About $1.32M against a department store after a clothing rack tore a 5-year-old's eyelid

A Harrison County jury in Biloxi returned a $1,468,000 verdict for a 5-year-old boy whose eyelid was torn on a clothing rack in a department store at a Biloxi mall. That total was $468,000 in compensatory damages and $1,000,000 in punitive damages. The jury put 70% of the fault on the store and 30% on the boy’s mother.

The boy and his older brother were with their mother in the children’s clothing section in September 2014, playing tag and weaving through the racks. As he turned a corner he caught his eyelid on the arm of a “six-way” sales rack, which protruded beyond its base at about his eye level and nearly tore the left eyelid off. He had four hours of surgery that day and two more surgeries later. The eye mostly healed, but there was evidence of lasting anxiety and emotional distress.

His parents argued that the rack design was dangerous in a children’s section, where horseplay is common, and that its edge was sharp rather than smooth. To support punitive damages they offered proof of about 35 similar incidents at the chain’s stores nationwide. The store said six-way racks are the industry standard, denied the arms were jagged, and blamed the mother for not supervising the boys. A store manager had corrected the children minutes before the injury.

The reporter said the compensatory verdict form was not yet in the court record two weeks after trial, so the exact compensatory figure was not confirmed, and no judgment had been entered. It expected the judgment to be the compensatory award less the mother’s 30%, plus the punitive award as approved under the state’s punitive damages scheme. That works out to about $1,327,600, the figure shown here. The compensatory award was under Mississippi’s $1 million cap on non-economic damages. We have not found a final judgment or an appeal.