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PORTLAND, Maine (WBZ NewsRadio) — A man who pleaded guilty to putting razor blades in pizza dough at Hannaford Supermarkets in Maine last year has been sentenced to more than four years in prison.
Nicholas Mitchell of Dover, N.H. was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison and has to pay Hannaford nearly $230,000 in restitution, according to the Portland Press Herald. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
According to the prosecution, the man went into the Saco, Maine Hannaford in October of last year, walked up to a refrigerator case, and started putting razorblades inside the pizza dough there. Customers bought the dough a few hours later and found the razors inside.
The pizza dough was recalled shortly after.
Mitchell agreed to plead guilty this past June to one count of Tampering with a Consumer Product. Mitchell could have received a sentence of up to ten years in prison, but his sentence fell much closer to the 3.5 years requested by his defense attorney, David Beneman.
In a court filing ahead of the sentencing, Beneman said Mitchell worked for It'll Be Pizza, a company based in Scarborough, Maine, that manufactured pizza dough, but was fired from his job in June of 2020. In his plea for lighter-than-maximum sentencing, the attorney said he had entered a tailspin after the pandemic began, and was arrested on a domestic abuse charge. Beneman said if he's able to pay a hundred dollars a week, it would take Mitchell 44 years to pay off the restitution to the supermarket chain.
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