$50M Settlement to 3 Families in Ikea Dresser Tip-Over Cases
By Dean I Weitzman, Esq. on December 30th, 2016
Swedish furniture retailer Ikea will pay $50 million to the families of three small children who were killed since 2014 when their Ikea-designed dressers shifted and fell on the toddlers and crushed them in their family homes.
The $50 million settlement, which will be equally split between the families, was revealed in a Dec. 21 story in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The three families had filed wrongful death lawsuits against Ikea and led to the recall of 29 million Ikea dressers, the story reported. “At the time, the company acknowledged the dressers were at serious risk of tipping onto and killing children,” according to The Inquirer.
The plaintiffs included the parents of a 22-month-old Apple Valley, MN, boy, Theodore McGee, who was killed in February when an Ikea Malm model dresser fell on him; the parents of a 2-year-old West Chester, PA, boy, Curren Collas, who died in 2014; and the parents of 2-year-old Camden Ellis, of Snohomish, Wash., who also was killed in 2014, the story reported. The lawsuits were filed in Philadelphia.
The plaintiffs alleged the Ikea dressers were “defective and dangerous” and that the company “continued to sell them despite the risk, while not properly warning consumers,” the story continued. Since 1989, seven deaths were publicly linked to unstable Ikea dressers, according to the report.
Ikea had in the past made similar payments to the families of two other children who were killed by an Ikea dresser in the past, the story reported. Court records showed that in 2008 Ikea paid $2.3 million to the parents of Katie Elise Lambert, a 3-year-old Huntingdon Valley girl who had been crushed by an Ikea wardrobe while playing in her bedroom, while in 2009 the company settled another case for an undisclosed amount with the parents of a 3-year old girl from Chula Vista, Calif. who died when a 3-drawer Ikea dresser in her bedroom tipped onto her, the story reported.
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