Following the death of Burton Maynard last November, his wife Melissa Maynard initiated a class action lawsuit against Downtown Market, a local grocery store that’s a staple of Main Street. Mr. Maynard had succumbed to a terrible bout of food poisoning, and early speculation on the cause of his illness was that it was due to eating wild mushrooms from Blackwood Forest.

However, an investigation by a team of mycologists determined the mushrooms growing there to be benign. It was later discovered that poor refrigeration standards at several local grocery stores were the culprit, as Mr. Maynard had recently purchased a gallon of skim milk from Downtown Market and had it with his cereal that morning.

After doctors at St. Benedict’s Hospital reached out to various patients who had also been stricken with food poisoning over the last year, it was discovered that they all had shopped for milk and other dairy products at Downtown Market. An investigation was launched by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), and they found that Downtown Market was keeping their refrigerators at around 50°F (10°C), when FDA guidelines call for them to be no higher than 40°F (4°C).

Several other local supermarkets, including Parker Fresh, Food Lynx, and Trader Tom’s were also determined to have their refrigeration temperatures set above the recommended threshold, but much less significantly than Downtown Market. The Gazette reached out to each of the other offending stores for comment, but they all declined to respond.

While the FDA has issued fines to all the supermarkets found to be in violation of national standards, Mrs. Maynard felt that this was not enough to stop them from disregarding the regulations again.

“My husband lost his life because of them, and all they got was a slap on the wrist,” she angrily told reporters this morning. “The fine is barely a blip to them, especially with the amount of money they saved in electric bills by keeping their refrigerator temperatures so high. To really drive it home that what they’re doing is incredibly unethical, I feel the only choice is to file this lawsuit against them. If they had to pay a significant sum of money to their victims, they might actually think twice before doing it again.”

The class action lawsuit was filed by the law firm Thurston, Everett & Dolan and announced this morning. This case is being handled personally by Michael Dolan, one of the senior partners at the firm. They are seeking a $2.2 million settlement with the lawsuit. In addition to Mr. Maynard, at least six other victims have been attached as co-plaintiffs. More are expected to join as word of the lawsuit becomes public.

Mr. Dolan issued a statement that read: “We are filing a class action lawsuit against Downtown Market because their negligence directly resulted in countless cases of severe food poisoning that left the victims with large medical bills, loss of wages, and, in the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Burton Maynard, death. The settlement amount we are asking for is extremely fair, considering how much damage Downtown Market’s attempt to save money by breaking FDA regulations has caused.”

The Gazette sought to give owner and manager of Downtown Market, Yolanda Perez, a chance to tell her side of the story.

“I can’t say much, per the advice of my legal team,” she replied. “But I think it’s important to note that my attorneys reached out to St. Benedict’s Hospital to get the contact information of the mycologists who concluded the mushrooms weren’t poisonous, and they have yet to cooperate. Without the ability to independently verify those findings, it seems absurd to file a lawsuit for something that hasn’t been proven by an unbiased source.”

-Sarah Donovan, Editor & Local News, Emerson Valley Gazette

UPDATE (2/10/2020): In response to Mrs. Perez’s statements, Mrs. Maynard offered a rebuttal: “Burt was a teacher and a boy scout troop leader, so he knew what kind of foraged food was safe to eat and what wasn’t. It’s an insult to his memory for anyone to suggest he would be so careless as to feed not just himself, but his entire family mushrooms that he wasn’t 100% certain were safe to eat.”