It’s not often that a shopping center turns into something out of an Indiana Jones movie, but that’s the first thing we thought of when we heard that a two-ton cement ball had been knocked loose from its berth in front of a Target store in New Jersey and rolled into traffic. And now, Target doesn’t want to pay for the damage it caused.
ABC-7’s On Your Side team has surveillance footage of a pickup truck nudging a red bollard — which we learned today is a word the Brits use for a series of short posts designed to keep vehicles from going where they shouldn’t — marking the front entrance of a store in Paramus, NJ. That little bump caused it to break free and roll into traffic, where it smashed into a moving car.
“All of sudden I hear this crash and a really loud noise,” the car’s driver said, adding that she thought she’d run something over. It turned out to be the cement ball, which bounced off the driver’s side of her car and kept rolling until another driver jumped out of his car and stopped it.
“You just got hit by the Target big red ball,” the driver says he told her.
The video shows three men rolling the ball back across the parking lot — and then leaving it balanced outside the exit, where a child hops on top of it at one point.
The woman whose car was hit says the ball cost about $3,500 in damage, and that Target’s insurance company won’t pay for it, even after ABC-7 pointed out the way the ball was left unsecured in front of the store. Instead, Target said she could go after the driver of the pickup truck.
Police, however, were not able to make out the license plate number on the truck, and the woman says she doesn’t think the driver of the truck even realized they’d knocked the ball loose.
Target acknowledged that another bollard at the same location had broken off days ago, but would only say that it was aware of these incidents and that it will re-check all bollards at the store.
As for the driver, she says she’ll be filing against Target in small claims court.
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist