Fayetteville, Arkansas is apparently not the best city for high-up executives at multimillion-dollar food companies.
In September, following an Arkansas Razorbacks football game, Beyond Meat chief operating officer Doug Ramsey was arrested and charged with terroristic threats and third-degree battery for an incident that saw him allegedly bite the nose of a man in a Fayetteville parking garage. (Ramsey was suspended by Beyond Meat and then later left the company.)
On Monday, news emerged of Tyson Foods chief financial officer John R. Tyson (son of company chairman and former CEO John H. Tyson and grandson of founder John W. Tyson) being arrested early Sunday morning for breaking into a college-aged woman’s house and falling asleep in her bed:
Tyson Foods' CFO was arrested in Arkansas after he entered a random woman’s home while intoxicated and fell asleep in her bed, police say. https://t.co/ixam1JSkY1
— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2022
Here’s more on that from that article, by Marlene Lenthang of NBC News:
The chief financial officer of Tyson Foods and son of the company’s chairman was arrested in Arkansas over the weekend after he entered a random woman’s home while intoxicated and fell asleep in her bed, according to police.
John R. Tyson, 32, was found asleep at the home in the 400 block of North Mock Ave. in Fayetteville on Sunday at 2:05 a.m., according to the preliminary arrest report. Tyson’s headquarters is located in Springdale, about 10 miles northeast of Fayetteville.
A college-aged woman who lived in the home called police about a potential burglary saying she believed she left the front door unlocked and returned home to find “a male she did not know asleep in her bed.”
Fox 24 Fayetteville’s Jacob Smith and Garrett Fergeson have more on Tyson’s response to police and what he was charged with:
Police attempted to wake Tyson up and speak with him but he could not verbally respond. After briefly sitting up, Tyson laid back down and tried to go to sleep.
The report states there was an odor of alcohol on his breath and body and his movements appeared sluggish and uncoordinated.
Tyson was arrested for Criminal Trespass and Public Intoxication and booked into the Washington County Detention Center. He was released Sunday evening.
Unlike the Ramsey situation, it’s unclear if this particular arrest had anything to do with Arkansas football. However, the Razorbacks did lose 21-19 at home to the Liberty Flames Saturday.
This is not the first recent controversy for Tyson Foods. The company, which is the world’s second-largest processor of chicken, beef, and pork and operates prominent food brands from Tyson to Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm, Ballpark, Aidells, and State Fair (and made $43 billion in revenue in 2020), has previously been under fire for their lobbying and actions around the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, reporting from ProPublica earlier this year revealed the degree of their involvement in pushing President Trump to sign an executive order keeping meatpacking plants open during a heightened early period of virus spread, an order that had lots of similarities to one drafted by Tyson’s legal department days earlier.
Tyson is currently under legal fire over their actions around that order. That includes a federal appeals court ruling in July that the order does not protect Tyson against a lawsuit brought by the families of three dead workers and 11 surviving infected workers. The actions of John R. Tyson here certainly aren’t on that scale, and we’ve seen other people receive relatively minimal punishment for entering the wrong domicile while intoxicated, but this is still another black eye for a company that didn’t need it.
[NBC News; photo from Rogers, Arkansas’ KNWA Fox 24]
