In what lawyers believe to be the largest child wrongful death settlement in American history, Ikea is set to pay $46 million to a California family whose son was killed after a dresser tipped over and fell on him.
Two-year-old Jozef Dudek was killed in 2017 when a three-drawer Ikea dresser fell, crushing the child after he was put down for a nap by his father.
“Our clients were extremely safety-conscious. They baby-proofed their home, and they had even secured other furniture in their home to the wall if they thought it presented any risk of tipping over,” Alan Feldman, one of the family’s attorneys, said at a press conference.
“However, when they purchased the three-drawer MALM dresser from Ikea in 2008, they never suspected that this small, short dresser could be an instrument of death,” Feldman continued.
The dresser weighs 70 pounds, according to court documents. Lawyers claimed that Ikea knew that MALM dressers “lacked counterbalancing weight on the back and bottom of the dresser, causing the dresser to be top-heavy and front-heavy, so as to render it unstable,” according to the
complaint.
Ikea only recalled the dresser after lawyers from the Feldman Shepard law firm filed lawsuits on behalf of two other families whose children were also killed by the same type of dresser.
