Judge dismisses wrongful death lawsuit filed by family of teenager killed in Menards forklift accident
A judge in February dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit filed after a 19-year-old Menards employee who was operating a forklift was crushed by a stack of lumber.
James Lee Stanback died in 2021. His mother said he was working at the Golden Valley, Minnesota, location for the summer before going to college.
The lawsuit that Stanback's mother filed against Menards in 2024 said the teenager was still a trainee, about a month on the job and wasn't being supervised. It also claimed other Menards employees were negligent in how they trained Stanback and in providing him the proper equipment to do the job.
The judge in his dismissal said the suit did not present any specific facts suggesting that Menards acted consciously and deliberately to cause harm to Stanback.
As for the claims against the other employees, the judge wrote that the Minnesota Worker's Compensation Act says a coworker is not liable for the personal injury of another employee "unless the injury resulted from the gross negligence of the coemployee or was intentionally inflicted by the coemployee."
The mother's lawsuit didn't argue that the other employees' alleged misconduct was outside the scope of their job duties, the judge said.
The Minnesota Department of Labor's OSHA fined Menards $25,000 in 2022, citing unsafe conditions relating to the stack of lumber involved in the incident.