Seller of Tainted Strawberries to Schools Gets 5 Months in Prison

The president of a food-brokering firm who fraudulently sold 1.7 million pounds of Mexican strawberries linked to a hepatitis outbreak will spend five months in prison and five months in home custody, a federal judge ruled Monday.

“I have a lot of remorse for what I did,” Frederick L. Williamson, 61, president of Andrew and Williamson Co., told U.S. District Court Judge Leland Nielson.

Nielson ordered Williamson’s company to pay $150,000 in restitution and a $200,000 fine. The company had already agreed to pay $1.3 million to the federal government.

More than 200 schoolchildren in Michigan, Maine and Wisconsin developed Hepatitis A after eating the strawberries, which were sold to the federal government’s school lunch program. As a precaution, several thousand students in Los Angeles who had eaten the strawberries received inoculations.

Williamson pleaded guilty to fraud for telling authorities that the strawberries were grown in the United States. All food purchased for the lunch program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture must be grown in this country.