A coroner in Greenville, S.C. confirmed on Friday that the ground beef patties from a local Dairy Queen were not, in fact, made out of human flesh. The confirmation comes in the wake of rumors swirling about the fast-food joint after it was hit with a federal raid on Wednesday, according to the Index-Journal.
“I promise you, I’ve never had anything of that nature asked of me. I’ve never suspected anything like that. I can honestly say that’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I don’t see any validity in that at all,” Cox told the Index-Journal on Friday when asked about the possibility. “There’s little to no chance of anything like that ever being able to happen.”
The raid itself resulted in two men facing federal charges for running an unlicensed money transfer business. None of the South Carolina restaurant’s 18 employees were subject to police action, and while the name of the store’s manager, Saif Momin, reportedly appears in the related criminal complaint, he also was not charged with any crimes.
It wasn’t so much the raid itself that set off the rumors, but rather the second-to-last paragraph that seemed to come out of nowhere in a report about what happened Wednesday. From the Index-Journal:
Momin said he was notified by a corporate inspector that somebody lodged a complaint about “human meat being inside a burger.” According to state Department of Health and Environmental Control inspection records, the facility has an “A” grade and was examined four times in 2018, most recently on Nov. 28 when it received a score of 97%.
Talk about burying the lede! After the story broke, an Index-Journal editor decided to ask Dairy Queen itself for comment on the allegations, and the official Twitter account replied.
Momin, meanwhile, has been stuck with having to do a significant amount of damage control. In response to whether his store served burgers made of human meat, he said, “If that was the case, they already would have shut me down.”