Man Trampeled To Death At Wal-Mart

Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede

BY JOE GOULD, CLARE TRAPASSO AND RICH SCHAPIRO
DAILY NEWS WRITERS

Updated Friday, November 28th 2008, 10:46 PM

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.

The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.

When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.

CAUGHT ON CAMERA: WAL-MART CROWD MOMENTS BEFORE DEADLY STAMPEDE

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.

"They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.

"They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.

Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.

Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.

"They pushed him down and walked all over him," Damour's sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said. "How could these people do that?

"He was such a young man with a good heart, full of life. He didn't deserve that."

Damour's sister said doctors told the family he died of a heart attack.

His cousin, Ernst Damour, called the circumstances "completely unacceptable."

"His body was a stepping bag with so much disregard for human life," Ernst Damour, 37, said. "There has to be some accountability."

Roughly 2,000 people gathered outside the Wal-Mart's doors in the predawn darkness.

Chanting "push the doors in," the crowd pressed against the glass as the clock ticked down to the 5 a.m. opening.

Sensing catastrophe, nervous employees formed a human chain inside the entrance to slow down the mass of shoppers.

It didn't work.

The mob barreled in and overwhelmed workers.

"They were jumping over the barricades and breaking down the door," said Pat Alexander, 53, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. "Everyone was screaming. You just had to keep walking on your toes to keep from falling over."

After the throng toppled Damour, his fellow employees had to fight through the crowd to help him, police said.

Witness Kimberly Cribbs said shoppers acted like "savages."

"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since Friday morning!'" Cribbs said. "They kept shopping."

When paramedics arrived, Damour's condition was grave.

"They were pumping his chest, trying to bring him back, and there was nothing," said Dennis Smokes, 36, a Wal-Mart worker.

Damour was taken to Franklin Hospital and pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m.

Hank Mullany, president of Wal-Mart's northeast division, said the company took extraordinary safety precautions.

"We expected a large crowd this morning and added additional internal security, additional third-party security, additional store associates and we worked closely with the Nassau County police," he said in a statement.

"We also erected barricades. Despite all of our precautions, this unfortunate event occurred."

The 28-year-old pregnant woman and three other shoppers were taken to area hospitals with minor injuries, police said.

In a news conference after the incident, Nassau County police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming described the crowd as "out of control" and the scene as "utter chaos." He said Wal-Mart did not have enough security onhand.

Fleming said criminal charges were possible but that it would be difficult to identify individual shoppers in surveillance videos.

Items on sale at the Wal-Mart store included a $798 Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28 and Men's Wrangler Tough Jeans for $8.

The Long Island store reopened at 1 p.m. and was packed within minutes.

"I look at these people's faces and I keep thinking one of them could have stepped on him," said one employee. "How could you take a man's life to save $20 on a TV?"

rschapiro@nydailynews.com

With Brendan Brosh and James Queally

People are stupid, they truly are. It's kind of hard to have faith in humanity when the majority are made up of people like the ones stampeding into a Wal-Mart trampelling people to death. The greed!

I remember dropping off product to a Salvation Army store in Richmond, BC. All these Asian people were gathered outside the store, propped up against the glass looking like Garfield cats from the inside of the store. Apparently the store was having some kind of sale. My co-worker and I had to go through the front door to wheel in appliances on our dollies. Once the doors opened, all these Chinese people were trying to force their way in. I grabbed a Chinese man by the back of his jacket and yanked him out of my way, as he tried to get into the store (it wasn't even open yet). My partner and I had to fight our way past the mob. At the time, it was among the funniest shit I've ever experienced.

People are so stupid and greedy.

"Twilight" An Allegory For The Bloodsucking Nature of White Hetero Males

Just when I thought I was done talking about the fruit cake known as Julian Real, a stumble across this latest blog entry. In it he takes a crack at being an amateur film critic, and watches the vampire flick "Twilight" through his radical profeminist lens. And the results are expected and hilariously stupid.

"Twilight": another tale of the awful plight of the troubled white serial killer

Where the vampire's otherness posed a terrifying threat for the original readers of Dracula, [...] today that same alien quality is often perceived as an attraction. As rebellious outsider, as persecuted minority, as endangered species, and as member of a different "race" that legend portrays as sexually omnicompetent, the vampire makes a fitting hero for late twentieth-century popular fiction. --"The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction", by Margaret L. Carter, p. 29 of Blood Read.

The white, dark-haired, not-so-badboy is back. His name is Edward Cullen and he's "sexier", and paler, than ever. Edward is keeping his damsel-in-distress, Bella Swan, out of trouble with the enemies of true white love--you know, those with the "longest incisors". Keep in mind the story of The Ugly Duckling--with feathers all stubby and brown--the first three and a half minutes of this YouTube video tells the tale. Only when it becomes a white swan does it become bella, or beautiful. So of course he's desired by and desires a young thin pale white woman--duh! ("Out" gay men and butch lesbians of any color are not likely to make the cut as "the romantic love interest" anytime soon in a major motion picture.) And of course he desires to BE WITH HER ALWAYS (creepy!), never letting him out of his sight, or, well, to be her soulmate. (Too often in real life: same diff.) This is where this story lures us in: is he a bad "irresistable" pale guy who wants to be good, or a good guy whose passions will lead him to be bad? Even without long incisors, we are aware he carries danger somewhere inside himself... perhaps in his molars.

It sometimes gets confusing as to who exactly is evil in racist Western patriarchal cultural mythology. But generally speaking, in cinema, all that is white, including good-whiteguy cowboy hats, represents good. All that is dark or black, including bad whiteguy cowboy hats, as well as anyone with unpale or "black" skin and allegedly "black" eye color, is ominous, dangerous, and just plain evil. The 1960s campy TV vampire soap opera was called "Dark Shadows" not "Sunny Days" for a reason. More on Twilight's racism a bit later.

This story draws on themes that go all the way back to the Old Testament (with that original irresistible white temptress who only makes the weak white man feel badly about himself for giving into temptation). Is this another telling of male supremacy's Adam and Eve'l or Romeo and Juliet? Well, the woman in such myths is a threat to a man's well-being or she's dead; or, in vampire films, perhaps a combination of both.

This is the dilemma our newest pale male vampire faces in Twilight: to love Bella, be with her, as an abnormal human doing his best to assimilate, or to steel himself away from her, for her own good. Edward isn't your common cannibal, after all. He only goes after non-human animals for snacks, unlike the other more overtly predatory heteromale vampires in this film, such as James--a common cannibal who really hates vampires who won't suck the life out of people who are (only) human. (Figuring out what to serve such a lot at a U.S. holiday supper must get so problematic. I don't get the sense anyone would be all that happy with tofurkey.)

In Edward and James we have the eternal inner struggle of the perrenially tormented pale vampire: To bite/penetrate/kill or not to bite/penetrate/kill? For Edward, a diet of pets may suffice. But not so for James, whose specific tastes might be termed Bellatarian. Good vampire vs. bad vampire. Each battling for the love, or blood, of Bella. The subtitle to this film could just as well be "It's Hard Out Here for a Vampire". Poor fellas. Poor Bella--drawn to a man who cannot love her without the risk of her being destroyed. Here is the painful passion found in many abusive relationships: she wants him, but he's not good for her; he wants her, but his love might result in her death. But back to fiction.

Vampire movies are, historically, a Hollywood film genre known for eroticising pale male violence against [traditionally] young thin white women, in that "oh-so-sexy-while-creepy" way. Sure, there was that 1994 ECD oh-so-controversial Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise homoeroticism pervading some scenes in Anne Rice's best-seller brought to the screen, Interview with the Vampire". (And, the blogger noted sarcastically, they really pushed the envelope regarding who is seen as handsome in Hollywood with that film, eh?)

We might note the number of women involved in the maintenance of this genre. I suspect because these stories are, on the surface, more romance and passion than ugly predation and woman-killing. (Male writers and directors still hold the market on the bloodier, "terrify, fuck, and kill the woman" films. But given the racist-sexist pornographication of Western society, it matters not if the story is written by a woman or a man. All these lines between love, romance, danger, and death have been blurring for some time. Terror and horror can be themes in a dominant society that won't own the real horrific and terrible things that it does, like, say, keeping a genocide going on this soil.

In fact, the blending of racism (not just symbolically), heterosexism, the potential and impending death of a woman or women, spiced with turn-on or terror, is something that U.S. films and many top rated TV shows just can't exist without. For Hollywood, leaving the violence out of sexist and racist themes, and the sexism and racism out of violence, would, well, be like depriving a predatory heteromale vampire of fresh female blood. Well, the female blood that comes from the neck area*.

[*There are plenty of tired, misogynist jokes about male vampires being drawn to women who are having their periods. The idea with this humor is that it is "gross" (hence funny) because, you must understand, menstruating women are really gross, so men say. Menstruation = gross = funny. Yes, this does mean dominant male society's emotional maturity level is perpetually in elementary school. Perhaps because of being raised in the company of plenty of girls and women, I've never understood the aversion to menstrual blood. Women friends and I have discussed using it in political work. For me, the more it is in men's faces the better. Why is it "in vogue" to cover women's faces in men's semen? Because it shows who is degrading whom, and that semen is gross, not hot, when it touches female flesh. (In gay male pornography, it's only hot, because it never touches female flesh.)

I can't seem to get through to my gay and heterosexual brothers on this topic. They'll shriek and cringe like, well, the misogynistic mensesphobic grown men they are, when I bring up the subject of menstrual blood. They share stories of personal "horror" such as when a young or older man finds external evidence lying around of a woman having her period, such as when a woman doesn't waste water by not flushing the toilet when there's drops of blood in it as well as urine, or when the disposal of a tampon or pad is shamelessly left atop a bathroom wastebin "insufficiently" cocooned in toilet paper. The key to understanding misogynist men's attitudes about women and blood is this: blood from the uterus--not sexy. Blood from any other area of a woman--sexy. Menstrual blood is not the kind of blood men eroticise in (or on) women because it is a sign of pre-menopausal women's health, and life. Women bleeding is, in the misogynistic imagination, supposed to be fused only to the possibility of female death. Of course this still allows men the pornographic option of being the violent cause of women's internal bleeding, anywhere in her body, including down there.]

But where were we? Ah yes: misogyny and racism.

Pale white is the dominant U.S./U.K. new (oh, and not-so-new, and olden days) "beautiful", according to fables, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and corporate pimps. Surely you remember: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?" and all that other racist-hetero/sexist children's story horseshit. But the claims of the vampire as another race gets tricky in a film like this one. For there are, [SPOILER ALERT!!] actual people of color depicted in this movie. In typical Hollywood racist fashion, American Indians have "a role" to play in this film, and, unfortunately, it's not solely to remind the pale-faced leeches to go back to Transylvania... or wherever in Europe we came from. Here, they can be werewolves. (Wait: isn't that basically how Hollywood has ALWAYS presented American Indians?) As such, they become "animals" for white-night-crawling vampires to drain. (Sarcasm alert:) Humans as animals: nothing sexist or racist about that!

As for the hidden and not-so-hidden misogynist violence within this genre, one need only note that in the 2008 ECD vampire TV show True Blood, there was reference to a "fang-banging". (The dots are all connected, it's just that we're trained to see only dots, no lines.) Curiously, this time it's the TV show that could "go there" while this movie, rated [SPOILER ALERT!!] PG-13, doesn't quite. Ah, the allure of the long period of longing in heterosexual seduction. The endless wait for consummation, a word which means to bring to fruition, to fuck if newly married, and to terminate. (How quaint of the English language to offer up such a term.)

Twilight, according to reports, handles this topic of consummation in an way that shouldn't upset too many folks who are into the whole white Christian conservative spawned (and miserably failing) phenomena of the "virginity pledge" and the "Purity Ring".

There will be no "sex" (meaning, OF COURSE, genital-to-genital male-with-female intercourse) in this new film! Sparing the audience of predominantly white, middle class adolescent girls and their moms of scenes of consummation means you have a Disney-tame plot line with enough sexual tension to take us through several sequels, or centuries: whichever comes first. It also means that grown men are not so likely to go see this one. (We're virtually all addicted to Internet porn anyway, so "Bye, ladies, have fun at the movies!" This is not to say one need leave home to see fangy-toothed men portrayed graphically.

For example, you may have seen this vampiric theme on CSI:

">

In overtly sexually violent
Vogue magazine photos, and in this more "tame" Vogue image in which such thin white young women seem to walk the line, visually, between life and death.

And in the news, men serially murdering women is also nothing new. To modify a famous quote by C. A. MacKinnon: Man kills women; subject verb objects. There has even been a real life vampire serial killer.

Academics, too, have tackled this theme. For an especially good analytic piece on the subject, see this.

I can only wonder about the on-going jokes of the dashing draculesque dude having blue-balls, and not just because he's so damned cold all the time. All I can say is: Edward Cullen, take matters into your own hands. If you don't get to that nubile female human blood in time, what's the worst thing that can happen? Oh, right: you die, for good.

To Edward, James, and any readers of this blog who happen to be vampires, I recommend that you leave white women, men and women of color, and non-human animals alone and go crawl into a coffin.

Male pale-faces, go home to Transylvania!

Hey, Edward--what do you think of that idea?

I thought so.

Get ready for the sequels, folks.

For a whole book on this subject, see Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Society, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger.

If interested in more plot details, see here.

For discussion and analysis of the racism in the book (which spills over into the film), click here.

For a wonderfully transgressive fictional spin on the same ole plot, see Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories. A review of her book is here.

(Revised on Nov. 25)

I posted a comment on this blog, I don't expect any sort of response, nor do I expect it to be shown. Julian has control over what comments can or cannot be shown on his page. The ones he keeps, though, are usually copied and pasted and used in his rants.

I feel disgusted right now. Not because Julian Real is a fucking idiot (and he is). But because after all that, he turned out to be a pretty weak opponent. Here is a guy who would go out of his way to smear those whose ideologies conflicted with his, only to be a quitter. Now has half-baked movie reviews, in the guise of social commentary? Bullshit!

The comment I submitted went something like this.

"Twilight," an allegory of the bloodsucking nature of White Hetero Men? You truly are a fucking idiot. Does ANYONE besides you take you seriously?

PETA at Large!

Papers won't run PETA ad linked to Pickton case

Papers won't run PETA ad linked to Pickton case
Updated Thu. Nov. 14 2002 12:41 PM ET

CTV News Staff

Two Vancouver newspapers have refused to run an advertisement that likens the treatment of animals to the fate of women allegedly murdered on a British Columbia pig farm.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a U.S.-based advocacy group with a history of creating controversial ads denouncing the eating of meat. Its latest campaign makes reference to the case of 63 missing women abducted from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood and alleged evidence found on Robert Pickton's Port Coquitlam pig farm.

Pickton has been charged with 15 counts of first-degree murder in connection with the case.

One section of the ad that was to have run Thursday, reads: "They were drugged and dragged across the room... Their struggles and cries went unanswered... They were slaughtered and their heads sawed off... Their body parts were refrigerated... Their bones were discarded."

It's thought the PETA campaign was intended to coincide with Pickton's preliminary hearing, which had been scheduled for Monday but has been put on hold.

Pickton is not mentioned by name in the ad but he is mentioned in a news release issued by PETA.

"PETA has just released a print ad that illustrates the well-established connection between animal abuse and acts of severe violence against people, and compares what is done to animals on factory farms and slaughterhouses to the ways in which accused serial killer Robert William Pickton apparently dealt with his human victims," says the press release.

"PETA believes that Pickton’s job as a pig killer could easily have numbed him to the cries of animals who felt his knife," the release continues.

The group says the ad is similar to one that PETA ran in the Des Moines [Iowa] Register a decade ago during convicted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial.

Family of victims are disgusted by the association.

"All they're talking about is the pain of the animals, they don't care about the pain of the families," said Laurie Isberg. "They're torturing us. They're torturing us like they say everybody tortures animals."

"The parallels in this case are very clear," said PETA spokesman Andrew Butler. "What happened to the unfortunate victims of this crime are happening every single day in pig farms around the world where animals are routinely mutilated."

PETA bought a full-page ad in Thursday's edition of The Vancouver Province. But the company that publishes the newspaper, Pacific Newspaper Group, said Tuesday it would not run the ad in either the Province or The Vancouver Sun.

It's believed to be the first time a Canadian company has refused to run a PETA ad. The newspaper says it will refund PETA in full. Simon Fraser University marketing professor Lindsay Meredith said pulling the ads was the right decision.

"This is in poor taste," he said. "You don't take the destruction of 50 lives and use that to push your product."

PETA says it will try to force the newspapers to run the ads.

PETA Compares Murdered Women to Meat
Run Date: 11/30/02

(WOMENSENEWS)

--An animal rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, recently launched an ad campaign that compared the deaths of 15 Canadian women murdered and dismembered to animals killed for meat.

An alleged serial killer Robert Pickton is currently facing trial for the deaths of the 15 women who disappeared in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in the mid-1980s. Pickton is accused of dismembering his victims and storing their body parts in a freezer on his small, non-commercial pig farm.

While the ads did not specifically name Robert Pickton, they mentioned alleged details of the crimes of which he is accused, and suggested the actions were akin to farm animals killed for food, according to Canadian newspaper reports.

PETA pulled the print ad campaign this week--along with plans for upcoming television spots--after receiving negative comments from the public. At least one Canadian newspaper refused to run the ads.

In a statement, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said the ad was meant to show the "horror and fear of the 'serial killings' going on every day in slaughter houses and on pig farms."

PETA is best known for running ads of barely concealed, naked women in their anti-fur ads, which feature the slogan: "I'd rather go naked than wear fur."

Why Most Vegans Are Usally Stupid

First off - sorry sorry sorry I have not written anything on here for a long time. I just kind of ran out of important things I felt motivated to write about but now all that has changed and I'm back with a buzz!
There's something I have been wanting to put into writing for quite sometime and that is why most vegans are usually stupid. I don't mean they have a brain the size of a pea or anything no - it's more that they don't use their brain (however big it may be) to consider their ecological footprint. The vegans I have met are fairly self righteous about their lifestyle and often feel certain that the way they live their life leaves the smallest ecological footprint on the earth. Usually I find they have failed to consider several major factors. Just because you eat vegetables and no animal products doesn't mean your diet is totally eco-friendly. While it's true that for every pound of meat you could grow many times more vegetables therefore using up less resources - eating a carrot for example may have required an unknown number of unenvironmentally friendly things (including animal cruelty) to happen before it got to your mouth.

The things I try to consider are:


1) Were any chemicals used which may have had detrimental impacts on the surrounding environment? - most artificial fertilizers and pesticides are damaging to wildlife and humans so I buy organic produce whenever possible. However, although a product may be "organic" that does NOT mean that dead animals were not used to grow it (fish and bone fertilizer - hmm?) and that the fertilizers used were from sustainable sources.


2) Is the product fair trade? - it's often difficult to find fair trade products but I when I see them I always buy them instead of similar items which are not fair trade.


3) Are there any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in it? - I avoid GMOs because the potential and proven environmental disadvantages outweigh the mostly unproved advantages.


4) How far has this product travelled? - I try to buy local produce as much as possible and avoid imported foods from a long way away. The environmental impacts (most notably C02 emissions) of food transportation are a major factor when considering your ecological footprint.


I also try to apply similar ethics to buying clothes and other products although it's not so easy finding things like organic cotton in local shops - especially in small places like Bermuda. Vegans however, boast about the fact that they don't wear wool or leather but what about their plastic shoes and their cotton shirts? There is more to being an ethical consumer than simply drawing a line between plants and animals. I do take my hat off to any vegan who buys local organic produce and wears natural organic clothes. However, most of the vegans I have met do not consider the things I have listed to be as important as the issues involved in livestock farming.

I am totally against livestock farming on land (especially factory farming but when it comes to the sea - as long it's sustainable and doesn't involve needless cruelty - I'm buying it! Of course my oceanic diet is fairly restricted because these days we're overfishing and depleting the oceans of life *rolls eyes* so there isn't much you can eat from the sea without a guilty conscience. However, local line caught fish together farmed mussels and tilapia are usually the best options. I'll talk more about them another time - but trust me on this - mussels - unless they are dredged - are like ZERO ecological footprint seafood ;-) and in my opinion are way better to eat than most vegetable sources of protein.

I know that vegans think I am cruel for eating fish that have no doubt suffered pain but when you destroy native flora and fauna in order to grow vegetables - is that not cruel and shouldn't it be avoided as much as possible? Sure we waste a lot of land growing animals and I am against that but it's even better to eat mussels and locally caught fish than it is to eat tofu... unless you consider killing fish and mussels a terrible sin - in which case - you would really need to find out where all your vegetables are coming from because you'll find that lots of animals died or suffered along the way - and I just don't know how you could justify eating anything unless you were a fruitarian that grew all your own organic fruit and if you were - I'd want to meet you and shake your hand to make sure you were real!)

Scientists Prove Plants Feel Pain, Vegans Face Starvation

DALLAS--Research scientists at Baylor Medical Center have proven that plants, including vegetables, feel pain when subjected to trauma such as being yanked out of the ground, peeled, cooked, and eaten. "Veggies and plants initiate a massive hormone and chemical barrage internally when they suffer any kind of injury," says professor Barry Lindzer. "This response is akin to the nerve response and endorphin release when an animal is injured. We cannot ignore the similarities." When Tarnish asked professor Lindzer and his research team what they thought this finding might mean, they responded unanimously, "Nobel prize, baby!"

Other agencies, namely People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the sum total of the world's hard-core vegetarians (known as vegans) registered formal complaints against the research. Their team of lawyers has already submitted a motion to have the results of the research destroyed or sealed. Others fear the damage has already been done. A spokesman for PETA said, "This is bad for us. Most of our members haven't eaten anything since hearing about the results. Our lawyers are looking into suing Mother Earth for false advertising, but concede that the suit will probably be inconclusive. In the meantime we'll be surviving on vitamin supplements and water."

In an ironic related story, a dozen PETA protesters picketing the Hungry Carnivore Steak House in New York City were allegedly assaulted by three patrons of the restaurant. Eyewitnesses say that the picketers were making their typical nuisance display of scorn and righteous indignation over the willful consumption of "the flesh of murdered animals" outside the Hungry Carnivore when two unidentified men and a woman stepped out of the establishment and sprayed the picketers with several gallons of what appeared to be blood. Victims and bystanders alike were surprised to discover that the liquid was actually V-8 juice. The truly shocking result of the alleged attack was the reaction of the picketers. All of the PETA protesters were wracked with convulsions and suffered hours of dry heaves while many of the bystanders merely laughed. This reaction within vegetarianism's great bastion of faith has many true believers reconsidering their dietary requirements. Others are quietly making funeral arrangements and the Environmental Protection Agency is considering declaring vegans an endangered species.