Jdimytai Damour
Mr. Damour’s family is filing suit against Wal-Mart for the trampling death of their son last Friday morning.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/03/family-of-walmart-employe_n_148159.html
GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — The family of a worker trampled to death in a “Black Friday” crush of bargain hunters at a Long Island Wal-Mart store filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on Wednesday, claiming store ads offering deep discounts “created an atmosphere of competition and anxiety” that led to “crowd craze.”
The lawsuit claims that besides failing to provide adequate security for a pre-dawn crowd estimated at 2,000, Wal-Mart “engaged in specific marketing and advertising techniques to specifically attract a large crowd and create an environment of frenzy and mayhem and was otherwise careless, reckless and negligent.”
Festival seating at rock concerts ended because of trampling deaths at a Who concert in 1979. What’s it going to take for the “doorbuster” Black Friday frenzy to finally be put to bed? Maybe there haven’t been enough fatalities yet, huh?
Jdimytai Damour, 34, had been hired by an employment agency as a temporary worker at the Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream and had been on the job about a week when he died, said his family’s lawyer, Jordan Hecht.
The 6-foot-5, 270-pound man died of asphyxiation after being crushed early Friday morning by the crowd, which broke down the electronic doors in frantic pursuit of bargains. At least four other people were treated at hospitals, including a woman who was eight months pregnant.
Authorities suspect that because he was as big as an NFL lineman, Damour was placed at the entrance of the store to assist with crowd control.
“Those hundreds of people who did make their way into the store, literally had to step over or around him or unfortunately on him to get into the Wal-Mart store,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey said this week.
I have a bold prediction: This case will never see the inside of a courtroom. If it did, the damage award would be the largest in history. What’s more, in my opinion, the aforementioned retailer will keep this family buried in a blizzard of paperwork from their attorneys until they are bankrupt. After all, it’s more important to “win” than to admit fault.
Retailers have been doing this for years. Most do not have incidents, because they put realistic and responsible crowd control policies into their holiday sales planning. The ones that continue having these problems are those who consistently put profit (and the video on the six o’ clock news of people pushing and shoving to get that $700 flat-screen TV,) above customer and employee safety. There’s a YouTube of what happened at the store Mr. Damour died in during last year’s Black Friday festivities, for instance. This isn’t the first time, and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last.
My condolences to the Damour family. I’m hoping against hope that they’re able to teach an expen$ive lesson in corporate responsibility and ethics.
-S
