Last July, a woman attending an Astros game at Minute Maid Park was allegedly injured when someone pointed a large gas-powered weapon into the stands and fired a projectile at her. The victim is now suing the team for more than $1 million in damages in Harris County District Court.
According to eyewitness accounts, the assailant was described as tall, wearing an Astros jersey and cap but no pants, and having green hair or fur all over his body, with orange antennae protruding from the side of his head.
Needless to say, the incident and the lawsuit attracted both local and national media attention and was recently featured on Fox News. The Southeast Texas Record was the first to reveal the identity of the perp: a local celebrity named Orbit.
The team mascot, as he often does, was firing complimentary Astros t-shirts into the stands during a July 8 game when one of them hit Jennifer Harughty in the hand and “shattered” her finger.
“Around the seventh inning … Orbit used a bazooka style t-shirt cannon to rapidly fire multiple t-shirts into the crowd,” Harughty’s suit states. “Orbit took aim and fired a t-shirt into the stands where Harughty and her family sat. The t-shirt struck her left index finger head-on and with so much force Harughty’s finger fractured.”
Claiming that her finger is still not right after two surgeries and therapy, Harughty is suing for past and future suffering, impairment, mental anguish, loss of opportunity, loss of enjoyment of life, loss of earnings, and medical expenses. She is also seeking punitive damages, arguing that the team displayed “an attitude of conscious indifference” for the “welfare” of fans by allowing Orbit to fire t-shirts into the stands and not warning them about the “unreasonable risk of harm.”
Harughty sat through two more innings with her “shattered” finger, waiting until the end of the game to go to the emergency room.
Orbit is still firing t-shirts into the stands – to the delight of Astro fans.