The New York Daily News recently caught up with the family of Jdimytai Damour, the Walmart worker who was killed in a literal doorbuster back in 2008. Not only do they talk about how much they miss him, but the story then goes on to detail once again just how terrible the people who run Walmart are and the lengths to which they went to wash their hands of the situation. The police don’t come out looking very good either, as in a detail I don’t remember from the time, they left long before things got truly out of hand because handling crowds wasn’t in their job description, they decided. If your police don’t do crowd control, just what the king fuck do they do, exactly?
I know we have a lot of fun with this whole Body Count thing, but if you remember, it was born out of my frustration with the whole stupid exercise. This is a great reminder of not only the senselessness of it all, but of the type of people you’re really supporting with your purchases.
The 6-foot-5 clerk was trying to hold back a throng of some 2,000 early-morning shoppers pushing against the store’s sliding-glass double doors when he was trampled to death.
“We always think about him on Black Friday and what could have been different,” his aunt Margareth Damour told The News this week.”
“Every time I go by the [Walmart’s] door I think about him.”
A worried Walmart supervisor called the Nassau County Police Department after the crowd surged past eight interlocking plastic barriers about three hours before Jdimytai Damour was trampled.Responding cops used bullhorns to order the crowd back but later left after claiming dealing with the crowd was “not in their job description,” according to court records.
A group of shoppers soon pushed their way past the barriers again.
The store supervisor ordered the bigger staffers like Jdimytai Damour to guard the front door from the frenzied crowd. Right before the store opened at 5 a.m., the doors fell on top of Damour due to the mass of the throng.
“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” Walmart worker Jimmy Overby told the Daily News at the time.
Four other people were injured, including a pregnant woman who said Jdimytai Damour tried to help her before he was trampled.