A 19-year-old girl has won a monumental million-dollar lawsuit after she suffered second-degree burns from hot sauce in her breakfast taco order.
Genesis Monita, 19, was awarded $900,000, with a further $1.8m in punitive damages Friday on the final day of her trial against popular Texas barbecue restaurant chain Bill Miller, reported Kens5.
The young woman and her sister were on their way to school on May 19, 2023, when they stopped to order breakfast, slathered in the restaurant’s famed hot barbecue sauce, in San Antonio ahead of their school day, according to court filings.
She pulled into a parking lot to chow down before the unexpected happened.
Monita was left with severe burns as she took a scalding hot 4-ounce plastic cup of barbeque sauce out from her order bag and dropped it haphazardously onto her thigh.
Her lawyer, Lawrence Morales II, argued it happened because staff violated policy when they failed to serve the sauce in a Styrofoam container, as was typical as per the food chain’s safety guidelines.
Crucially, Morales stressed that Bill Miller’s policy was to serve their barbeque sauce at a temperature of 165 degrees, and violated critical safety policy when they allowed it to be served at 189 degrees.
Monita provided local news with images of her wounds at the time that showed severe injury to her skin and deep tissue bleeding on her upper thigh.
The sauce reportedly soiled through her ripped jeans and left a horrific burn to her thigh – injuries for which the jury agreed to $25,000 as compensation for the surgery as Monita needed to have a scar left by the burn removed, the San Antonio Express-News noted.
On Thursday, Monita and her mother described how the severe burns led to work and school absences plus an onset of loneliness and depression, for Monita who was 18 at the time.
Morales claimed the teen had eaten the sauce previously “a hundred times” and with each time she did, the sauce temperature had remained the same.
In last week’s cross-examination, Bill Miller’s attorneys reminded Monita that as soon as they became aware of the incident, the restaurant sent her a check to cover her medical bills, offered to clean her car, and cover any lost wages caused by work absence – discretions that she reportedly declined, said Fox SA.
“At Bill Miller’s, the sauce is always hot, and our customers know that. And that’s why it’s hot.
“What would we have warned Ms. Monita of that she did not already know?”, McClenahan said Friday as per Law & Crime.
Monita told FoxSA she is yet to receive an apology despite the outcome.
“No one has ever apologized to me, even to this day, no one has ever apologized to me, you know they just shook my hand, have a good day, but I have not received an apology from them,” she said.
She and her lawyers were happy with the outcome and hoped that the verdict resonated with food establishments on the importance of taking customer safety seriously.
The Independent contacted Monita, her lawyer and Bill Miller’s attorney for comment.
