Editor’s note: Some of the content in the court proceedings is graphic and may be disturbing to some readers.
A court hearing on Tuesday revealed more information about the devastation a food contamination case caused a local chain of restaurants.
During a hearing for Jace C. Hanson, testimony was given about the effect the case had on the Hereford House restaurant chain, as well as graphic videos and text messages found on Hanson’s phone.
In July, Hanson pleaded guilty to 33 felony charges, including 22 counts of making a criminal threat related to allegedly contaminating food at the steakhouse’s now-shuttered Leawood location.
The charges also included 10 counts of child sexual exploitation for allegedly possessing child sexual abuse materials and one count of criminal damage.
Hanson is set to be sentenced later this year. The purpose of this week’s hearing was to determine if the court should depart, or deviate, from the sentencing guidelines in Hanson’s case.
Multiple people testified at Tuesday’s hearing, including Camellia Hill, who owned Hereford House’s Leawood location before it closed and also owns the company’s Independence, Missouri, location.
Also speaking Tuesday were Stacie Province, the director of Johnson County’s Health Services Division; Anna Hill, a crime analyst for the Leawood Police Department and Leawood Police Detective Jack Bond.
They all spoke about the investigation and fallout from the case, in which Hanson, a cook at the restaurant’s Leawood location from March 26 to April 23, 2024, admitted to police that he contaminated food by urinating and rubbing his genitals on food at the restaurant and posted videos of himself doing so online.
Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan is presiding over the case.
Hereford House owner said effect on business was immediate
Taking the stand first, Hill described the immediate effect the news of what Hanson allegedly did had on the business.
“The minute it hit the press, it basically destroyed our business,” she said.
The restaurant had been at Leawood’s Town Center Plaza since 1996. It closed in August 2024, roughly three months after Hanson was first arrested.
It was a loss that Stephanie Meyer, CEO of the Leawood Chamber of Commerce, described in an interview with the Post as “huge.”
“Beyond even just a fantastic restaurant to go to, they were really almost a community institution and were so philanthropic and involved in the broader city efforts that it’s really a shame not to have them here,” she said on Tuesday. (Meyer didn’t testify in court.)
While Hanson was arrested on Thursday, April 25, 2024, the news of the charges didn’t get released until after the following weekend, said Pet Andrews, an attorney at the Johnson County District Attorney’s office. Once the word of mouth spread early the following week, Hill said the Leawood location saw their business drop by 60%.
It never recovered.
“(It was) empty, (but) not totally empty … We just lost the business. We were in the paper every day. It was the headline on the TV and the newspapers, and everyone is asking for names of people damaged, and it was pretty hard to do business,” she said.
While the restaurant tried to make adjustments, such as being open only during dinner hours and reducing its staff, it wasn’t enough, Hill said.
“Eventually, it just got to the point that it just wasn’t coming back. It was too much of a strain,” she testified.
The fallout didn’t stop in Leawood. The chain had to also close its location in the Zona Rosa shopping center in Kansas City, Missouri. It still has restaurants in Shawnee and Independence that have slowly recovered over the last year.
“(The) negative press for our brand, it had a negative impact on us. We are recovering from that,” she said. “It was pretty hard … for the past year.”
In addition to the criminal case, Hill said Hereford House is still facing an estimated 150-200 lawsuits stemming from Hanson’s food contamination case.
The investigation strained Leawood Police resources
After news of the case hit the press, the Leawood Police Department set up a hotline for people who suspected they got sick from contaminated food to talk to police.
The amount of calls the police department received was “vast,” Anna Hill, the Leawood Police crime analyst, said in court this week.
“As the investigation unfolded, it became clear that we were going to have a vast number of victims in this case and a large number of leads,” she added.
Creating a database of alleged victims, Anna Hill said she would use it to assign officers and keep track of where every case was in the process.
“We were receiving just an unbelievable amount of people calling in (and) an unmanageable amount of information,” she said.
In total, Anna Hill said she interviewed 131 people. A total of 396 people submitted reports of food poisoning. It was a large enough amount of information in such a short time that it crashed the police’s record management system.
“We had to document what we were doing in [Microsoft] Word documents and then add them as attachments, instead of keeping track of them as we normally would, because it was so much data,” she said.
In addition, it also took police away from other investigations.
“All of the normal case work that I would have, from suspect identification, tracking stolen autos, all of that stuff got put to the wayside. In many cases, (people) were waiting for significant periods of time,” she said.
The result was a lot of angry people, Anna Hill added.
“They were obviously angry with our suspect, our offender. They were angry with Hereford House, angry with the police department, with the DA’s office, everyone involved,” she said.
Graphic photos, texts on Hanson’s phone
Leawood Police detective Jack Bond also testified Tuesday to what investigators discovered on Hanson’s phone.
Bond said that when police downloaded the contents of his phone, they discovered videos of him committing various criminal acts to the restaurant’s food, including urinating or spitting on the restaurant’s food, urinating in a container and pouring it on the food, going to the restaurant’s bathroom and placing food in his underwear or in the toilet, rubbing it on his genitals or buttocks or stepping on the food, Bond said.
In addition, they also discovered videos of children being sexually abused and texts allegedly sent by Hanson via the messaging app Telegram expressing a desire to abuse and commit violence to children, some as young as newborns.
“It was the most brutal and violent child sexual abuse material that I have ever seen,” Bond said.
During an extended portion of Tuesday’s hearing, attorney Melissa Parrish of the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office asked Bond to read out text messages that Hanson allegedly sent via Telegram to an unidentified person, most of which were too graphic to publish.
Jeffey Gedbaw, Hanson’s attorney, objected to the texts being entered into court records, stating they couldn’t be verified that it was Hanson.
“I don’t think … (we can) establish how those messages were actually Mr. Hanson’s and who they were being sent to, or so forth. There’s no identifying information on those messages that clearly identifies Mr. Hanson as a person who sent those messages,” Gedbaw said.
In the Telegram conversations, Bond said there were multiple picture messages that featured Hanson, as well as information in the conversation that corresponded with Hanson, such as his birth date, profession and location.
Judge Kelly overruled the objection and allowed for the prosecution to read the texts Hanson allegedly sent.
The contents of the texts including descriptions of children being sexually assaulted, a desire for child pornography, wanting to commit violence against children and suicide.
“I really want this life honestly, it’s the only thing I live for, working so I can hopefully do as much damage as I can someday,” one of the text messages read.
In an email correspondence with an unidentified person, Hanson clarified why he committed such acts and feels the way he does, Bond said.
“There were messages citing being sexualized at a young age, discovering pornography at a young age, and then or closely to the event, being contacted by men online requesting that Mr. Hanson do things such as contaminate the food at his place of employment,” he said.
What’s next
A second departure hearing and then a final sentencing for Hanson is scheduled for Oct. 9 at 1:30 p.m., in Johnson County District Court.
Go deeper: Ex-Hereford House kitchen worker pleads guilty to contaminating food
