On December 22, 2000, 15-year-old Michael Foradori Jr. walked into a Captain D’s seafood restaurant in Tupelo, Mississippi for dinner; while there, he started flirting with the girlfriend of one of the employees, which resulted in a shouting match. “‘This (employee) was kind of picking on him, he started threatening him, he even hit him with a wadded up paper,’ said Joey Langston, Foradori’s attorney.” (More on Langston at Point of Law, May 13.) A manager restored order by kicking everyone out of the restaurant; outside, a cook who clocked out for the evening got into an altercation with Foradori, and pushed him over a wall, breaking his neck and paralyzing him. (Naomi Snyder, “Captain D’s customer gets $20.8M”, Tennesseean, Oct. 13; “Jury awards paralyzed man $21M”, Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 13; Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Oct. 13).
For this, the national Captain D’s chain in Nashville was held responsible to the tune of $20.8 million by a federal jury that deliberated for two hours. Foradori’s attorneys argued that the manager should have “stopped the argument” and that training about workplace violence would have prevented the accident.
