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In one of those stories that makes you question humanity, some guy in New York pleaded guilty to posting a video on YouTube in which he claimed responsibility for seeing that millions of jars of Gerber baby food were poisoned. This is one of those stories from the dark side of social media and online video.

Forty-Three-year-old Anton Dunn, who is to be sentenced in March, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for one count of transmitting threats. Being a new dad myself, this seems like a pretty light punishment to me. There's no telling how Gerber's sales will be affected by this for that matter. Thankfully no evidence has been found confirming the reality of the threat.  Michelle Nichols reports for Reuters:

Dunn posted his first video -- in which he wore a black mask -- on April 20, 2008, and followed up with a further two videos, posted on July 24 and July 27.

"In the video, entitled "gerbersbabyfoodalert," Dunn stated that Gerber employees acting at his direction had poisoned millions of bottles of Gerber baby food, to kill babies who ate it," Dassin said in a statement.

"Dunn further stated that it was "too late" to do anything about the poisoned baby food because it had already been shipped to consumers," he said.

Gerber doesn't look to have done much to handle the situation from a reputation management standpoint. Searching for queries like "gerber, poison" (without the quotes) brings up various articles about Dunn, and some other things, but I haven't found any official Gerber PR on the matter. A look through the press section of their website shows no trace of the matter either (even going back to July, when the videos surfaced).

This situation is bound to freak out a lot of people, and parents are going to want to be assured that their babies are not in danger. Gerber would be smart to at least get something official up on the site about the subject. Anything to set minds at ease, especially now that the story is back in the news.