Mayhem in Henrico

On Tuesday morning, August 16, 2005, chaos broke loose in Henrico county, Virginia. I won't recap the story here, you can read it yourself. I will however, quote a few bits I find particularly horrendous.

A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

Blandine Alexander, 33, said one woman standing in front of her was so desperate to retain her place in line that she urinated on herself.

Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing forward, using a folding chair he had brought with him to beat back people who tried to cut in front of him. "They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just," he said. [Incidentally, he was one of the lucky 1,000]

I'm not sure exactly how to respond to an event like this. Obviously the mob is to blame for the panicked stampeding. Though certainly the county should have changed their sale tactic once they saw that there were over 1,000 people in line. One article estimated the people count at 12,000. Twelve thousand! You'd think the county officials would've been able to reason this one through... "hmm, we've got 12,000 people, in a frenzy, waiting outside to squeeze through a narrow gate, and they all want these laptops, which we have 1,000 of." A bit of simple math will tell you that things will go horribly amiss unless you attempt to control this. Tickets, a raffle, any simple method of filtering people out based on a random selection process.
Now my punishment: all 1,000 people will have their laptops taken away. The $50,000 that the county took in from them will be used to pay off damages done to people like the old guy. Any remaining money will be donated to a local charity organization. The laptops will be donated to local under-funded school districts, where children who truly need the computers to aid in their learning process can use them. The woman who demanded two laptops because her stroller was destroyed should be tried and imprisoned for child neglect. And all 12,000 people who stood in line will be sent straight to bed without supper.