By CBS (Health) | Created at 2024-11-18 18:59:03 | Updated at 2024-11-23 12:34:30
4 days ago
Canada's Bestar has agreed to a more than $16 million civil penalty for failing to report a defect in its wall beds until after one person was killed and more than a dozen others injured, some seriously, federal officials say.
Starting in September of 2014 and continuing through 2022, Bestar received numbers of reports that the products had detached from the wall. By 2016, the company was told of two cases in which people had been injured by the beds falling on them, according to a settlement agreement announced on Monday by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The furniture company then engaged with CPSC and Health Canada, but did not tell regulators of an additional five incidents it had become aware of by that time, the document said. In 2018, a Bestar wall bed fell on an elderly woman, causing injuries that led to her hospitalization and death later that year.
All told, Bestar was aware of 35 incidents in which its beds detached from walls and fell on people, resulting in the fatality and 15 injuries, some of which were serious, according the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Bestar knowingly failed to immediately report that its wall beds posed a serious impact and crushing hazard, as is required by law, the agency said Monday in a news release.
The CPSC has agreed to suspend all but $4 million of the $16.025 penalty because paying more than that would cause the company to go out of business.
Bestar and the commission announced a recall of the wall beds on April 7, 2022, warning consumers that a 79-year-old woman had died after a wall bed fell on her, injuring her spine. Bestar and the CPSC at that time stated the company had received reports of 60 additional incidents resulting in bruising and other injuries from the beds detaching and hitting people.
About 129,000 of the wall beds were sold in the U.S. from June 2014 through March 2022 online at Amazon.com, Costco.com, Cymax.com and Wayfair.com. Bestar also sold roughly 53,000 of the wall beds in Canada.
The commission explained the discrepancy between the lower number of incidents noted in its current press release and the higher case count in its 2020 recall as a matter of what the company had reported at specific times.
"Our penalty cases focus on when the firms reported to us; not the recall date. So, it is earlier in time; thus, fewer incidents," a CPSC spokesperson stated in an email.
The settlement does not constitute an admission of guilt by Bestar to allegations including it knowingly broke the law, it said in the document. The company had not received "substantiated claims" that its beds had fallen on people so long as they were properly assembled and anchored to the wall.
Bestar did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
Bestar purchased Bush Industries in 2020, with both brands now operating under a corporate parent, eSolutions Furniture Group, which was established in 2021 and is based in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. It operates manufacturing plants in Lac-Megantic and Sherbrooke, Canada, as well as in Jamestown, New York, Erie, Pennsylvania, Reno, Nevada, Sacramento, California and Asia.
Kate Gibson is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch in New York, where she covers business and consumer finance.
