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Exploding Bottle
On July 4, 2007, Linda and Marc Gallelli and their 16-month old son, Nicholas, went to a relative’s house for a 4th of July family party. Family was gathered outside on the deck. While appetizers were being served, Nicholas was standing on the deck when a bottle of Corona beer spontaneously exploded out of a cooler. Shards of glass flew everywhere and one unfortunately flew into Nicholas’ left eye. Though an ambulance arrived within minutes, doctors were unable to save Nicholas’ vision. He is permanently blind in his left eye.
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Family Sues Beer Maker
Aug 26, 2008
by Robert E. Kessler
An Islip Terrace couple are suing the makers of Corona beer for $15 million, saying that a poorly manufactured glass bottle of the brew burst at a family Fourth of July party in 2007, permanently blinding their infant son in one eye.
Linda and Marc Gallelli said they and their son, Nicholas, now 2, were at her brother's house in East Northport at the start of their family's celebration of the Fourth when a bottle of Corona Extra that was in a tub of ice and water shattered, sending shards of glass into Nicholas' left eye, according to papers filed in the U.S. District Court in Central Islip.
"It sounded like a firecracker, and Nicholas started screaming, and there was blood gushing down from his left eye," Linda Gallelli said yesterday at the Westbury office of her family's lawyer, Robert Danzi.
"I saw a piece of glass in the eye," Gallelli continued, and her sister, a registered nurse, and her brother-in-law, an emergency technician, tried to treat him, but the infant had to be rushed to Huntington Hospital.
Gallelli, a high school teacher of Italian and Spanish, said that her son has had five eye operations at Schneider Children's Hospital, but doctors say that her son has lost sight in the eye.
"It makes me very angry that this had to happen - he was such a healthy little boy," Gallelli said.
She said that because of his age Nicholas does not remember the accident, but now when he walks, "he bumps into things, occasionally," because he has lost his depth perception.
"[I]t is our company policy not to comment on pending litigation," Jennifer Shelley, a spokeswoman for Grupo Modelo, the Mexican company that manufactures Corona, said yesterday in an e-mail. "We can assure you, however, that Corona is brewed and bottled with the highest quality standards."
Danzi, the Gallelli family's attorney, said that a chemist and an engineer he has hired said their preliminary tests indicated that the glass of the beer bottle was defective.
The shards probably went flying because the glass could not withstand the difference in temperature between the warmth of the liquid beer and the chill of the ice and water in the tub, according to the chemist and the engineer, Danzi said.