"The skin was peeled off her toe; it's a pretty horrifying injury,” says the lawyer representing the family of a 3-year-old girl in a $7 million lawsuit against the Colorado-based footwear company Crocs. The girl, Emma Hochberg of Westchester, was wearing pink clogs when she got caught in an escalator at JFK Airport, chewing up her big toe and causing “severe and permanent” injuries.
There have been similar incidents of children getting stuck in escalators throughout the country while wearing Crocs, but as of yet the company refuses to put warning labels on its popular plastic footwear. Last year the Japanese government issued a warning to Crocs wearers after the escalator incident total passed 40. Crocs are made of a "closed-cell resin that expands and contracts to mold to the wearer's foot" but it's the soft rubber sole that gets caught in elevator treads.
A Crocs spokesman says “escalator safety is an issue we take very seriously, and we are looking into this report.” Mothers now rushing to dispose of their children’s Crocs may want to consider donating them to the company’s SolesUnited initiative, which turns the old clogs into new ones and distributes them to the needy around the world, hopefully in less advanced countries where they still climb stairs.
But listen up kids, Crocs aren’t the only things that make the bloodthirsty escalator monsters drool. Baggy pants caused a human avalanche on the long escalator to the Lincoln Square IMAX in 2005, the same year a young girl’s finger was sliced off when she tripped on a Macy’s escalator; it happened again at Macy’s in 2006 when a boy severed part of his thumb on an escalator. We’re now taking bets on when Bloomberg will swoop down to save us with a ban on these menacing escalators.
Photo of a 4-year-old Toronto boy's foot after a Crocs-related escalator incident.
