The Tragic Black Friday Stampede That Killed a Walmart Employee
Damour’s death was not the first or last crowd disaster gone terribly wrong
“How could you take a man’s life to save $20 on a TV?” one Walmart employee said about Jdimytai Damour, his deceased co-worker.
As a child, one local news story scared me like no other. It was a horror story about a stampede at a Walmart that killed an employee on Black Friday. The Walmart was in Valley Stream, New York, only about 20 minutes away from where I lived.
It was the first death related to Black Friday shopping.
To this day, the stampede story has made me reluctant to go anywhere overnight for Black Friday shopping. The most I ever shopped at Black Friday was for a discounted version of Guitar Hero when I was 12-years-old, at 6 p.m. on Friday. The deal wasn’t even that great — we got $20 off on the game, which meant it was cheaper than usual, but not anything worth waiting at the store overnight for.
I was again reminded of the stampede when I heard news of a “crowd surge” at a Travis Scott concert that killed eight people and injured hundreds. A professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Brian Higgins, said the crowd and people were not violent despite the violence of eight people dying…
