A Serial Poisoner Poured Bleach on Groceries 15 Times in Bizarre, Multi-Store Crime Spree. Why Did Will Rollins Give Him a Sweetheart Plea Deal?

David Lohr walked into a Los Angeles grocery store in November 2018 and poured Clorox into a refrigerator full of cheese for sale. He doused bleach on more groceries like ice, alcohol, and frozen shrimp in California stores—four more times—before being arrested on federal charges in February 2019, according to court documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

After the FBI determined Lohr was also behind a 2016 bleaching incident, the serial poisoner—who told a TV news reporter that "I committed no crime"—faced six counts of tampering with consumer products, a maximum sentence of 60 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine. Three months later, as that case was playing out, Arizona issued a separate indictment, accusing him of contaminating products on nine additional occasions at multiple Target and Walgreens stores.

But despite his years-long, two-state bleach spree, Lohr was sentenced to just over four years in 2021 for the federal charges, thanks to help from Will Rollins, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the federal case.

Rollins, a California Democrat, left his job soon after signing Lohr’s plea deal to take on Republican Rep. Ken Calvert. He narrowly lost that race but is currently challenging Calvert to a hotly contested rematch, positioning himself as a crusading, tough-on-crime former prosecutor and making public safety a top issue. In February, for example, he wrote an op-ed titled "Will Rollins: Contrary to Ken Calvert’s lies, I’m the only candidate serious about public safety." In late August, he tweeted, "As a counterterrorism prosecutor, I took on MS-13 and January 6th insurrectionists."

But Rollins’s record as a prosecutor—which the Free Beacon had to piece together through an exhaustive documents search after his campaign declined repeated requests to provide details—shows scant evidence of toughness. In one of the most prominent cases he prosecuted, the case of the bleach bandit, Rollins agreed to a surprisingly lenient sentence for a chronic offender and repeat safety menace.

All told, Lohr was accused of contaminating groceries 14 times across two states over four months, plus a 15th two years earlier, according to court documents. Consuming concentrated bleach can cause permanent gastrointestinal damage that may lead to death, while lower concentrations can cause nausea and vomiting, according to Poison Control.

In one December 2018 incident, a customer with her child, who was holding a bag of ice against his chest, told a Redondo Beach, Calif., grocery store employee that something was wrong with the ice, according to an FBI special agent’s affidavit. The employee took the bag and noticed the child’s black shirt had become discolored. He told the FBI "the bleach fumes were overwhelming" when he opened the freezer containing the ice.

The employee threw out about 20 bags of ice as a result. He said the bleach gave him a headache and made his hands burn and tingle. An assistant manager noticed bleach seeping through a hole in one bag.

Surveillance footage showed Lohr entering the store, retrieving a bottle of bleach, opening a freezer door, and leaving without the container, but the angle and distance made it impossible to see him dump the contents, according to the affidavit. The next day, Lohr visited a grocery store about 20 miles north in Los Angeles, just outside Beverly Hills. This time, surveillance footage captured Lohr dousing bags of ice with bleach. That store threw away 35 to 40 bags.

Lohr was arrested at a bus stop in Sunnyvale on Feb. 6, 2019, after pouring hydrogen peroxide and a white powder (later determined to be salt) on a public bus, according to the FBI.

Rollins was the only federal prosecutor to sign Lohr’s July 2021 plea deal, making him a central player. Lohr admitted that he "acted with reckless disregard for the risk that another person would be placed in danger of death or bodily injury."

In exchange, Rollins moved to dismiss three counts of tampering with consumer products. Lohr still faced 30 years in prison, a three-year period of supervised release, and a $750,000 fine, but Rollins also recommended the court reduce the offense levels and issue a sentence "no higher than the low end of the applicable Sentencing Guidelines range," according to the plea deal.

Lohr was also ordered to continue taking medication prescribed after his arrest, which he agreed was successfully treating his schizophrenia symptoms. After finishing his prison sentence, Lohr would live in a mental health center that would provide a treatment plan, according to court records.

But those documents lacked important details, such as how long he would remain at the facility. Further, Lohr, now 53, has periodically received psychiatric treatment since 1999, been involuntarily hospitalized three times, and previously stopped taking medication, according to a psychological evaluation. He told a psychologist he believed pouring bleach into refrigerators would create a "humidity cloud" that would cause rain and alleviate California’s drought.

Lohr also has a history of violence with convictions for felony battery and felony assault on a police officer, as well as other serious crimes like grand theft and concealing a weapon, Rollins wrote in a court filing. In fact, Lohr was on probation when he went on his bleaching spree.

Rollins admitted that Lohr’s actions could have seriously hurt customers, including children, and that the court must consider "the need to protect the public from future crimes of the defendant."

The "defendant committed crimes that put innocent, extremely vulnerable members of the public at risk of injury when they were simply trying to buy food for their families," Rollins wrote.

But because the treatment Lohr received after his arrest was working, and because he wanted to continue the regimen and took responsibility for the bleachings, Rollins pushed for a lighter sentence.

A public defender who represented Lohr did not return a request for comment.

Arizona prosecutors, meanwhile, accused Lohr of contaminating products on nine occasions in October 2018. Those incidents were separate from the California case, but the indictment came down in May 2019—two years before Rollins secured Lohr’s cushy plea deal.

In a 2018 interview Lohr gave to KSAZ, Phoenix’s Fox station, he claimed, "I committed no crime. Absolutely no crime."

When asked why he was pouring chemicals on food, he explained that he was trying to remove "invisible chemicals" from the freezer case.

"Because the store’s security is using invisible chemicals," said Lohr. "It was one bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It was off their shelf from the Target. It makes the chemicals go away. I put it in the bottom of the cooler so it was not in the food. It was not on top of the food in any way, so it had no contact with any food."

He then abruptly ended the interview.

Lohr pleaded guilty in Arizona, as well, and was sentenced to 10 years of probation, seven of which would be supervised, and unspecified mental health terms.

Rollins, who did not return a request for comment, has previously exaggerated his record as a federal prosecutor. He repeatedly touted his prosecutions against "insurrectionists" in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, but an exhaustive Free Beacon review found the only case Rollins was involved in was against Beverly Hills cosmetologist Gina Bisignano, a Jan. 6 protester famous for shouting, "You are not going to take away our Trumpy Bear!" into a megaphone outside the Capitol while wearing a Louis Vuitton sweater and Chanel boots. Her case is still pending.

In December, a judge ruled that Rollins could not refer to himself on the primary ballot as a "counterterrorism attorney" or "counterterrorism advisor." Instead, he could only call himself a "counterterrorism law attorney" to not mislead voters into thinking he was actively working for the government in counterterrorism (he had left the Justice Department for a private law firm).

Rollins’s race against Calvert is expected to be tight. He lost to the incumbent in 2022 by less than 5 percentage points, but he was considered one of the top overperformers in the nation, Politico reported. Recent redistricting swapped heavily Republican areas in California’s Inland Empire for parts of the Coachella Valley that include overwhelmingly liberal Palm Springs.

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