JACKSONVILLE, FL. Back in April 2026, state inspectors ordered a Jacksonville Subway closed after documenting rodent activity inside the restaurant, the third time in four years that this specific location had been shut down on an emergency basis.
The closure at Subway #31891 on Lem Turner Road was ordered on April 1, 2026, with inspectors requiring the restaurant to vacate by April 2. The April 1 inspection turned up four high-severity violations and three intermediate violations. Rodent activity was the trigger for the emergency order.
What Inspectors Found
Subway #31891 on Lem Turner Rd: Inspection History
The April 1 visit produced four high-severity violations, the category reserved for findings that pose a direct risk of foodborne illness or physical harm to customers. Rodent activity is among the most serious triggers in that category.
A follow-up inspection on the morning of April 2 showed zero high-severity violations and zero intermediate violations. The restaurant was cleared to reopen at 8:15 a.m. that day.
What This Violation Means
Rodent activity inside a food service establishment is not a paperwork problem. Mice and rats carry pathogens including Salmonella and Hantavirus, and they deposit urine and feces on food-contact surfaces, in ingredient storage areas, and along the routes they travel through a kitchen. A customer eating a sandwich made on a surface that rodents crossed overnight has no way of knowing that contact occurred.
That is precisely why state inspectors treat documented rodent activity as a grounds for immediate closure rather than a citation to be corrected at the next scheduled visit. The risk is not theoretical. It is present in every sandwich built after the rodents moved through.
The fact that the April 2 follow-up showed zero violations does not mean the rodent issue was resolved overnight in a lasting way. It means the restaurant met the minimum threshold required to reopen. Whether the underlying conditions that allowed rodents access to the facility were addressed is a question the inspection record alone cannot answer.
The Pattern Before the Closure
The April 2026 closure did not arrive without warning signs in the record.
In February 2025, inspectors visited the Lem Turner Road location and found three high-severity violations and three intermediate violations. No closure was ordered that day, but the high-severity count placed that visit among the more serious routine inspections in the facility's recent history.
Go back further and the pattern sharpens. In August 2023, inspectors documented six high-severity violations and two intermediate violations in a single visit. That triggered follow-up inspections on August 15 and August 17, with the August 15 visit still showing two high-severity violations before the location finally cleared on August 17.
The restaurant's worst single inspection on record came in September 2022, when inspectors found seven high-severity violations and four intermediate violations and ordered an emergency closure for temperature violations in storage. That location reopened the same day.
The Longer Record
Across 23 inspections on record, the Lem Turner Road Subway has accumulated 156 total violations. That works out to an average of nearly seven violations per inspection visit, though the distribution is uneven. The clean inspections that follow emergency closures pull the average down. The inspection visits that triggered those closures push it sharply back up.
This location has now been emergency-closed three times. The first documented closure came in September 2022 for temperature violations. The second is not separately detailed in the available records beyond the closure count. The third was April 2026 for rodent activity.
Three emergency closures at a single location across roughly four years is not a run of bad luck. It is a documented pattern of conditions serious enough to require state intervention, resolved quickly enough to reopen, and then recurring.
The 2022 closure involved temperature violations, a category distinct from the rodent activity that triggered the 2026 closure. That means this location has accumulated emergency-level findings across multiple violation categories, not a single recurring weakness.
The restaurant cleared its April 2 follow-up inspection and was permitted to reopen. Whether inspectors have returned to the Lem Turner Road location since that April 2 clearance, and what they found if they did, is not reflected in the available inspection data.