A woman who was injured in a terrorist attack on a McDonalds in France is suing McDonalds.
Nell Sanders Aspero, 54, says she was eating in a Paris McDonald’s on Jan. 7 when several men wearing hoods walked into the restaurant and dropped a canister bomb and pro-Iraqi leaflets picturing Saddam Hussein and then fled, according to a suit filed in federal court in Denver on Wednesday.
She said the canister released an unknown chemical into the air and a liquid that spread across the floor and into the leaflets.
The chemical attack has evidently left Aspero with vision and neurological problems.
So why pick on McDonalds? (Aside from their being much easier to sue than terroirsts, that is.) Aspero says McDonalds was warned something like this might happen, and failed to take proper steps.
The US State Dept. had issued a global warning a few days earlier, noting a “concern about the possibility of terrorist acts abroad” against American targets, as it was the 10th Anniversary of the Gulf War.
However, what was McDonalds to do? Close their stores worldwide? Hire armed security guards for each location? Put a big warning sign on their doors?
It doesn’t matter, of course. It’s a shame that Ms. Aspero was injured, but McDonalds has no more responsibility in the matter, that I can see, than she had in taking the personal risk of being “an American abroad.”
People who file stupid suits like this ought to be taken out in the town square and flogged. An automatic flogging machine should be set up with a web interface so people in remote areas can express how stupid it is.