Mountain Dew Mouse Lawsuit: Ronald Ball and the Dissolving Defense

The Mountain Dew mouse lawsuit was a 2009 product liability case in which an Illinois man, Ronald Ball, alleged he found a dead mouse in a sealed can of Mountain Dew he bought from a workplace vending machine. PepsiCo denied the claim and mounted an unusual defense: its expert testified that the soda’s acidity would have reduced any mouse inside the can to a “jelly-like substance” within about 30 days, long before Ball said he opened it. The parties settled confidentially in August 2012.¹

What Ronald Ball Said Happened

Ball bought the can on November 10, 2008, from a vending machine at a Marathon Oil facility in Wood River, Illinois. According to his complaint, he opened the sealed can, took a drink, and immediately became violently ill. He poured the rest into a Styrofoam cup and a dead mouse fell out.²

Ball showed the carcass to co-workers and contacted PepsiCo. A company representative collected the mouse for testing. Ball’s attorneys, Ed and Samantha Unsell, later alleged that PepsiCo returned it in “deplorable condition” after “destructive testing” that made further independent examination impossible.³

Ball filed suit on April 29, 2009, in Madison County Circuit Court as Ball v. PepsiCo, Case No. 09-L-440. The complaint named PepsiCo, a store, and its manager, and pleaded negligence, breach of warranty, product liability, and spoliation of evidence. The complaint alleged the can had not been tampered with or punctured before Ball opened it.³

The Dissolving Mouse Defense

PepsiCo moved to dismiss with an affidavit from veterinary pathologist Dr. Lawrence McGill, dated April 8, 2010. Mountain Dew has a pH of roughly 3 because of citric acid. According to McGill, a mouse submerged in it would begin to decalcify within four to seven days. The abdominal structures and skull would rupture. After about 30 days the body would disintegrate into a jelly-like substance, with the possible exception of the tail.²

The timeline mattered. The can had been filled and sealed on August 28, 2008, which was 74 days before Ball said he opened it. If a mouse had gotten in at the plant, it should have been unrecognizable mush by November.

McGill also examined the mouse itself. He concluded it was only two to four weeks old at the time of death, meaning it had not yet been born when the can was sealed. The carcass showed none of the decalcification or organ breakdown expected from even a week of submersion in the soda.² The defense was, in effect, a double denial: no mouse could have stayed intact in a sealed can that long, and this mouse in particular could not have been there from the start.

Does the Science Actually Support the Dissolving Claim?

Independent scientists said the general premise was plausible, though not tidy. Dr. Yan-Fang Ren of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry told LiveScience that citric acid at a low pH breaks down tissue and has a chelating effect that strips calcium from bones. What would remain, however, is not nothing. Collagen and soft tissue would persist as something with a rubbery texture.⁴

A 2025 forensic study went further. Researchers placed 30 laboratory mice into sealed and unsealed beverages for periods ranging from three days to two months. Mice in sealed carbonated drinks consistently developed severe, full-body gas distention after at least a week, a change absent when the containers were open or refrigerated. When the same researchers examined mice actually submitted for necropsy after being found in consumer beverages, those real-world rodents lacked both the gas distention and the incisor erosion the experiments predicted. The researchers concluded the animals had likely entered the containers after consumers opened them, not during manufacturing.⁵

Why the Defense Backfired in Public

The lawsuit was first reported by the Madison/St. Clair Record in 2010 and sat largely unnoticed for more than a year. In early January 2012 the story exploded internationally. NPR reported that a late February 2011 Record article about changes to PepsiCo’s legal team appeared to trigger a search-engine algorithm that pushed the case into wider circulation.⁶

The public did not read the affidavit as exonerating. The headline most readers walked away with was that Mountain Dew can dissolve a mouse. Plaintiff attorney Samantha Unsell told ABC News that PepsiCo’s argument “doesn’t say a lot about their product.”⁷ Snopes reviewed the central claim and rated it True in the narrow sense that a veterinary pathologist had indeed testified Mountain Dew would turn a mouse to jelly, while noting the same testimony was offered to argue Ball’s story could not have happened as he described it.²

How the Case Ended

Ball v. PepsiCo never went to trial. In August 2012, the parties reached a confidential settlement for an undisclosed amount. PepsiCo denied liability as part of the agreement. Ed Unsell told Courthouse News that “it’s a done deal, and both parties are on their way.”¹ No public reporting indicates that the FDA or any other regulatory agency investigated Ball’s specific claim.⁸

1
Courthouse News Service. Settlement Reached in Mouse in a Soda Can Case
2
Snopes. Mountain Ewww
3
The Intelligencer. Dead Mouse in Soda Can Prompts Lawsuit
4
LiveScience. Mountain Dew Dissolve Mouse Carcass
5
SAGE Journals. Rodent Contamination of Soft Drinks: An Evaluation of Postmortem Changes
6
NPR. Mountain Dew Mouse Story Goes Viral
7
ABC News. Mice No Match for Mountain Dew
8
CBS News. PepsiCo: No Dead Mouse Found in Mountain Dew, Soda Would Dissolve Carcass