The family of the teenager who died after a wall collapsed on him at Robins Air Force Base filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government Monday. (Edward Aspera/U.S. Air Force)
(Tribune News Service) — The family of a teenager who died after a wall collapsed on him at the Robins Air Force Base filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government Monday.
Camalle Stone and Timberly Stone — the parents of 14-year-old Gabriel Stone, who died July 22, after the wall inside a men’s bathroom at the Robins Air Force Base swimming pool collapsed on top of him — filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, the Air Force and 17 unnamed individuals Monday. The lawsuit argued that the defendants’ actions “resulted in pain and suffering and ultimately death to Gabriel.”
The Stone family, represented by Shofaetiyah Watson and Rod Edmond, accused the government of negligence for the wall’s lack of anchoring and inspection that could have prevented Gabriel Stone’s death. They’re requesting to be paid damages.
Gabriel Stone, his brother and two friends were swimming at the Heritage Pool at the military base. They went to the men’s bathroom after swimming, at around 3 p.m., and some of them climbed on the partition wall because it didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, according to the lawsuit. The wall began to sway.
The structure, weighing “as much as a small SUV,” fell and pinned Gabriel Stone underneath, Watson said during a news conference Tuesday. Lifeguards extracted the teen from the rubble and performed CPR. He momentarily woke up and screamed out in pain before falling unconscious again. Then, he started convulsing, the lawsuit said.
Once first responders arrived, they took Gabriel Stone to Houston Healthcare, where medical personnel pronounced him dead. He died from blunt impact to his head, according to the lawsuit and an autopsy report.
“Gabriel was the best of me,” said Camalle Stone, Gabriel Stone’s father. “I thought it would get easier with time, but it seemed to get harder and harder, because I’m thinking about the beautiful life that’s no longer here with me, the one that I was taking care of.”
“I pride myself on being a good dad, being a present dad, you know, being one that’s coaching my boys to be better than me, and now I can’t experience that. I can’t see what all my seeds produced in my son,” Camalle Stone said.
‘There are structures like this all over the world’
An investigation conducted by the Air Force determined that the wall wasn’t properly anchored, but the Air Force said in its report that the wall still wouldn’t have fallen if an external force wasn’t applied. The wall that collapsed consisted of 93 cinder blocks that were hollow and non-bearing, and the top of the wall had no covering on the top of the wall.
The cells of the cinder block were exposed, the lawsuit says.
The investigation showed that the structure was not supported by horizontal or vertical support, as required by building standards from when the wall was built in 1969, the lawsuit says. There was no evidence that an inspection was done to determine the wall needed this support, nor was there evidence the wall’s stability was inspected.
“There are structures like this all over the world, military bases like this that were built in 1969 just like this base,” Watson said. “And we’re not going to speculate, but we can only imagine what has happened and what could happen if they have similar structures that haven’t been inspected the way that this structure should have been inspected.”
A lawsuit only represents one side of a legal argument. The U.S. government has not filed a legal reply to the allegations as of Tuesday.
Reporter Jesse Fraga contributed to this story.
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