Husband of woman hit by shopping cart at Harlem Target suing shopping center

New York Post ^ | February 26, 2012 | KATHIANNE BONIELLO

[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.

[blueunicorn6]

If I would have pushed a shopping cart onto a woman from the fourth floor of a parking garage when I was 13 years old, My dad would have taken me up to the fourth floor of that garage, chained me inside a shopping cart, given me a feather to hold in each hand, and then pushed me over the edge screaming “Fly, you little sh-thead, Fly!”

[roadcat]

In our Target store, the cart escalator is next to the people escalator. You push your shopping cart into the cart escalator, and then you step onto the people escalator which travels slightly faster. At the other end, you retrieve the cart as it comes off the escalator. The carts are free to move around the store. At the upper levels, the exits towards the parking garage upper levels have stairs and poles to prohibit removing the carts from the store. You can only exit the store with carts at ground level. I agree with you that patrol guards are useless.

I've seen pictures of the Target store in Harlem, and the carts are allowed to leave the store's upper levels on bridges that enter the parking structure. No barriers at all. Poor design. It's true that these Harlem punks could throw any miscellaneous heavy objects off the bridge onto that white woman. But the store's poor design aided the punks in giving them ammunition for their twisted amusement. My personal opinion is that the punks should be knee-capped as punishment, but lib judges will give them a pass.

[Ditter]

Forget the shopping carts, if someone was so inclined, they could bring anything heavy into the parking garage in their car or truck and throw it at people below. Someone threw a brick off of an overpass onto the freeway, it hit the windshield of a passing car and the woman had a wreck and died.

Rules and regulations are good and well meaning but evil people will find a way. I am in favor of cameras so you can get a picture of a perp and arrest them but some people are against cameras. You are damned if you do and damned if you don't, as my mother used to say.

[Altariel]

Yes, it’s a good system. I’m surprised that other stores haven’t adopted that system; I’m sure it cuts down on stolen and/or damaged carts.

[9422WMR]

This could have been avoided if a good civil engineer had designed the parking garage in a way to prevent large objects from being dumped over the rail. No excuse for the feral yutes, but it should have been anticipated.

[EDINVA]

I wonder if some of the design/access wasn’t NYC’s rules/regs? Maybe restricting cart exit only to the ground floor was deemed unfriendly to customers? And, really, tho it’s their job to anticipate virtually any circumstance, who’d have foreseen two early teens (or anyone) heaving a shopping cart up over a Jersey wall and down 4 stories.

I hadn’t realized the victim is white, and hope the matter doesn’t get more complicated because she was racially targeted (no pun intended, cause it ain’t funny). I think I just assumed all the parties were minorities.

The whole incident is just horrible. And, no matter the result of the suit, her life and her family’s life will never be the same again. Nor will those boys’ or their families’ lives.