A woman attending a party in a room at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare got stuck inside a walk-in freezer and died. Now the hotel, its security company, and on-site restaurant are paying out $10 million.
She was leaving the property at 2:30 a.m., realized she’d left her phone in the guest room they were partying in, and her friends went back to get it for her. They left her alone, apparently for an hour and she stumbled into a kitchen and into a walk-in freezer at 3:32 a.m.
Her friends returned, and they couldn’t find her. They told her family, to contacted the hotel. The family says the hotel promised to review security footage but didn’t – and that it would have revealed what happened in time to save her. Instead, her body was found 21 hours later.
- The hotel probably should have heard a party going on and stopped it earlier?
- Her friends shouldn’t have left her alone in her implied condition
- She shouldn’t have been in that condition?
In a Saturday Night Live commercial for the parody law firm of Green & Fazio, a firm client asks “Let’s be frank, what does a ‘No Trespassing’ sign mean when you’re as drunk as I was?” Here, $3.5 million of the settlement will go to attorney fees in a case that dragged on for six years.
I guess the freezer shouldn’t be accessible and I guess an airport hotel hosting parties ought to know that drunk people might wander into them at 3 o’clock in the morning and be unable to get out.
Example of you’re not r responsible for your own actions.
Though to be fair these things should always have an internal door release. Innocent workers have been trapped in them and that is just a basic safety measure.
I see the hotel as grossly negligent per your description.
It’s sad people have to drink to have an enjoyable time.
That was cold of her friends to leave her behind
Being so drunk you walk into a freezer makes it difficult to feel compassion for this woman. Obviously, a walk-in freezer anywhere should have an obvious way to open the door from the inside. But the responsibility still lays with the drunken woman.
They were afraid of the award a Cook County jury would be. Many lawsuits in Cook County are settled because of the notoriously generous juries there.
Was she stupid? Yeah. Were her friends stupid? Sure. Did she deserve to die? No. Did the hotel staff agree to take some actions that would have saved her life, had they actually taken them?
Did she then die a miserable death?
If that’s how it was, I can see why the settlement.
We’ve all done some dumb stuff and deserved to suffer for it, but few have done stuff so dumb they deserve the death penalty.
I know, selection on the phenotype and all that. On the other hand, doing stupid stuff and getting away with it makes us inherently sexy. Without that, we wouldn’t have songbirds.
I started working at a cafeteria when I was 16. One of the things they showed me was how to open the freezer door from the inside. Being drunk doesn’t help things. If there was a way to get out and she knew about it maybe being drunk made her unable to do anything about it.
Darwin was right. Can not cure stupid. The hotel was NOT responsible to find the drunk. You do not leave your drunk friends alone, they tend to go missing or walk out into traffic, get assulted.
Personally I have never seen a walk in freezer that did NOT have a door release on the inside. The no door release is a Hollywood movie prop. Now that’s not saying she was cognizant of her surroundings, but that is not the fault of the hotel or business.
“Obviously, a walk-in freezer anywhere should have an obvious way to open the door from the inside.”
I’m sure it did. She was too drunk to use it . . .
Regardless of her being drunk, the kitchen and freezer shouldn’t be accessible to guests. It would be very easy for someone to tamper with the food etc. or start a fire with the gas.