Landry’s, Inc. owns and operates more than 600 properties across the country, including restaurants like Landry’s Seafood, Chart House, and Morton’s Steakhouse – plus hotels, casinos, and family-oriented entertainment complexes like the Kemah Boardwalk amusement park between Houston and Galveston.
In addition to multiple restaurants, the park offers numerous carnival rides, such as a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, and a miniature replica of the 1863 C.P. Huntington train. It’s a fun place for kids, but a potentially dangerous one as well, which is why park policy stipulates that minors must be accompanied by at least one adult chaperone.
Of course, if that adult chaperone gets distracted or is not paying attention to the minors he’s accompanying, he’s not going to be much help when they wander off and get into harm’s way.
That, apparently, is what happened when Danish Ahmad of Fort Bend County took his children to the boardwalk last summer. In his own account of the incident, Ahmad says he noticed his children playing near the railroad tracks and ran toward them to keep them from being hit by the miniature train.
He noticed them playing near the railroad tracks? That raises some serious questions: What was Ahmad doing before he noticed them? How long had it been since he last noticed them? How far away was he when he did notice them? Had he not noticed the train tracks prior to that?
It may seem like a clear-cut case of parental negligence, but Ahmad insists that the park’s to blame for him failing to notice until it was almost too late, that his children had put themselves in peril.
Ahmad filed suit in Galveston County District Court, seeking more than one million dollars in damages from the operator of the train, Landry’s G.P. Inc., and Landry’s Seafood Kemah Inc. for the injuries he allegedly received when the train struck him instead of his children and knocked him to the ground.
If an honest jury hears his case, it’s likely to be derailed.