Wal-Mart battles in court over LI trampling-death fine
It's not the $7,000 fine for the Black Friday trampling death in 2008 that Wal-Mart Stores objects to - that's not much for a company that made more than $14 billion last year. Instead, the company said the principle of the violation and the troubling precedent it sets are why it's fighting so hard.
After more than a year of subpoenas and other legal maneuvering, Wal-Mart spent its first day Wednesday as a defendant in an administrative trial over a fine sought by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as a result of the death of temporary greeter Jdimytai Damour, 34, at the company's Valley Stream store. He was trampled by a crowd of about 2,000 people eager to get into the store before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving.
In the case before Judge Covette Rooney of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, Labor Department attorney Jeffrey Rogoff tried to show the company was badly prepared for the crowd.
Sal D'Amico, the chain's regional asset protection coordinator, testified that there was nothing in the Black Friday sale manual about crowd control. During questioning by company attorney Daniel Rathbun, D'Amico said there had been a Nassau County police presence at the sale in previous years, but he didn't know if the store arranged for it in 2008.
Justin Rice, another store employee, testified that at the previous year's sale, "Everybody was just pushing, like it was a rampage." He said he asked store manager Steve Soknanan if there were plans to make the 2008 sale safer, but got no response. Rice, a self-described "big dude," said he was one of the employees trying to hold the crowd back, but when people broke through the doors, he got out of the way only by vaulting over a soda machine.
In other venues, Wal-Mart has been eager to settle. It reached an agreement with the Nassau district attorney's office, promising to improve its crowd control. It also spent almost $400,000 on compensation for injured customers and donated $1.5 million to community programs in Nassau.
"OSHA wants to hold Wal-Mart accountable for a standard that was neither posted nor proposed at the time," company spokesman Greg Rossiter said. The problem is, the violation defines "crowd trampling" as an occupational hazard and requires Wal-Mart to protect workers from it, he said.
But the definition is impossibly vague, said Willis Goldsmith, an employment attorney who has done work for Wal-Mart in the past. So if the company defines it differently than OSHA, it could be liable for many violations, he said.
That kind of rule isn't necessary, and the orderly, uneventful Black Friday sale last year is evidence of that, Rossiter said.
"This was just a tragic event," he said. "We're all saddened by it. We never want it to happen again."
With Maria Alvarez
