The parents of a four-year-old girl are suing McDonald’s and its franchisee after a scalding-hot Chicken McNugget burned their daughter’s thigh, leaving her “disfigured and scarred.”
Philana Holmes told a Florida court in Broward County that as she exited a McDonald’s drive-thru, she heard her daughter screaming in the back of the car.
When she stopped, she found a hot chicken nugget between her daughter’s thigh and a seat belt, which had remained in contact with her skin for about two minutes.
Holmes and the girl’s father, Humberto Caraballo Estevez, are now seeking $15,000 in damages because the restaurant served a chicken nugget that was “defective, harmful and unfit for human treatment.”
Parents of a 4-year-old girl are suing McDonald’s and its franchisee after a scalding hot Chicken McNugget burned their daughter’s thigh
According to the lawsuit, Holmes went to the McDonald’s drive-thru in Tamarac on August 21, 2019 and ordered, among other things, a six-piece Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal for her then 4-year-old daughter, Olivia Holmes.
“The Chicken McNuggets in that Happy meal were unreasonably and dangerously hot (in terms of temperature) and caused the skin and flesh around her thighs of Olivia Holmes to burn,” the lawsuit reads.
Jordan Redavid, representing the family of the burned child, told a court on Tuesday that McDonald’s and the franchisee failed to warn of the dangers of the nuggets and acted negligently in serving such a hot nugget.
He took the iconic Happy Meal box, with two gold arches for handles, to court and handed it over to the judge.
“The reasonable, foreseeable, intended use is for a child to handle this box. The law implies a promise from a company to, in this case, a child,” he said.
“And if it’s preventable, it’s warnable, you have to warn someone about it, and if you don’t, you’re liable.”
His position was challenged by Scott Yount, a lawyer representing McDonald’s.
Philana Holmes is pictured on surveillance footage giving her daughter a box of gold nuggets in August 2019, who then burned her
Jordan Redavid, representing the family of the burned child, took the iconic Happy Meal box to court and presented it to the judge
Mrs. Holmes bought 32 chicken McNuggets that day. The evidence will show that 31 of them were not a problem,” Yount said Tuesday afternoon.
In making that statement, he may have been referring to all the gold nuggets in Holmes’ order, including those not in her daughter’s box of six, which fell on her lap.
“Olivia even dropped six on her lap, and she has one burn, and that’s the only place where the McNugget was attached to the seatbelt for two minutes,” he added.
“The Chicken McNuggets are not faulty, they are not unreasonably dangerous, they are not dangerously hot, and there is no negligence.”
In a preliminary statement, Holmes described the events after she picked up the food.
“As I pull out of the drive-thru I hear [Olivia] start screaming. But the time I hit the street, it’s a straight-up scream,” she told the court, according to a transcript.
“I turn around and she dropped the nugget in her lap. So I try to drive and knock them out of her lap as I go down the street.
Olivia is seen in the back of the car (lower right) as her mother pulls out of the drive-thru
The franchisee told the court it must serve hot nuggets to meet food safety standards
“So as soon as I was able I stopped I ran to the backseat of the car and I got out of the clump I could see and I pulled her seatbelt over the lap then there was a chicken nugget that got stuck I couldn’t reach .
“As I remove the clump of her skin, it falls apart in my hand. Her thigh – upper thighs – it was really, really red. She screams, she screams,’ she said.
Caraballo Estevez also spoke during deposition and told the court that while the girl doesn’t say the scar bothers her, she does refer to it sometimes.
‘Occasionally she looks at [the scar] and she calls it her chicken nugget.’
The hearing will resume on Wednesday.