murphy-bedsSure, Murphy Beds (c. 1900) predate Murphy’s Law (c. 1948), but have you ever seen a better juxtaposition of the two?

A Staten Island man trying to install a Murphy bed in his apartment was immediately killed when the contraption suddenly broke, his family claims in a lawsuit.

Joseph Annunziato, 32, had purchased the queen-sized bed, which connects to the wall and can be folded up and hidden away, from Murphy Bed Express in Manhattan, according to court papers.

The bed was down when the December 2012 tragedy occurred. But it popped back up and struck Annunziato. “It was a defective bed, and it snapped with such force that it crushed his skull and severed his spine,” family attorney Elias Fillas said. “It was instant. It was just like a gunshot.”

The family claims the Chelsea store was negligent by selling the bed “without instructions, warnings and all pieces necessary to properly and safely assemble the bed,” ­according to the Manhattan Supreme Court papers.

Annunziato had bought the bed in 2011, and it came with “parts and pieces” not intended to go with the product, which was “unsafe, unmerchantable and unfit for use,” the family alleges.

This whole story becomes clearer — what we’re seeing is the allegations from the family’s ambulance chaser.

The Annunziatos are seeking ­unspecified damages.

A manager for the store denied any knowledge of the lawsuit and claimed the company had delivered a bed to an Annunziato family in Midtown but not one on Staten Island.

Naturally, no story about a bizarre death is complete without a recap of the five other Murphy Bed deaths in the last century or so:

It’s not the first death reported in connection with the space-saving device, invented in San Francisco in 1900.

In 2005, two British sisters suffocated to death while on vacation in Spain, after an improperly installed Murphy bed with a wall-storage unit sprung on them, leaving them trapped for days, according to a report.

In 1982, a man in Los Angeles who had been drinking with a buddy died after he passed out inside a folded-up Murphy bed.

Where would When Guns Are Outlawed be without Judgment Juice?

According to reports, a missing grandmother in Liverpool, England, was found mummified inside her Murphy bed, which had folded up while she was asleep.

via Murphy bed snaps up and killed man: suit | New York Post.

Grandmaman wanted to die in her sleep, in England where guns are outlawed, but not like that, we’re thinking.

This entry was posted in When Guns Are Outlawed… on by Hognose.

About Hognose

Former Special Forces 11B2S, later 18B, weapons man. (Also served in intelligence and operations jobs in SF).

7 thoughts on “When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Murphy Beds

Kirk

I’m going to point out that any idiot screwing around with spring-loaded anything is at risk, and these things are a lot more common than people realize. Damn near every house has a garage door on it, which is generally supported by a framework that includes a big damn spring with significant tension built into it. If you don’t know what you’re doing with one, don’t screw with it. I know of a couple of cases where people are dead or received life-changing injuries after having messed around with a doors lift mechanism. One idiot I was working around during a house demolition blithely started taking the garage door tracks apart, and took a door track in the face, right between the eyes. In his case, the blow just knocked him out because the track section got hung up in something else that absorbed a lot of the energy, but it did knock his stupid ass out. And, I call him that because he’d been told by multiple people to leave that thing alone, if he didn’t know what he was doing, but he assured all and sundry that, indeed, he knew allllllll about garage doors…

Evolution is an ongoing process. Unfortunately, it takes ferflippinever before you see the results.

Mr. 308

M1 Thumb is a thing.

DSM

No joke Kirk. Had a garage spring snap one evening, darn thing sounded like a gunshot.

Mike_C

>Naturally, no story about a bizarre death is complete without a recap of [similar] deaths in the last century or so

Ah yes, the classic “Case Report and Review of the Literature” beloved of medical students eager for the prized Publication. As to the purported skull crushing, would/could a Murphy bed’s hardware be capable of supplying the force needed? A cursory Google search turns up all kinds of hits on “Oberyn vs The Mountain” that are more heat than signal, and I’m too lazy (unmotivated) to do any actual thinking or (gasp) fact gathering.

>Evolution is an ongoing process.

I have doubts about that re humans in the West. We’re subsidizing stupidity and stupid behavior. So I suppose it’s evolution of a sort, just not that sort one might deem desirable.

Hognose Post author

That’s how I’ve always seen it, Mike. Evolution continues, but the selective pressures have changed.

Remember, natural selection selects for >reproductive success. It’s the deep truth in the first five minutes of Idiocracy.

Keith

It used be that ignorance was understood to carry a death warrant. I guess that was before we became the country with more lawyers than any other country and more people in law school than every other school across the world added together.

Ryan

I’m envisioning a bed-sized mousetrap.