Illinois Lunch Lady Goes to Prison For Stealing Chicken Wings

An Illinois lunch lady pleads guilty to stealing an estimated $1.5 million of chicken wings from her school district.  Leaving us all wondering what happened to all of that food.

Apparently, the food service director for Harvey School District 152 has been stealing large amounts of food for the last decade. The height of this scam took place during the pandemic.  The school district continued to feed students during at-home learning.  66-year-old Vera Liddell saw that as an opportunity and ordered lots of food on the school district's dime according to WGN,

Court records accuse Liddell of ordering more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings from the school district’s food provider and then picking-up the order in a district cargo van.

The school district estimates Liddell stole $1.5 million in food, mostly chicken wings.

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The district uncovered the crime during a mid-year audit that found the district was already $300,000 over its annual budget with half of the year still to come.  It turns out that the massive amounts of chicken wings that were ordered were never on the school menu because they weren't boneless.  It didn't take investigators long to figure out what was going on after that discovery.

The 66-year-old lunch lady eventually pled guilty and was sentenced to 9 years in prison last Friday.  Did this lunch lady feed the poor or sell this food for a profit?  We may never know where all of that food went.

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