The Rancho Feeding Corp. tainted-beef case came to a close today when a federal judge sentenced the last of four defendants.
U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer sentenced Felix Cabrera to three months in prison and three months of home detention for his role in a scheme to purposefully process and distribute cattle unfit to eat at the now-defunct Petaluma slaughterhouse where he worked.
The 56-year-old foreman pleaded guilty in 2014 to the scheme, which resulted in a national recall of 8.7 million pounds of meat. As part of his sentence, he was also fined $1,000. He will need to surrender on Sept. 2. His prison term will be followed by two years of supervised probation.
Cabrera passed on instructions from Amaral to the kill floor, and even sometimes gave his own instructions, about which condemned or uninspected cattle to slaughter.
The conditions of Cabrera’s sentence are the result of his compliance early in the investigation and his lack of prior offenses, while still keeping in mind the “serious” nature of the offense, according to the prosecution.