A worker at the Marc's Deeper Discount Store warehouse in Brook Park was rushed to the hospital after coworkers found him pinned between a forklift and a metal pole on Oct. 29, an incident that left him without a pulse before paramedics managed to revive him on the way to the hospital.
The man, a 30-year-old Mayfield Heights resident who had only been on the job for about three days, was taken to The MetroHealth System in Cleveland after the roughly 3 p.m. incident at the warehouse, located at 19101 Snow Road, according to cleveland.com. A coworker first discovered him trapped between the forklift and the pole and asked for help from the warehouse office, the outlet reported.
Coworkers and Supervisor Rush to Free Him
Two coworkers and a supervisor pushed the forklift off the worker, sat him down and called 911, per the same account. By the time police and paramedics arrived, the worker had no pulse. He was loaded into an ambulance, where paramedics performed CPR, and he regained a pulse before reaching the hospital, the report said.
Paramedics told responding officers they would advise police if the worker's condition changed, the article noted. At the time of the police report, the man was alive, though his condition afterward was not addressed in the available reporting.
Supervisor Unsure About Warehouse Cameras
The supervisor told police he was not aware of any cameras inside the warehouse that might have captured the incident, according to cleveland.com. That detail leaves open the question of whether there is any video record of exactly how the forklift came to pin the worker against the pole, a circumstance the available reporting does not otherwise explain.
Forklift accidents remain a persistent hazard in warehouse and industrial settings nationally. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that from 2011 to 2017, 614 workers died in forklift-related incidents, with more than 7,000 nonfatal injuries involving days away from work occurring each year during that span.
General Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidance on powered industrial trucks outlines conditions under which a forklift must be taken out of service, instructing operators who notice such a condition while driving to stop, park the vehicle and get assistance. That guidance is general safety standard language and does not establish what happened in the Brook Park incident.
