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Mother sues Crocs over T escalator accident that left daughter with mangled foot
By adamg on Thu, 09/16/2010 - 9:04am
Nancy Geshke, whose 8-year-old daughter wound up in Mass. General when one of her feet got caught and crushed in an escalator this past July, yesterday sued Crocs for $11 million, alleging the company keeps selling its plastic shoes despite mounting evidence they are a menace on escalators.
In her suit, filed in US District Court, Geshke says the company now has more than 300 complaints on file of Crocs-wearing children injured on escalators. In her case, she, her daughter Nell and her husband, on vacation here from California, were going down to the Blue Line to return to their hotel when Nell's foot got stuck.
Geshke charges Crocs' response to safety complaints was to either brush them off or blame the wearers:
At every crucial juncture, when the onus was upon CROCS to modify its footwear and its marketing so as to warn consumers of dangers known to CROCS, defendant instead made false and misleading statements in an effort to maximize its corporate profits, regardless of the known risks of injuries to young and innocent children. When confronted with incident upon incident of children being injured due to produce defects in its footwear, rather than act to protect children and inform their parents and consumers of known dangers, CROCS instead issued false statements, baselessly attempting to blame persons and entities who were wholly free from fault.
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Comments
Legitimate Lawyer?
I read the complaint. Was this filed in 1994? The lawyer's email address is a juno.com account.
Maybe the PARENTS should be
Maybe the PARENTS should be responsible for mangled foot? They bought the shoes.
After all
Parents are all-knowing and all-seeing. We can predict any hazard ... no, wait, then we are HELICOPTER PARENTS oh noes.
But, hey, the fun never stops when you are a hater!
Re: the fun never stops
You should know.
And what was that yesterday about the death penalty for alleged medical malpractice? Could you explain that one for us, hater?
Interesting Study Concept
Hypothesis: anonymous haters can't read with effective reading comprehension while they are hating.
It might be possible to test this, only the population remains anonymous.
So sorry
You're right-- you weren't calling for the death penalty per se, only that the people who failed to diagnose the girl's meningitis should die painful and confused deaths. Still vindictive, hateful, and judgmental, not to mention more than a little sick.
Anonymity is still irrelevant-- I don't know, or care to know, who you are.
Tangled
Complaint appears to be brought in Massachusetts federal court by California residents, injured in Massachusetts, through New York attorneys (using local counsel), against a Colorado corporation, alleging violations of California law. It's like a law school exam question...
By the way, Plaintiffs seek no less than four miiiillion dollars
I guess we all have a right
I guess we all have a right to sue "Big Shoe" for producing unsafe products which cause millions of stubbed toes, twisted ankles, foot pain, and other assorted nonsense. Someone start that class action lawsuit right now!
The CROCS company probably is responsible
and should end up paying something.
But I wonder how many people who wear flip flops or other non-sneaker/shoe type footwear get hurt on esclators? I mean, just looking at CROC shoes tells me they aren't safe for a lot of things.
What would help
If the T would install the proper guards that have been talked about for many, many, many years.
Oh, and properly maintain its escallators, too. It isn't just crocs and little kids but older people and scarves who lose more than limbs - See Also State Street and Death.
I am surprised they aren't
I am surprised they aren't suing the 'T actually.
There's a very short window in which to sue the state
I think it's 30 days for tort cases.
It's natural selection
Escalators are the urban human's only remaining predator, taking down the weak and flip-flopped among us and leaving only the strong to survive.
Data
There were an estimated 26000 escalator-related injuries among children who were 0 to 19 years of age in the United States during 1990–2002, yielding an average of 2000 of these injuries annually (rate = 2.6 per 100000 population per year).
* * *
There was a disproportionate number of escalator-related injuries among children who were younger than 5 years.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/...
Disproportionate
Were a disproportionate number of incidents involving children younger than five years also involving Crocs shoes?
If not I really can't see how there's a case here.
Don't make me
...bust out the "Mallrats" quote again.
Weird
The dude named "Lunchbox" reminded me of Mall Rats. Then you reminded me of the escalator joke. I'm sure I could think of something else, but I threw my back out humping your mom last night. Nooge.
Huh?
I love the morons posting here who still seek to blame the T for someone else's stupidity.
Whatever happened to long-term memory?
Maybe you forgot, but when news of the incident first broke, the focus was on the fact that the girl's father and another guy kept hitting the escalator's emergency stop button and nothing happened. That's why somebody might ask about the T.
I suspect that Crocs will use that fact
as part of their defense in this case.
the claim of defective equipment was false
that's why the T is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit
Do you have
an actual cite for that comment?
If I recall correctly, wasn't
If I recall correctly, wasn't the father a doctor who was aware that crocs were known to be crappy shoes for children to wear?
Of course the fact that the emergency stop button failed to operate is just plain unsafe and unacceptable.
Yeah
Not like the T has resisted putting guards on escallators for like, oh, twenty years while people have been maimed and killed. Seems they have also perfectly maintained their escalators at all times, including the really nifty slick wooden ones they yanked after the Kings Cross fire.
Nope. No responsibility there.
Can you provide some more
Can you provide some more information about these escalator guards, and the T's refusal to install them?
Just Google "MBTA Escalator Accident"
Be sure to set to "google news" and remove the date restriction.
There have been issues with this for about 20 years, and many of the reports and papers this will bring up are in archive - I'm not paying to get full text.
One example of a call for tougher safety rules, including equipment to prevent entrapment (as cited in the California safety standard, below)
Another entrapment, close to the time of a death due to entrapment: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/4274921/detai...
In this case , injuries to small children happened when the escalator lurched.
This isn't just a problem with horrible neglectful Croc-buying parents with kids who deserve to die. This is a problem with a range of ages of adults, too, and few are drunk like the guy at Porter Square, either. A problem that goes back as long as I can remember being around here - around 25 years. This is a problem with bad design. They need to have equipment that prevents entrapment. Such equipment exists and has been available for years: example of available technology
Finally, here's some interesting reading about minimal safety standards: http://www.dir.ca.gov/oshsb/walkways2.html Note that it references several Boston Globe articles on the subject, which had to do with ugly MBTA accidents.
The T eventually got sued enough to put in some brushes, but they have steadfastly refused to employ anything more effective, like sideplates.
Supposedly crocs are in some
Supposedly crocs are in some kind of critical butter zone for getting your foot mangled on escalators. They're too soft to provide any protection but they're not easy enough to slip off when they become tangled in the escalator.
Jargon
Is "critical butter zone" the technical term?
Crocs
I think the crime here isearing crocs. They are rediculous
You were warned
By last July, every parent with a functioning synapse knew that crocs and elevators were a hazardous mix.
I'd certainly not heard of
I'd certainly not heard of any hazards of these Crocs, other than that they're questionable fashion and make your feet smelly.
Maybe the parents ought to
Maybe the parents ought to teach their kid how to ride on an escalator. Anyone with limited intelligence knows those shoes aren't good for kids feet.
From the complaint: There are
From the complaint:
There are no towns in California and there is no such thing as the "State of Massachusetts"!