A Woman Called the Cops Because She Thought Store-Bought Meat Was a Penis
Earlier this week, an Akron, Ohio woman put a pot of beans on the stove to simmer, but instead of serving them to her family, she stood in her house, watching as officers from the Akron Police Department put on their gloves and separated what should’ve been her dinner into several large plastic bags.
According to the Akron Beacon Journal, Lamia Singfield bought a package of smoked turkey tails that day at a nearby Save A Lot supermarket. (Her receipt said they were smoked turkey tails but the label listed them as smoked pork tails—although that’s not the problem). She was in the middle of a Facebook Live video and, after stopping to stir the beans, she realized that one piece of that seasoning meat didn’t look right.
She put the meat on a plate, and realized that it looked less like a piece of pork or poultry, and more like a piece of, um, a man. “It’s got the folds,” she said, prodding it with a fork. “Upon further investigation, there’s a hole at the tip.”
Springfield became convinced that the meat was actually a human penis. Her first phone call was to the Health Department, but when no one answered, she called the cops. Several officers came to her house and, according to Springfield, they weren’t immediately convinced that it wasn’t a penis.
“I called the police because I examined it and it is what it is,” she said in a second Facebook Live video. “The police came and they examined it, and it is in fact a penis. They are calling the medical examiner out here right now, and the coroner, because somebody is missing the stuff. Save A Lot has got some explaining to do.” (“Some poor man died or maybe [sic] alive without his penis,” one commenter wrote. “Very sad. Prayers for whomever it was.”)
During that follow-up Facebook Live video, Singfield said that she believed that her home could be investigated as a crime scene, mentioned that the officers would have to take the pot that the mystery meat had been cooked in and that they were “at their car Googling stuff” while they waited for additional personnel to arrive.
The Akron Police did deliver the meat to the Summit County Medical Examiner’s Office, where tests determined that it was an unfortunately shaped but otherwise normal piece of pork. Their official conclusion is that it was most likely a pigtail, as the label on the package indicated.
In a statement, Save A Lot said that it took “issues of quality” like this one very seriously. “We can confirm that we have had no previous quality issues with this item and we have not been contacted by the customer in question or the local authorities regarding this incident,” the company said in a statement. “We will take the appropriate action at that time.”
VICE has reached out to the Akron Police Department and to Ms. Singfield for comment but has not yet received a response.
