A Glenview Elementary School teacher briefly left his sixth-grade class unattended, and the kids decided to play a game called “Chubby Bunny” to see how many marshmallows they could hold in their mouth at one time. Unfortunately, 12-year-old Catherine “Casey” Fish was a tad overambitious, and choked to death on the three or four marshmallows she had in her mouth, and her parents sued the teacher and the school district for not having a teacher physically present to deal with the consequences of their daughter’s actions. The school district decided to settle the case with insurance funds. As is inevitable, the family’s lawyer denied that money was at the center of the case, and the newspaper allows the fiction: “John and Therese Fish’s wrongful-death lawsuit involving their late daughter, Catherine, was never about money but was meant to publicize hazards of such ‘idiotic’ games, the couple’s attorney, Francis Patrick Murphy, said.” It’s not likely we’ll see follow-up on how much of the money the Fishes spend on anti-marshmallow-choking public service advertising. (Rummana Hussain, “Family of girl who choked to death gets $2 mil.”, Chicago Sun-Times, Jun. 3; Lisa Black, “Settlement reached in choking lawsuit”, Chicago Tribune, Jun. 2; Romenesko blog, Jun. 5).

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