South Carolina Coroner Swears Local Dairy Queen Burgers Are Not Made of Human Flesh

Summer may be cooling down, but America's fast food wars are just heating up. While Popeyes and Chick-fil-A continue to debate who sells the best chicken sandwich (editor's note: let's not leave Publix's chicken tender sub out of the mix), a Dairy Queen in Greenwood, South Carolina, has been forced to fight back against a slate of recent claims that their burgers are made of ... people. Just how did these rumors get started? It's complicated.

Complex reports that last week, the FBI, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and state law enforcement officials raided several businesses in South Carolina's Greenwood, Abbeville, and Orangeburg counties—the Greenwood Dairy Queen being one of them. The officials were acting on a complaint that two men were operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, and they did reportedly find $200,000 in an unlocked safe at the Greenwood DQ. Though the name of that DQ's manager, Saif Momin, came up in the initial investigation into the financial crime, authorities have made it clear that Momin has not been charged with any crime, nor were any of his 18 employees in any way connected to the raid. But none of that is the strange part of this story.

In the wake of the raids, dozens of rumors began flying about what the FBI was looking into at the local ice cream franchise. That's when a corporate inspector informed Momin that, in what appears to be a separate incident, someone had lodged a complaint about “human meat being inside a burger” at the same DQ. It didn't take long for social media to catch on, and use Twitter as a platform for confirming whether or not there was a Soylent Green-like situation happening.

Even after Dairy Queen confirmed that their burgers are 100 percent beef and zero percent human being, the matter wasn't quite over. The continued public outcry led the Index-Journal, a local news outlet, to enlist the expertise of Greenwood County coroner Sonny Cox, who seemed taken aback by the question itself.

"I promise you, I’ve never had anything of that nature asked of me," Cox said. "I’ve never suspected anything like that. I can honestly say that’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I don’t see any validity in that at all. There’s little to no chance of anything like that ever being able to happen."

Momin echoed Cox's statement, telling the Index-Journal: "If that was the case, they already would have shut me down."

In November 2018, the Department of Health and Environmental Control gave Momin's store an A grade and a score of 97 percent. So it seems highly unlikely that your FlameThrower GrillBurger has any ground human meat in it—though it's certainly not the first time fast food burgers have undergone a thorough analysis.

Cannibalism accusations aside, one positive thing to come from this story is a reminder of the importance of local journalism.