A Longmont mother has filed a new negligence lawsuit over her allegation that her 6-year-old son found and was pricked by a used syringe in a McDonald’s bathroom in June 2019. The complaint, filed in Boulder County District Court on Oct. 26, says the boy came out of the restroom at the restaurant at 245 S. Main St. holding an uncapped syringe, according to The Denver Post.
The lawsuit alleges the restaurant’s employees should have done more to protect customers from exposure to bodily fluids. A police report cited by the newspaper says the boy first denied being poked, then complained his finger hurt; his mother said she saw a mark that could have been a needle prick. The complaint says she took him to an emergency room because of possible exposure. Neither the reported account nor the allegations establish what was in the syringe or whether the child contracted an infection.
A renewed case, with key questions unresolved
Newman previously brought a case without an attorney in 2023. As described in the earlier complaint, her son experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, underwent weeks of testing for possible infection, and received care costing nearly $7,000, The Denver Post reported. Court records allowed the claims to be refiled after the earlier case was dismissed; the new filing names attorney Glenn Fair. Fair declined to discuss details, and McDonald’s representatives did not respond to the newspaper’s requests for comment.
A separate incident offers a point of comparison, not evidence of how often such injuries occur. In 2019, a 4-year-old boy in Boulder was pricked by a discarded needle near a Park East neighborhood playground; the Daily Camera reported that a pediatrician found two pokes on his hand and that he had follow-up blood tests at three and six months. The setting differed from the alleged Longmont restaurant incident, and the two cases do not establish a local trend.
Local disposal options—and limits of the available figures
For residents seeking a safe way to discard sharps, Boulder County says its Hazardous Materials Management Facility accepts them free during normal operating hours from residents of Boulder County, Broomfield and Erie. The City of Longmont’s prescription-disposal page directs people looking for syringe and needle disposal information to its Trash Wizard, where they can search for “sharps.”
In Boulder—not Longmont—red sharps-disposal containers installed near downtown in May 2020 had collected more than 689 pounds of needles, according to city officials cited by the Boulder Reporting Lab in 2023. That collection total documents use of those containers; it does not measure syringe litter in Longmont or explain the circumstances of Newman’s allegations.
