A Tennessee family’s life changed substantially for the worse when their 3-year-old daughter lost four of her fingers on a “dangerous and defective” escalator after a trip to a popular Texas grocery store chain, a lawsuit filed this week in the Lone Star State alleges.
On March 30, the Williams family went to the H-E-B in Bellaire, a medium-sized city in the Houston metro area.
The young girl entered the supermarket “with no care or worry in the world,” but the calculus shifted entirely as she was leaving, according to the lawsuit. While “riding the escalator down with her parents,” the girl “stumbled and sat on the escalator step to catch her balance.”
Moments later, the girl and her family would be subject to a kind of terror and pain often feared but seldom experienced, though research suggests a steady uptick in escalator-related injuries since the 1990s.
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“Unbeknownst to her or her family, the escalator had a large gap between the step and the skirt wall which was large enough for a child’s hand to get stuck in,” the lawsuit filed on Wednesday reads. “As [the girl] was catching her balance, her fingers on her right hand got stuck between the moving escalator steps and the stationary wall of the escalator and were sucked into the escalator down to the palm of her hand. To her parents’ horror, [the girl] could not get her hand out of the moving escalator as she continued toward the bottom despite her parents’ desperate attempts to remove her hand.”