KS man sentenced for angry rant over Chick-fil-A sauce, smearing spit around pharmacy
A 39-year-old Wichita man has been sentenced in a case where his outbursts at two Dillons stores caused the local grocers to temporarily halt at least part of their operations in 2021.
In one incident, on Jan. 8, 2021, James Adam Hirsh reportedly became enraged with pharmacy workers at the Dillons on 47th South and Broadway who couldn’t find his records during a computer system outage and smeared his spit all over a counter, credit card machine, monitor and keyboard — all while claiming he had a COVID-19 infection, court records say.
Five months later, on June 2, 2021, authorities have said he became physically violent, threatened to retrieve a gun to shoot staff and drove his car toward the entrances of the Dillons at 31st South and Seneca after workers refused his demands to remove bottles of Chick-Fil-A sauce from the sales floor, according to Wichita police and court records.
Hirsh’s actions in the January incident disrupted employee work flow and customer service because everything he touched had to be disinfected. His June 2 tantrum left the store on lockdown for more than two hours, court records say.
Hirsh pleaded guilty on March 2 to two amended counts of criminal threat — one for each incident— and had three other charges dismissed in exchange, court records show.
On Thursday, Sedgwick County District Judge David Kaufman ordered Hirsh serve a year of probation with an underlying sentence of five months in prison, said Dan Dillon, a spokesman for the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office.
“If he violates probation, he could serve the 5 months,” Dillon said.
