A North Carolina man has been arrested for allegedly putting rat poison in shredded cheese at a pizza restaurant where he worked.
Ricky Lee Adami, 59, was arrested and charged with distributing food containing noxious/deleterious material, WTVD reports.
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The incident occurred June 1 at Primo Pizza in Fayetteville, where Adami was an employee, police said.
Manager Gurol Bicer told investigators he was preparing pizza when he noticed an unknown substance, described as brown pellets, mixed in the cheese. The manager checked five other tubs of cheese, and three of them contained the same substance.
Bicer said he immediately reviewed surveillance footage, which showed Adami tampering with the cheese.
"I see him reach into his pocket and sprinkle something into the cheese," Bicer told WTVD. "I kept watching it, and he did it three more times."
The manager contacted police and collected all contaminated cheese before it could be served to customers.
"Everything he touched, I threw away," Bicer told WNCN. "All the containers, the parts of the machine, the cheese, of course."
Bicer said Adami had worked in the kitchen for a year without any problems, but had gotten in trouble with the restaurant owners hours before the incident, which may have set him off.
Adami is being held at the Cumberland County Detention Center on a $100,000 secured bond, WNCN reports.