Psychiatrist: Stampeding shoppers had "mass hysteria"

Shoppers who stampeded through the doorway at a Wal-Mart in Nassau County on Friday, killing a store employee, were gripped by a form of mass hysteria, a prominent local psychiatrist said.

Jdimytai Damour, 34, was crushed to death by frenzied bargain hunters as the store opened at 5:00 a.m. on Black Friday. Police are now reviewing surveillance tape, trying to pick-out faces in the crowd. Some shoppers may face criminal charges, authorities said.

"It's not that they are malicious and trying to hurt anybody. It's a stampede effect," said Dr. Thomas Qualtere, an Albany-area psychiatrist. "I would expect [them to exhibit] extreme remorse, and for them to say they didn't even realize what was going on."

Some shoppers did not try to help Damour because of the so-called bystander effect: with so many people around, they assumed someone else would help him, Qualtere said.

Others, including those who reportedly surged past Damour as emergency workers tried in futility to resuscitate him, were so singularly focused on finding their discount television or vacuum cleaner that they simply didn't care, he said.

"Their priority is already set," Qualtere said. "They have achieve something, they have to bring home something. And the complete disregard for life at that point is unfortunate, but that's the reality of the situation."

Some shoppers reportedly became irate when informed the store would be closing because someone had died.

Qualtere expects many of the people who took part in the stampede to find themselves in a psychiatrist's office months or years from now, as they begin to develop residual guilt.