The Associated Press reported this week that a death at Home Depot in 2000 has resulted in a second company having to pay the family damages. The lawsuit was brought by the parents of a 3 year old girl. Sprawl-Busters first reported on this death at Home Depot in July of 2000. On Sunday afternoon, May 29, 2000, around 4:30 pm, 3 year old Janessa Horner was inside the Twin Falls, Idaho Home Depot when she was hit with either countertops or broken pieces of countertops. A Home Depot crew was moving the countertops from an overhead bin, and had barricaded the aisle during the operation. The forklift driver and an employee spotter said the load seemed steady, but it shifted as the forks lowered, and even though Janessa and her parents were outside of the barricaded aisle, pieces of the countertops split and flew like splinters across the room. One of the fragments hit Janessa, knocking her to the concrete floor, causing massive head injuries. Four years later, a jury has found that California-based Sani-Top Inc. was partly responsible for the death of Janessa, awarding her parents about $570,000. The lawsuit charged that Sani-Top made the skids that a forklift operator was using to pick up a stack of counter tops. One of the skids broke and the countertops spilled and shattered on the floor. Janessa was knocked down and she hit her head against the floor. She was pronounced dead from head injuries the next day. The Horners already settled out of court with Home Depot in early 2001, so no report was ever made public on the amount of money the home improvement retailer put up to end the family’s lawsuit.
The Horner case at the time raised issues with how Home Depot was jeopardizing the safety of its customers. Several highly-publicized deaths at Home Depot from falling merchandise prompted the company to change its policy about doing forklift stocking during store hours. For more background on injuries at Home Depot, search this site by “falling”.
