The Valley Stream, New York Trampling Death: A Sociolegal Analysis

One might begin with the absurdity of the situation: two thousand people standing outside in late November at 5 am waiting for a warehouse full of imported Chinese junk to open its doors.  This is what life has come to in the "consumer economy."  We no longer have to wait for the lead or melamine in the products to kill us; the shopping itself can now be lethal.

The police were on the scene at Wal-Mart shortly after the trampling death of a temporary employee in this store 20 miles east of Manhattan.  They were studying video footage of the crowd which surged through the doors, but the cops admitted it was difficult to identify individual perps.  Anyway, it's pretty well recognized that a mob has a psychology or state of mind all its own, quite different in quality from that of a single person caught up in similar circumstances.  Lynchings and other acts of human barbarity result from this derangement; a conscientious individual acting alone, who would never dream of intentionally stepping on another human being, will mindlessly join a throng crushing such a person if the circumstances are just right, such as in a state of vengeful frenzy.  Or, in the case of the Valley Stream Wal-Mart, if enticed by

"Items on sale at the Valley Stream Wal-Mart includ[ing] a Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV for $798, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28, a Samsung 10.2 megapixel digital camera for $69 and DVDs such as "The Incredible Hulk" for $9."

Well, no wonder, you might now say.  A 50" plasma for $798?  How does Wal-Mart do it?  The temporary employee, Jdimytai Damour, could not be rescued by other Wal-Mart employees who attempted to go to his aid.  Police said that Wal-Mart did not have "enough security," but one must wonder about that all-too-predictable, knee-jerk criticism.  How many security guards would you need, and with what armament, to control two thousand hyped-up shoppers, lusting for nine-buck copies of "The Incredible Hulk," pushing against the doors in the cold dark of a New York morning?  

Nor does it seem reasonable to blame the first shoppers through the door who probably knocked Mr. Damour down.  Think about it.  What time did they arrive at Wal-Mart?  Midnight?  Their minds fogged by hypothermia, stamping their feet to remain ready for the opening rush, they probably became gradually aware of the huge crowd gathering behind them, of their agitation as the 5 am opening approached - and they were themselves frightened by the pressure of humanity against them.  The opening of the doors by Mr. Damour, at long last, for these vanguard shoppers was probably not so much an opportunity to grab the first of the twenty-eight buck vacuum cleaners as it was a chance to avoid Jdimytal's fate.  It was him or them, in other words -- somebody was going to get crushed.  

So the lead shoppers were acting in self-defense.  Those who followed were probably unaware they were killing someone. Hell, they were just shopping, competing for bargains.  How American can you get? Our current president has counseled this behavior as the most rational response to terrorist attacks.  And Wal-Mart, after all, was just participating in the same insane marketing strategy followed all over the country on Black Friday, albeit with the best deals around.  Mr. Damour was working a lousy job for minimum wage because he needed the money, and somebody had to open the door.  Something bad happened while everyone was doing what they were supposed to do.  That's the way it goes sometimes.

So face it: no one is to blame.  There's no one to arrest.  There will be a wrongful death suit, of course, against Wal-Mart, and a bunch of personal injury/worker's comp cases brought by employees who got hurt in the rescue effort, and by other shoppers who were knocked around. Standard procedure.  These are not so much fault-finding exercises as the process by which we, as a society, partially redistribute Wal-Mart's profit.  America's largest employer can't keep it all, you know, that magnificent take from those ultra-thin margins on high volume.  Settlements from the trampling episode are really just Wal-Mart's way of "giving back."

So I think we should all be content with what happened yesterday morning in Valley Stream. It's what we as a "culture" do. It's who we are, what we've become. It's hypocritical, really, to get too worked up about it.  These are unavoidable consequences of the way in which we approach life and derive our livings from the planet.  A decided bummer for Mr. Damour, I'll grant you that, but somebody needs to get trampled to death in our mad pursuit for cheap crap we don't need.  We keep our economy humming that way.  Don't cluck self-righteously about what "they," the Wal-Mart shoppers of Valley Stream, did yesterday.  We're all part of the same mob, you know.