Sharif Durhams and Adam Bell broke the following story this morning:

Restaurant linked to E. coli shut down

Health officials closed a China Grove restaurant linked to a deadly E. coli outbreak today after learning some employees slaughtered a goat there last month.  At a news conference this afternoon, Rowan County Health Director Leonard Wood said that on Friday, a former employee of Captain’s Galley Seafood Restaurant on Main Street in China Grove told health officials a goat had been slaughtered there.  Wood said the restaurant’s owners confirmed the report of the goat slaughter over the weekend. He ordered the restaurant closed today.  News of the slaughter was “very disturbing” to him and the restaurant’s owners, Wood said.  “They don’t know if or when the restaurant will reopen,” he said.

We have bee contacted by family members of the victims of this outbreak.  This is not our first case in North Carolina.  We are presently representing nearly a dozen kids in an E. coli outbreak stemming from the 2004 State Fair and we represented over twenty-five families in a Salmonella outbreak at a Spruce Pine Western Sizzlin’.