about her kids posting the video — which went viral — on Facebook. She
said,
"I want all the employees at McDonald's to be safe. I think they acted appropriately.
I want peace. I want them to keep their jobs and the man to get some help. We all need
to learn how to talk to people in public and show them some respect."
According to Inside Mystery, on January 13, 2020, at about 3:00 a.m. in Pueblo, Colorado,
13 McDonald's employees summoned police to investigate what they believed to be a demonic
entity. All of them heard a screaming phantom woman, sounds of barking and someone speaking
a strange language. They refused to leave the premises until dawn.
Police did a thorough search around the exterior of the building but found nothing, and although
security cameras recorded the employees' terrified reactions to what they heard, no sounds were
captured. Pueblo Police Captain Tom Rummel later tweeted,
"Three officers searched the area, but didn't come up with the source of the disturbance."
Someone responded enigmatically to Captain Rummel's tweet with two words: La Llorona,
a fearsome figure who stems from a Southwestern legend about a ghostly woman who screams through
the night, searching for her dead children.
Another odd coincidence is that it happened during the so-called "witching hour," the
time between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. when people are supposedly especially likely to perceive
paranormal occurrences. As reported by Week In Weird, this creepy encounter is hardly
the first time a McDonald's has been haunted. They're everywhere, after all.
On New Year's Day, 2020, at 4:00 a.m., at yet another Florida McDonald's, 19-year-old
Maguire Marie McLaughlin demanded extra packets of dipping sauce in every flavor. According
to Oxygen, she then flew off the handle when told she'd have to pay 25 cents for each one.
According to the arrest report published on The Smoking Gun, McLaughlin had put in a large
order at the drive-thru. When told she'd have to pay extra for extra dipping sauce, McLaughlin
rather ominously threatened to, according to the arrest report, "get the sauce by whatever
means necessary." When police arrived on the scene, arresting officer Christian Castano
noted he smelled booze on the teenager's breath, and that she was behaving drunkenly and slurring
her speech.
As Officer Castano escorted McLaughlin to the patrol car, she locked her legs and refused
to go further. Castano tried forcing her into the patrol car, but, in his words,
"She proceeded to place her legs in the door jamb and refused to get inside."
An assisting officer helped him get McLaughlin down to the ground and put her in a restraint.
Fox News reported that the belligerent teen was charged with one count of disorderly conduct
and one count of resisting arrest.
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