Hugo Boss is fined £1.25m over death of boy, 4, crushed by 18st mirror
LUXURY retailer Hugo Boss was yesterday fined £1.25million over ‘ systemic failures’ which led to a four-year- old boy being fatally crushed by a mirror.
Austen Harrison suffered irreversible brain damage when the freestanding 18-stone mirror at one of its stores fell over as his father, Simon, tried on a suit.
Mr Harrison, from Crawley, West Sussex, and wife Irina took the agonising decision to turn off their son’s life support four days after the tragedy in June 2013.
Yesterday a judge said it ‘would have been obvious to the untrained eye’ that the mirror, which was described in court as being balanced upright like a ‘domino piece’ ready to fall, had posed a danger.
Judge Peter Ross added that it was ‘nothing short of a miracle’ that the mirror hadn’t already fallen in the nine months it had been in the store at the Bicester Village outlet village in Oxfordshire, a favoured destination of the Duchess of Cambridge.
Directors from the designer German fashion and fragrance brand were brought before Oxford Crown Court after the company admitted breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act and Management of Health and Safety at Work regulations earlier this year.
At the sentencing hearing yesterday, prosecutor Barry Berlin said contractors had ‘hurried’ to convert the shop from a Burberry store that had occupied the space previously.
Mr Berlin said the three-sided, hinged mirror should have been fixed to a reinforced wall – but was left freestanding to hide a gap in the wall.
The prosecutor added: ‘There was no checking by anybody to make sure that the mirror had been placed or fixed properly. The company accept this was a direct cause, not just a significant cause, of Austen’s death.’
The court heard a manager at Hugo Boss, which reported a turnover of £192.8million last year, had told staff months before that the mirror needed to be moved.
Mr Berlin said Austen had been moving the wings of the mirror as his father tried on the suit moments before it fell – just as Mr Harrison turned his back.
It was revealed that managers at the store had failed to carry out health and safety checks. Forms, which were meant to be filled out by staff every month since 2000, had never been completed.
An area manager reported that nobody in the store knew about the forms in the shop.
Mr Berlin said the lack of health and safety awareness at the company ‘went up the chain…to senior management’ – an allegation which was disputed by Jonathan Laidlaw QC, representing Hugo Boss.
The prosecutor said that the company’s ‘system plainly broke down seri- ously’ when it came to mirrors – with glass panels also known to have fallen on two occasions at a Hugo Boss shop in Carnaby Street, London. He described the accident as ‘entirely foreseeable’ and said that this was ‘a systemic failure’.
Mr Laidlaw said the company has settled a civil claim with Austen’s fam- ily, whose parents have now divorced. Hugo Boss was fined £1,100,000 over one charge of failing to conduct the shop as to not expose employees and the public to risk, and £100,000 for failing to make effective planning and safety arrangements.
The firm was also given 14 days to pay £46,951 costs.
No health and safety checks