A Colorado Springs woman is suing Dollar Tree after she says a man followed her family through the aisles of a local store and ejaculated on her while she was shopping with her child and mother. The negligence lawsuit, filed in El Paso County, names Dollar Tree along with the private equity companies that own the land and building where the store sits, and it argues the incident was part of a pattern the company should have seen coming.
The lawsuit alleges that Dollar Tree's chronic understaffing and lack of security measures have turned its stores into what plaintiffs describe as a hunting ground for sexual assaults involving public masturbation, according to The Denver Post. Attorney Morgan Carroll, who represents the woman, said chronic short staffing and a lack of investment in security measures directly lead to preventable assaults. “This never should have happened,” Carroll said, adding that Dollar Tree has known about a pattern of serious safety issues impacting customers and employees, particularly involving sexual assaults.
A Pattern the Lawsuit Says Was Ignored
Court filings detail nearly two dozen incidents of women being sexually assaulted at Dollar Tree stores dating back to 2018, the newspaper's report notes. In one cited episode, a man allegedly committed an assault at a Dollar Tree in Colorado Springs in March 2025, and according to the lawsuit, he had previously been involved in a similar incident at another Colorado Springs Dollar Tree back in December 2024 — despite the company reportedly having banned him from the chain at that time, per the lawsuit. He was arrested and charged with indecent exposure and aggravated unlawful sexual contact, the filing states.
The complaint also alleges that Dollar Tree has not invested in security guards, has not required its real estate partners to provide security, and that its stores often do not have working security cameras, all according to the lawsuit's claims. Where cameras do exist, they typically cover the cashier or high-theft merchandise rather than the full store or parking lots, the filing states. Stores are typically staffed with just one to three employees, the lawsuit says, meaning workers cannot watch the entire store from the cash register or respond quickly to emergencies.
A National Trend Tracked Since July
The lawsuit's central claim — that these attacks were clearly foreseeable — leans on reporting that surfaced a disturbing rise of what's being called “gooning” incidents in July, per The Guardian. The outlet's investigation found Dollar Tree appeared to be a favored location for the attacks, with strangers approaching customers and assaulting them by ejaculating on them or wiping semen on them from behind. That same investigation documented 63 officially recorded sex crimes at Dollar Tree and Family Dollar stores nationally, including 16 involving masturbation or public ejaculation, with annual reported cases climbing from under five a year before 2020 to as many as 18 a year after 2023.
The behavior has become common enough that it is referred to online as “nut-and-dash,” and separate reporting from The Mary Sue has traced how online subcultures turned the assaults into a viral phenomenon dubbed “Dollar Tree Gooner,” spawning a cryptocurrency coin, a SoundCloud track, and even custom trading cards built around the trend. Investigators and legal researchers have found that participants in these online spaces use terms like “tagging” and “sharking” to describe the act of publicly exposing themselves or surreptitiously ejaculating on unconsenting shoppers, according to the International Business Times UK.
Similar Cases Surfacing in Other States
The El Paso County filing is not an isolated case. A San Diego woman filed a parallel lawsuit in August against Dollar Tree after an active-duty U.S. Marine, identified as 22-year-old Noe Gonzalez Cresencio, allegedly targeted her and two other shoppers inside a Clairemont store over a single week in March 2025, according to Dexerto. San Diego police charged him with three counts of lewd acts and two counts of sexual battery in civilian court, since the alleged offenses occurred off base. Hoodline previously covered a similar civil case in Houston, where a shopper sued Dollar Tree over an assault in a River Oaks store, alleging understaffing let a perpetrator target her in broad daylight.
Under Colorado's Premises Liability Act, C.R.S. § 13-21-115, retail shoppers are classified as invitees, which imposes the highest legal standard of care on store operators to protect customers from known or reasonably foreseeable hazards, including criminal acts by third parties, according to Justia Law. That standard is central to Carroll's argument that Dollar Tree had ample notice of the risk. Store owners in Colorado can be held liable if plaintiffs show management knew or should have known about the security risks a location posed.
A History of Federal Scrutiny Over Staffing
The staffing concerns raised in the lawsuit echo years of federal attention on Dollar Tree's labor practices. In August 2023, Dollar Tree entered a national settlement with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, facing potential daily fines up to $500,000 for uncorrected hazards, after accumulating more than $13.1 million in proposed penalties across hundreds of store safety violations since 2017, per Business Insider. That agreement required roughly 2,000 camera audits per month in store stockrooms, a detail plaintiffs' attorneys in recent lawsuits say contrasts with claims that sales-floor cameras are often left non-functional.
U.S. Senator Patty Murray launched a formal congressional inquiry into Dollar Tree and Dollar General back in April 2022, warning that extreme corporate labor cuts and understaffing left employees unable to maintain store security or prevent criminal activity, according to the U.S. Senate HELP Committee. Reports of similar incidents have surfaced at Dollar Tree stores across the country, including a case Hoodline covered involving a man hunted after an assault on a 12-year-old at a Pennsylvania store.
Dollar Tree officials had not responded to requests for comment as of the Denver Post's report Tuesday. The case in El Paso County is a developing story that may be updated as court proceedings continue.
