Selena Edwards, 38, of Victorville claimed that an unsecured lid caused steaming hot McDonald’s coffee to spill on her right hand, severely burning it. As supporting evidence, she provided pictures of second-degree burns. But the only burns Edwards may suffer from are the prosecutorial ones she now faces for allegedly faking her injuries.
State insurance officials said Edwards looked to the golden arches in Fontana on Jan. 28, 2013, to allegedly commit the crime to extract easy money from McDonald’s Corp. The woman claimed coffee had spilled on her right hand when she was handed a cup with an unsecured lid at the McDonald’s drive-through. The photos and medical documents Edwards provided to bolster her case came from the Internet. “We discovered that some of the photos were from a hospital website,” state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said. Edwards also submitted counterfeit documentation for treatment that she claimed to have received from a local hospital. “We contacted her medical provider and discovered she hadn’t received any medical treatment.” The San Bernardino County district attorney charged Edwards with 21 felony counts of insurance fraud and workers’ compensation fraud.
The prosecution of Edwards comes 20 years after a jury awarded $2.9 million to a 79-year-old woman who was badly burned after hot coffee spilled into her lap at a McDonald’s in Albuquerque. The 1994 verdict attracted international attention, was mocked by radio and television talk-show hosts and was even used as a plot point in the TV comedy “Seinfeld.” ABC News called the case “the poster child of excessive lawsuits”, while the legal scholar Jonathan Turley argued that the claim was “a meaningful and worthy lawsuit”. In June 2011, HBO premiered Hot Coffee, a documentary that discussed in depth how the Liebeck case has centered in debates on tort reform. Despite the controversy, the woman in that case, Stella Liebeck, actually did suffer severe third-degree burns and required skin graft surgery.
In January, a woman filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s, saying she was burned when coffee spilled on her at one of the fast-food chain’s Los Angeles restaurants. Paulette Carr claimed she was burned on January 2012 because the lid on her cup was not properly secured. The lawsuit did not describe the severity of Carr’s injuries.
The merit of those cases aside, Jones said that every year tens of thousands of cases that potentially involve fraud are referred to his agency. In the last 11 months there have been 26,415 cases, about 1,549 of which remain open, officials say.