Posted on 02/26/2012 8:07:49 AM PST by ConservativeStatement
The husband of a Manhattan real-estate agent left with severe injuries after a shopping cart was dropped on her head from an East Harlem parking garage claims lax security caused the devastating accident.
Michael Hedges claims in a lawsuit against the East River Plaza shopping center that if there had been enough security at the mall, two teens wouldn’t have been able to send the shopping cart plunging four stories onto his wife’s head.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The land on which that mall was built was seized from private businesses via eminent domain. So maybe the victim should sue New York City.
Target in Harlem? There goes the neighborhood.
Instead of blaming the feral “youth” who drop shopping carts on people’s heads for fun, we blame the retailers for not having enough security to protect people from feral “youth”.
Now, it might not be a bad idea for stores to have a "no unattended yutes" policy... Then you just need a couple guards at every entrance.
To be consistent with the anti-gun zealots, she should have sued the SHOPPING CART MANUFACTURER! It’s obviously their fault that the shopping cart decided to jump in a suicide attempt!
Who has the deepest pockets, the feral yutes or Target?
I feel badly for this lady. She didn’t just write a check, but actually donated her time for poor kids. Nonetheless, she obviously realized and accepted the dangers involved in going to a neighborhood like this. There’s no possible way a shopping mall could hire enough police or guards to completely guarantee anyone’s safety. This suit should be thrown out and re-directed against the thugs who committed the crime. Sadly, unless a shopping cart falls on one of them, none of these punks are ever gonna have any money.
Two thoughts:
One of the reasons why businesses don’t establish themselves in poor neighborhoods stems from high crime rates, not to mention the entitlement mentality of the customers. We got a twofer here.
Second, I would bet that just about all the students in my freshmen English classroom would have enough empathy in their still-growing little brains to understand that dropping a big object from a substantial height might hurt someone on the ground. Apparently not these kids in the parking garage (assuming it was done intentionally). If it wasn’t done intentionally, and we’re dealing with some short-sighted teenagers whose goofing around got out of hand, than it’s tragedy. (By the way, “short-sighted” is the core quality of being a teenager.)
I guess we’ll see what the truth is here in a while.
Gee, you mean they’re not suing the cart manufacturer?
I may be alone in agreeing with his decision to sue. Very bad design of the store and garage facility, to allow shopping carts at a high elevation without safeguards. We have a multi-story Target store with attached garage at our local mall. Although carts can travel on all levels of the store (via a cart escalator), the carts can only leave the store at the ground level.
Kids do a lot of stupid things. Even older kids. We had a dorm at my college, 6 stories, build as a square with an enclosed interior patio area. I would occasionally venture into there to pick up empty beer cans for recycling, but quietly and quickly because the kids in the dorm “guarded” their trash, and would throw things at people who were in there.
There were several large pieces of furniture, and a couple of major appliances scattered around. Clearly any of these would have done real damage if they hit someone. And these were “adults”.
I can imagine as a child doing something stupid with a shopping cart, although I hope I wouldn’t drop one where people were walking. I could imagine pushing one down a street, not thinking about how it could cause a car accident. Kids don’t really think. They just do.
This is a rare case where I agree with such a suit.
Teeing up shopping carts four storeys above the innocent in Harlem is totally irresponsible.
Putting shopping carts up on a roof with the general public, four storeys above the street, is just asking for trouble in this neighborhood.
I don’t care if the kids should have been responsible, anyone passing by on the street should not have been put at such risk.
And when the shopping center closes down, the locals will scream racism.
We don’t know from this story if the Harlem store has the ‘cart escalator’ or not How else are shoppers going to get their carts from floor to floor in the store or to their car(s) in the garage?
These kids seem generally to have had no respect for rules or others’ property, but wanted to do damage. No cart escalator was going to stop them. They could have removed the cart from such an escalator or track if one exists in the garage, or even on the ground floor and taken it up to the garage’s 4th floor.
Mr. Hedges seems to think there should have been more guards patrolling the garage. With kids as uncivilized as these, there are not enough patrol guards in the world to stop them from creating the havoc they are intent on committing.
As lacking in details as the story is, it explains amply why businesses stay the he!! out of Harlem.
Hi, honey!
Our local Aldi stores have a chain system where you have to put a quarter in to get a cart out, and you get it back when you replace the cart.
Just sayin.’
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