The family of a 32-year-old man who was killed when his Murphy bed snapped up unexpectedly is suing the Manhattan store that sold it to him. The lawsuit argues that the bed was "defective" and sold without instructions, according to court papers, causing it to fatally crush the victim.
The lawsuit alleges that Joseph Annunziato, 32, was setting up a recently-purchased queen-sized Murphy bed in his Staten Island apartment on New Year's Eve in 2012. While he was installing it, according to court papers, the bed suddenly snapped up, killing him instantly. The medical examiner's office determined Annunziato died from blunt impact to his head, with skull fractures and injuries to his eyes, brain and spinal cord. "It was a defective bed, and it snapped with such force that it crushed his skull and severed his spine,” Elias Fillas, the family's attorney, said in a statement. “It was instant. It was just like a gunshot.”
The bed was purchased in 2011 at Murphy Bed Express in Chelsea, and the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, alleges the bed was sold "without instructions, warnings and all pieces necessary to properly and safely assemble the bed." The store, meanwhile, says they have no record of an Annunziato from Staten Island purchasing the bed, and that they usually deliver and install the beds themselves. "I don’t know how that unit got over there," Severino Duran, the store's manager, told the Staten Island Advance.
Murphy beds have reportedly caused at least four deaths over the years. In 1982, a Los Angeles man suffocated to death when the Murphy bed he was sleeping in folded up; in 2005, two British sisters were killed when their bed collapsed on top of them, and a British woman once reportedly found her grandmother's mummified corpse hidden inside a Murphy bed that had collapsed five years prior.
