Last October, a New Hampshire man slipped into a supermarket in Saco, Maine, and put razor blades in pizza dough made by his former employer.
He did the same at other stores in the area.
This week, Chief Judge Jon D. Levy of the U.S. District Court in Portland, Maine, sentenced 39-year-old Nicholas Mitchell to four years and nine months in federal prison for the crime. He also ordered Mitchell to pay the Hannaford grocery stores $229,611.92 in restitution, said the Portland Press Herald.
After the razor blades were discovered in the dough, Hannaford stores issued a recall of the Portland Pie Company product. The stores have also said they would improve their product tampering reporting process.
From October 2020 to November 2020, dough sales plummeted by 82 percent, while in-store pizza sales fell by 89 percent, according to court records referenced by The New York Times.
Though none were injured due to the tampering, Levy said that was merely by chance.
Around four months before Mitchell made the bizarre choice to put dangerous objects in the Portland Pie Company dough, he was fired from the It’ll Be Pizza, a company that manufactures the brand. Since the pandemic hit, his girlfriend also lost her job as a hairstylist.
Mitchell was arrested for domestic violence last year and ordered to stay away from an apartment the couple shared with their two children, though they have since reconciled. He also lost access to therapy after missing phone appointments.
“I tried everything I could to steer the ship in the right direction,” Mitchell said before he was sentenced. “In a lot of ways, what I did was a cry for help, a cry for answers, a cry for all the chaos to stop, a cry for my simple, normal life back. My clouded and desperate strategy backfired and only brought more pain and suffering and confusion to myself and to everyone else here today.”
Mitchell also said that he did not intend to hurt anyone when he put razor blades in the pizza dough.
“I think it’s very important to clarify here that my intentions were never to harm anybody, only to disrupt my former employer’s bottom line,” he said.
Mitchell’s attorney, federal public defender David Beneman, detailed his client’s traumatic upbringing in a pre-sentencing memo. He also said Mitchell’s debt will now follow him for the rest of his life.
However, Levy said the hefty sentence sends an important message.
“This sentence has to send a firm message that anyone who is going to engage in conduct like this will spend a significant time in federal prison, and to send a message of deterrence to Mr. Mitchell that society will not tolerate him blowing up like this,” said the judge during a Zoom hearing.
Apart from the domestic violence case and this most recent sentencing, Mitchell had around 25 prior convictions.
“Mr. Mitchell does not care about the well-being of anyone else or what the law saws he can do,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Perry.
Although he is vaccinated, Mitchell recently contracted COVID-19 in the Cumberland County Jail. After his sentence is complete, he will be on supervised release for three years.
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