The headline grabbed me:
Jury Awards $45 Million to Woman Struck by Falling Shopping Cart
First:
Falling what? Shopping carts fall? When exactly do they leave the ground? Have you ever seen a shopping cart in the air? Overhead? Ever? This is some "when pigs fly" kind of stuff. So I had to
read:
Nearly seven years after two boys pushed a shopping cart off a walkway at a Manhattan mall, severely injuring a woman four stories below, a jury decided to award more than $45 million to her and her family.
Ohhhhhhh.
So the shopping cart didn't fall. It was
pushed off a walkway. But how do you push a cart off a walkway? No city inspector who wants to not only keep his job, but not be sued would sign off on a walkway without a railing or fencing to keep people (as well as things) from falling off the edges. Right?
The woman, Marion Hedges, had just shopped for Halloween candy with her son, Dayton, then 13, at the East River Plaza Mall in East Harlem in October 2011 and was at a parking kiosk when the two boys hoisted the cart over a railing above. It plummeted more than 70 feet and struck Ms. Hedges on the head.
Oh...So the cart was not
pushed off the edge. It was picked up and
THROWN over a railing.
So let's review:
Woman was minding her business on the ground floor of a mall. Two boys on an upper floor picked up a shopping cart, went to the walkway. Picked up the shopping cart and threw it over the edge, hitting the woman who was minding her business. Quick: Who's at fault?
1) The Boys
2) The Shopping Cart
3) Gravity
4) The Mall owner
5) The security guards
6) Anyone remotely connected with deep pockets
Well if you picked 6. You get the gold star.
Court documents show that Ms. Hedges and her family sued the mall and Planned Security Service, which was under contract to secure the mall’s common areas, including the walkway where the boys pushed the shopping cart over the edge.
Conspicuously absent are the parents of the boys or the estate of the boys who
picked up a shopping cart and threw it over a walkway, nearly killing someone.
On Friday, the six-person jury decided to award about $41 million in damages to Ms. Hedges, $2.5 million to her son and $2 million to her husband. It said the boys who threw the cart — ages 12 and 13 at the time of the injury — were 10 percent responsible, the security company was 25 percent responsible and the mall was 65 percent responsible.
So lets understand what this jury thinks:
The boys who picked up the shopping cart and tossed it over the edge were only 10% responsible for their own behavior. However, the mall who supplies the shopping carts, for it's customers is
65%m responsible. Because what? They cannot control each and every individual? Because they didn't have the foresight to think that civilized people do not need to be encaged so that they do not throw shopping carts off walkways?
The security company is responsible because it cannot control the actions of every individual who enters the mall?
In his statements to the court, Mr. Moore said the security company knew about repeated instances of objects being thrown from the pedestrian walkways, presenting a danger to passers-by below that was never adequately addressed.
This is common?
Video footage shows that three boys were together on the fourth-level walkway just before the cart was tossed. One appeared to try stop the other two from throwing the cart. Then he ran away, and the other two lifted it over the railing. It got stuck, just for a moment, before one boy gave a final shove to send it hurtling over the edge.
Kudos to the one boy who tried to stop the others and declined to participate. This jury though, got this entire thing wrong. Now when the people (mostly black and "hispanic") end up behind a fence and feel like they are in a cage, they can thank this jury. Imagine, a company had the gall...unmitigated gall to think that they could build a facility where they did not have to worry about the patrons throwing large objects over the guard railing...what kind of neighborhood did they think they were in?
