Another juror in the Feeding Our Future case was excused on Tuesday after hearing about an attempted bribe of another juror in the case.

A woman had attempted to bribe a juror on Sunday, dropping off a bag of about $120,000 in cash and telling the 23-year-old juror she'd receive more cash if she voted to acquit the defendants. That juror was excused and U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel questioned each of the remaining jurors on Monday to confirm no one else had been contacted or discussed the case in the past six weeks with anyone.

On Tuesday, as the jury began its second day of deliberations, a second juror — a 25-year-old woman from Savage — said she heard about the attempted juror tampering incident from a family member. She was replaced by an alternate — a 30-year-old Andover man — as the jury weighs the 41 federal criminal charges against seven people tied to a Shakopee restaurant.

A verdict will be widely watched because it's the first trial in a broader fraud case that led to charges against 70 people since 2022, when the FBI began investigating allegations of defrauding federal meal programs meant to feed children in need. With $250 million allegedly stolen, prosecutors have called it one of the largest pandemic-related fraud cases in the country.

In a rare move, Brasel sequestered the jury Monday night after the attempted bribery incident, citing their safety. The FBI is investigating the incident and no one has been arrested yet.

Jurors weren't told the reason why they're being sequestered, but many looked surprised when Brasel told them they wouldn't be going home Monday.

Brasel also added security to the courtroom, detained all seven defendants and had an FBI agent confiscate the defendants' phones. Authorities are investigating the leak of jurors' names, which hadn't been publicly disclosed to anyone beyond the attorneys.

Several attorneys noticed how rare and shocking a juror bribery case is, recalling only a 1980s and 1990s New York case where a juror was paid to acquit a mob boss of racketeering.

"It calls into question the integrity of our courthouse and our system," Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson told Brasel, adding that bribing a juror, which could lead to up to 10 years in prison, could affect other trials in the broader fraud case.

Inside the downtown Minneapolis federal courthouse, the jury began deliberations around 4:30 p.m. Monday after a six-week trial.

U.S. Department of Agriculture programs reimburse schools, nonprofits and day cares for feeding low-income children after school or during the summer. Prosecutors allege defendants exploited the pandemic to get rich, receiving more than $40 million for 18 million meals at 50 food sites from Rochester to St. Cloud.

"They saw the vulnerability of the program," Thompson told the jury in his closing arguments. "The money was being spent on anything but food."

Defense attorneys say they served real food to real kids, and they've cast doubt on what they say is a sloppy FBI investigation, with agents never searching some defendants' homes or a Minneapolis warehouse where food was stored or getting video surveillance. They argued the government relied on sensational photos of bags of cash and luxury purchases to infer criminal intent of seven Somali refugees who immigrated to the U.S. as children or young adults decades ago.

"They did nothing to but earnestly try to provide food during the pandemic," Andrew Garvis, a defense attorney, said in his opening statement. "Food was bought, food was delivered and food was given."