Wal-Mart Worker Dies In Black Friday Stampede
Update: Per the comments below, I mixed up two people from the linked article. The pregnant woman didn’t die. She was injured. The person who was killed was a male.
She was 28 and pregnant:
A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island store Friday morning, police and witnesses said.
The 34-year-old worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.
Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.
“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too…I literally had to fight people off my back.”
The unidentified victim was rushed to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., police said.
There are a lot of people (mostly liberal types) who turn up their noses at the “grotesque spectacle” of “black friday.” They rail against what they call “rampant consumerism,” but I don’t really see a problem with it. The shoppers want to shop. The stores want to sell them stuff. Creating some hype and pageantry around the holiday shopping season is just good marketing.
Clearly, stampeding someone to death is pretty horrific, but I’d chalk this up to poor management and bad crowd control more than anything else.
