Burn incident at Wal-Mart might bring 2nd suit

Three days after the family of a man severely burned in an August electrical fire at the new Bloomington Wal-Mart Supercenter filed suit against Wal-Mart and two other companies, a lawyer for another worker's family members said they are planning on suing.\nThe family of Scott Shelton, 35, an Anderson resident injured in the same fire, is preparing a lawsuit, said attorney William Emerick, who works for the law firm of Stuart & Branigin in Lafayette.\n"It's my expectation that we will have a lawsuit filed shortly," Emerick said in a phone interview Monday. \nEmerick did not say which companies his clients would be suing, but it is possible they could name the same ones as Stephen Abbott, 27, of Otterbein, Ind., and his wife did last week in their suit, which listed complaints against Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the LaSalle Group, Inc., and Duke Energy.\nAbbott's suit was filed Friday in the Monroe Circuit Court, alleging that the companies failed to provide proper safety supervision, among other things. The suit asked for a jury trial to determine an unnamed amount of damages for lost wages, as well as pain and suffering.\nThe men, who were employees of Electromation, Inc., of Muncie, were critically injured Aug. 26 after the electrical panels they were working on in a small back room of the under-construction Wal-Mart store became charged with up to 12,000 volts of electricity and shorted. The electrical charge sent an energy arc sparking out six to eight feet, lighting the men on fire. The lawsuit said that prior to Aug. 26, the contractors had worked on electrical units only when the power was off.\nFamily members of Bloomington resident Robert Eury, 29, also injured in the fire, said they are still considering their legal options.\nBoth the Eury and Shelton families said they are having difficulty coping with their sons' medical needs, as they live outside the state. The Sheltons live in northern Alabama and the Eurys live in North Carolina. \nShade Eury, Robert Eury's brother, who runs the family business with another brother in Salisbury, N.C., said family members have been driving back and forth to keep an eye on Robert, who is known to the family by his middle name, Byron.\n"Byron is doing better than both of (the other men)," Shade said, adding that he still has more skin grafts and operation ahead of him.\nShelton is currently in critical condition in Wishard Memorial Hospital's burn center in Indianapolis, along with Abbott and Eury. \nAll three men are a month and a half into at least a three-month long process of growing and grafting new skin onto their bodies, a burn center nurse told the Indiana Daily Student in an article last month. Eury received second- and third-degree burns to 85 percent of his body, while both Abbott and Shelton had more than 90 percent of their bodies burned.