Woman who says she wound up mangled in the pile of bodies at the bottom of a reversing escalator at Back Bay station latest to sue MBTA, maintenance company

A Michigan woman who says she still suffers severe pain from being tossed to the commuter-rail platform at Back Bay by an escalator that suddenly went into reverse in 2021 last week filed the latest suit against the MBTA and Kone, Inc. over the disaster.

In her negligence lawsuit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Marianne Layrousse of Ann Arbor, who attends a college in Boston, says she had just gotten off a train returning from a Patriots game in Foxboro on Sept. 26, 2021 when the escalator went into reverse, throwing her and other people - including her friend, Omar Dreidi of Los Angeles, who has filed his own suit - back to the platform:

Ms. Layousse was one of those unfortunate individuals on the Escalator who ended up being hurled downwards the length of the Escalator and ended up in the "pile of bodies" on the cement floor during which her back and neck were twisted and struck by other passengers and the Escalator. Ms. Layousse experienced immediate, sharp pain in her back and neck from this event and suffered lacerations to her back.

Ms. Layousse was barely able to extricate herself from the pile of bodies at the bottom of the Escalator and did so only with help from Mr. Dreidi. The Boston Globe article written the next day after the Incident aptly described it as "a bloody, horrific scene." When emergency personnel arrived on the scene Ms. Layousse was placed on a stretch and given a cervical collar to secure her spine and neck and taken by ambulance [to Tufts] ...

Layousse says she continues to suffer severe pain from the incident, to the point that she had to interrupt trips to Los Angeles and Tel Aviv to seek hospital care in those cities, in addition to care at Tufts and Mount Auburn Hospital, and despite regular physical therapy.

In addition to Dreidi and Layousse, the MBTA and Kone are facing suits from a Louisiana family and two women, also from Louisiana, who also say they were chewed up by the escalator and suffered the sort of injuries one might expect when hurtled to the ground with other people falling on top of you.

The family, the first to sue, later dropped the MBTA from its suit to concentrate on Kone.

The MBTA itself has filed cross claims against Kone for what happened, supposedly just three weeks after Kone inspected the escalator.

In its answer to the suit by the two Louisiana women, Kone gave 19 different reasons why the judge should dismiss the case, including that the two waited too long to sue, that nobody told it there was anything wrong with the escalator before it malfunctioned, that some unnamed third party caused whatever problem made the escalator reverse and that the people on the escalator are mainly at fault for whatever happened to them.

The Bethay family - who had come up here to watch their Saints play after losing everything in a hurricane - filed their suit less than a week after the escalator failure. Court records show a judge is scheduled to release a judgment in their suit by Sept. 30, court records show.

The other two suits are scheduled for judgments in 2026. Court records show Layousse's case has been scheduled for judgment by June 2027.