SAN ANTONIO – A family has filed a lawsuit against a Torchy’s Tacos restaurant on the far North Side after a young boy was hospitalized in intensive care after contracting salmonella from eating contaminated onions, according to a report from the San Antonio Current.
According to the lawsuit, filed by Ching-yi Ortiz on behalf of her son, the boy got sick after eating at a Torchy’s Tacos restaurant at 18210 Sonterra Place on Aug. 21. Torchy’s, its parent company Success Foods Management Group LLC and ProSource Produce LLC are named in the lawsuit.
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According to lawsuit documents, the family is seeking compensation to help cover the medical costs, pain and suffering, mental anguish, physical impairment, and more.
The child began to experience “exhaustion and a headache,” six days after eating at the restaurant, the lawsuit states. His symptoms continued to progress over the next 10 days after he developed “a fever, diarrhea, and intense pain in his lower back.”
The situation worsened on Sept. 7, when the boy was “in such intense pain he could not walk or sit up,” according to court documents. He was then taken to Methodist Children’s Hospital, where he was treated for salmonella complications in the ICU.
“The infection caused (the child) to develop sepsis, organ failure, pneumonia, acidosis, thrombocytopenia, a pericardial effusion, interstitial emphysema, and caused (the child) extreme pain when it reached the bones around his sacroiliac joint,” the lawsuit states.
The CDC issued a food safety alert for the recalled onions on Oct. 22 after ProSource Produce LLC and Keeler Family Farms recalled whole raw red, white and yellow onions that were imported from Chihuahua, Mexico. The onions, last imported on Aug. 31, were sold and distributed to restaurants and grocery stores nationwide, including Torchy’s.
Businesses that received the onions were urged by the CDC to check storage coolers for the onions and to throw them away and, to wash and sanitize any surfaces the onions may have come in contact with.
Torchy’s issued this statement to KSAT regarding the lawsuit:
“This week we learned that we are being sued based on an allegation that on August 21 a guest ate food from our Sonterra San Antonio restaurant and a week later became ill. This October lawsuit filing was the first notice we have received about this claim.
At Torchy’s, our number one priority is providing safe and delicious food to our guests. We take this claim very seriously and have retained nationally respected food safety experts to track our food supply in August to see if they can find a connection between food we served then and this claim.
We can report our Sonterra location has a uniform record of excellent health inspection scores, including a 100-score routine inspection from the City of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District as recently as October 8, 2021.
Our thoughts are with this guest and his family and we hope for continued recovery. When we have more information we will share it.”
We’ll bring more updates to this story as they become available.