"... it was purchased in blood."
A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.
The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.
When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.
But the shoppers got some great bargains over on Aisle 7!
"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said. [...] Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.
[...] Roughly 2,000 people gathered outside the Wal-Mart's doors in the predawn darkness. Chanting "push the doors in," the crowd pressed against the glass as the clock ticked down to the 5 a.m. opening.
[...] "They were jumping over the barricades and breaking down the door," said Pat Alexander, 53, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. "Everyone was screaming. You just had to keep walking on your toes to keep from falling over." After the throng toppled Damour, his fellow employees had to fight through the crowd to help him, police said.
Witness Kimberly Cribbs said shoppers acted like "savages." "When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since Friday morning!'" Cribbs said. "They kept shopping."
While some folks are blaming this on Wal-Mart (and I am certainly no Wal-Mart fan myself), I don't see how you could have had enough security to ward off the mob in these photos, and I don't care how low the vacuum cleaners were marked -- nothing save food rioters desperate to feed their families could possibly justify this. Placing the blame on Wal-Mart is like ... well, using the Twinkie Defense. "Their incredibly low prices and the commercial frenzy of all that TV advertising impaired my judgment."
Disgusting.
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News stories like this one are what prompted SEB's tag line. Jdimytai Damour was hired as seasonal help at a Long Island Walmart only to perish under the feet of deal-crazed shoppers this past Friday: "He was bum-rushed by 200 peopl...
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