Chris Jones offers to throw a financial bone to wing-stealing lunch lady
By Matt Conner
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This whole scene is straight out of The Onion or something.
Last week, a strange headline made the rounds on social media out of southeastern Chicago with the news that a woman named Vera Liddell pled guilty to charges that were filed against her last year when she was arrested for stealing $1.5 million worth of chicken wings from Harvey School District 152.
The entire affair sounds bananas and it is on the surface. It sounds as if it was a lunch lady slowly skimming some chicken wings for someone—perhaps herself—slowly over the course of years that added up to $1.5 million or something. In that kind of a circumstance, you can feel bad for the guilty party knowing there are real needs being unmet to create such desperation.
Alas that's not what was happening here. Liddell was a food service director for an entire school distrct who kept using school funds to purchase $1.5M in chicken wings from Gordon Food Services during the global pandemic. The schools were still tasked with providing to-go meals at home and Liddell went on to buy product only to never give it to the students.
The only reason she was found out is, per a WGN investigative report, the chicken wings have bones in them and, thus, are not part of the food that should have been packaged for in-home meals.
It's taken a full year since August 2023 when Liddell was first charged, but she pled guilty last week and received a sentence of 9 years in prison. It was in response to this that Kansas City Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones offered the following.
I’ll pay for the wings that she stole to get her free https://t.co/0mr1Bl9dWR
— Chris Jones (@StoneColdJones) August 13, 2024
What's interesting here is that authorities state they still don't know what Liddell did with the chicken wings—or at least that much has not been revealed to the public.
So what is Chris Jones thinking here? We know he makes a lot—with a shiny new extension worth $95M in guaranteed money—but does he really want to give $1.5 of that to a director guilty of misusing school district funds at a pivotal time of need in such an impoverished part of Chicago? Is he really looking for a discount on wings?
If anything, it should be someone from Buffalo...
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