How the 2008 Death of a Walmart Employee Changed Black Friday Shopping

On November 28, 2008, a crowd of shoppers at Walmart in the Green Acres Mall of Valley Stream, N.Y., broke through a sliding glass double door and knocked over 34-year-old employee Jdimytai Damour, fatally trampling his prone body in their rush to secure items at a Black Friday flash sale. 

Damour, who was 6-foot-5 and 270 pounds, was allegedly assigned to guard the door because of his size. He died of asphyxiation. But even as the grim nature of the scene unfolded, at least part of the crowd seemed unfazed.

According to one eyewitness, some shoppers refused to leave despite the death. 

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’” a shopper told the Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

In the years since Damour’s death, Black Friday customer frenzies have largely declined, says Bridget Nichols, a professor of marketing at the Hale College of Business at Northern Kentucky University who researches consumer emotion and shopping

“There isn’t nearly as much now as there used to be,” Nichols tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “It’s almost mythical now.”

Several factors have mitigated risk. One of the most important is preparedness on the part of retailers.

In 2010, two years after Damour’s death, the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration sent a letter to more than a dozen CEOs of major retailers, encouraging them to take strong measures in both crowd management and control. Those measures include the hiring of additional security staff, barricades outside storefronts and pre-event coordination with local fire and police.

Stan Kephart, a former police chief and crowd management expert who worked as the security administrator for the 1994 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that when an event is administered in an orderly way, crowds follow suit.

“If you respect a crowd and accommodate their convenience and don’t frustrate them, they’ll do what they want you to do,” Kephart says. 

Today, he says stores greatly reduce risk of shopper madness through technology like footfall counters, which measure occupancy to make sure they aren’t overcrowded. 

Fewer shoppers lead to less of the stampeding that can be responsible for so much damage; the stampeding comes from a “herd mentality,” according to Nichols.

“If you see a group of people running toward a corner, you feel like something is going on, and you have to go towards that, too,” says Nichols, who saw much of this shopper frenzy phenomenon while writing about the “Running of the Brides,” a since-discontinued, one-day wedding gown sales event that took place at Filene’s Basements nationwide.

Nichols says the scarcity of goods and inherent competitiveness of the type of shopper flash sales attract amplify the emotions at Black Friday sales.

“It’s a visual,” Nichols says. “You physically see the item on the [shop] floor. And it’s going to be gone soon.”

The most obvious way to control a crowd is by physically protecting the premises with private security and hired police, but that can also backfire. In 2011, a police officer in North Carolina who’d been hired to help protect a store pepper-sprayed a group of unruly shoppers.

According to Kephart, police misbehavior on Black Friday can be partly attributed to the nature of the one-off job of protecting retail, which can leave a patrolman feeling like a fish out of water. 

“This isn’t what cops do,” Kephart says. “Normally, they respond to calls for service. But here, they’re being asked to be an emissary for Walmart. So they might get frustrated and end up doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”

But while some cops might be inappropriately aggressive for the retail environment, officers excel at doing the prep work to ensure a shopping event goes well. By contrast, Kephart says, retail security is great at handling low level “rule-breaking” that still falls within the scope of legality (e.g., somebody who cuts the line).

Since 2008, stores have steered away from encouraging the mobs of shoppers that led to Damour’s death, Nichols says: “Retailers have changed their strategy. They’re going away from that and focused more on families.”

That might be partly about avoiding litigation. Walmart was sued by Damour’s family and Nassau County after the fatal stampede.

Green Acres Mall declined A&E Crime + Investigation's request for comment. In a written response, a Walmart spokesman stated, “We continue to evolve to meet the changing preferences of our customers.”

Kephart says, “If you get into people’s wallets, they have a tendency to change.” 

A shift in the culture could also be a factor. As retail moves increasingly online, there are fewer places for hordes to gather.

“This generation is not the mall generation,” Nichols explains. “Crowds for them are not fun. They don’t like to wait in line.”

Of course, Black Friday sales could always come back, and with them, danger.

“What is old is new again,” Nichols says. “Maybe there’ll be a retro trend to go back to Black Friday. All you need is an influencer to make it sound fun.”