A Black Friday Horror: The Walmart Employee Trampled To Death By Shoppers
Find a GraveJdimytai Damour, the Walmart employee who was trampled to death by Black Friday shoppers.
Although it technically happened the day after Thanksgiving, the story of Jdimytai Damour still weighs heavily nearly two decades after he died. Damour was a 34-year-old temporary worker who was just a week into his job at the Walmart in Valley Stream, New York. Standing 6’5″, he had been asked by his employer to use his body as a barrier for a crowd of people gathered outside the store for its heavily promoted “Blitz Friday” sale.
What happened next would make his name synonymous with the dangers of Black Friday shopping culture.
The store was set to open at 5 a.m., but shoppers had already begun lining up well before then. Soon enough, the crowd outside the store had swelled to more than 2,000 people.
“We expected a large crowd this morning and added additional internal security, additional third-party security, additional store associates and we worked closely with the Nassau County Police,” Walmart officials later stated. “We also erected barricades. Despite all of our precautions, this unfortunate event occurred.”
It was chaos, even before the doors opened. The crowd was pushing in at the entrance, and though store employees tried to hold them back, the shoppers rushed in. And the doors came crushing down on Damour.
“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” fellow employee Jimmy Overby told the New York Daily News of the Thanksgiving crime at the time.
Damour died of asphyxiation when he was trampled by the crowd. His family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit, alleging that Damour’s death was caused by the “wanton disregard for public safety and gross negligence of the defendants.” Four shoppers were also injured in the stampede.
In response, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited Walmart for poor crowd control and imposed a $7,000 fine, finding that the store had not given its employees proper training and equipment to deal with crowds.
What followed became almost as controversial as the tragedy itself.
Walmart then reportedly devoted 4,700 hours of legal work fighting the $7,000 fine, spending millions of dollars in the process. The company’s argument was that crowd trampling was not an occupational hazard that employers were responsible for mitigating and that OSHA was trying to retroactively hold them responsible for standards that didn’t exist when Damour died.
It wasn’t until 2015 — seven years after Damour’s death — that Walmart finally dropped its appeal.
Even then, however, the company maintained that “the citation from OSHA should not have been issued, because it imposed standards that did not exist and were unknown to the retail industry at the time of the incident.”
Ogera Charles, Damour’s father, said he hoped the company and shoppers would do whatever was needed to prevent a repeat of the disaster, saying, “No one wants to die so young.”
