The Death of a Jdimytri Damour

I grabbed my wife's copy of the Freeport Voyager, Class of 1993 High School Yearbook, from the bookshelf. I thumbed thru the alphabetical pictures of that year's graduates and stopped at the pictures beginning with the letter D. There he was. Just two spots from my wife. How many times had I looked at that yearbook, skimming past his face and resting my eye's on my wife's picture. This time I didn't notice her. I stared at the once 17 year old and I could only think of the indignity of his death. The Holiday season will never be the same for his family. Hell, every single day will never be the same for them. Killed during a Midnight Madness shopping event at a local WallMart Store. Impatient shoppers, some waiting as many as 7 hours in front of the store's main entrance, became rowdy when the store opened 3 minutes after it's advertised 5:00 AM opening. They chanted and shouted impatiently, some 2000 people, hoping to find what is now some meaningless bargain. They crashed thru the glass apron, trampling Mr. Damour to death, not even stopping to notice that an employee hired just 4 days earlier, lay under foot. From the NY Times..(Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”).

How does this happen? According to New Rochelle psychiatrist Dr. Candida Fink, people can lose control of their decision-making process as part of a crowd. From the NY Post...("We have no off buttons as a group, she said. There's no central brain making these decisions. I suspect that there's not anyone in that crowd who doesn't feel horrible - as an individual - about what happened." Worry about the economy may also have played a role, she said, as the shoppers worked themselves up into a near-frenzy in the search for better deals. And, she said, store management could have done little things - "giving out cookies and hot cocoa, something that keeps people human and friendly" - to keep the thousands calm during the long wait. Dr. Estyne Del Rio-Diaz, a Manhattan behavioral psychologist, blames neurotransmitters. In such crowd situations, she said, "the dopamines - which stimulate the pleasure parts [of the brain] - are harried to such an extent that all people are thinking about is what to grab." The sale, that's what going on in their minds, strictly the sale. They're not caring about who's on their left or their right.")

For many this is what the holiday season has become. People now skip the Midnight Mass for the literal "Midnight Madness". For one man, a seasonal job to help make ends meet, cost him his life.