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SALT LAKE CITY — Sunny and Reno Mahe have filed a lawsuit against several window blind manufacturers, installers, distributors and marketers following the 2016 death of his young daughter.
Their daughter Elsie died in November, 2016 after she was found hanging from a blind cord in the family’s Utah County home.
The Mahe family filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking a jury trial in Salt Lake City’s 3rd District Court.
Among the defendants in the lawsuit are BlindVision, based in Utah; Century Blinds Inc., based in California; Hunter Douglas Inc., based in New Jersey; Hunter Douglas Fabrication Company, based in California; Turnils North America Inc., based in New York; and ten other potential defendants who are not yet known or named in the suit, according to court documents.
The suit accuses the companies of product liability, negligence and breach of warranty.
Those companies “manufactured, assembled, marketed, distributed, installed and sold the window coverings involved in Elsie’s death,” according to the suit. It alleges that those window coverings were “unreasonably dangerous and defective” because they were sold without some proper warnings and safety mechanisms.
The suit also says that the window blind companies should have known that people who use the blinds, including Elsie Mahe, would not have realized the “danger posed by the defective condition of the blind and its component parts.”
Reno Mahe is a former BYU football player and coach.