Man Ordered to Pay $5,001 for Peeing in Co-Worker's Coffee Pot
If you were thinking of pissing in a co-workers drink, here's something that should give you pause: A man who admitted spiking his colleague's coffee with urine was ordered to pay $5,001 in damages. And that fine was in addition to the year-long prison sentence he'd already received.
According to the Daily Progress, on March 16, 2009, James Carroll Butler used an empty soda can to scoop urine from a toilet into his co-worker Michael Utz's personal coffee pot at the water treatment plant in Culpepper, Va. He returned the pot to the coffee maker "hoping [his co-worker Michael] Utz was the person who would get the urine-tainted coffee."
Sure enough, Utz tried to brew coffee but stopped when "he was hit with a strong smell of urine, observing fluid already inside his coffee pot that he had not put in there."
Utz told his supervisor, who suggested testing the liquid at a lab. The results came back positive for urine and feces. Butler confessed to the crime the next day.
"I done something I am very much ashamed of to a co-worker for [reasons, which are] stress-related [and] things going on in my life on and off the job. I am very much ashamed of my stupid and childlike behavior," Butler wrote in a letter.
Court documents obtained by the Daily Progress show that $5,000 will go towards punitive damages and $1 will go towards compensatory damages. While well short of the $728,000 he was seeking, Utz is "really, really happy about the victory and he's glad it's done," according to his attorney.
In May 2009, Butler was found guilty of misdemeanor assault for the coffee pissing and sentenced to a one-year jail sentence—11 months were suspended— and one year of unsupervised probation. He was also fired from the plant, where he'd worked for 17 years.
