Bystanders do nothing to help dying man in Chicago street

CHICAGO (Sun-Times Media Wire) - On Thursday morning, 10 weeks after Marques Gaines was punched on the street and run over by a taxi as he laid unconscious outside a Near North 7-Eleven, his family filed suit against the convenience store.

The incident occurred shortly after 4 a.m. on Feb. 7 outside the 7-Eleven at State and Hubbard Streets, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Phyllis Nelson, Gaines’ aunt, who alleges that store owners, operators and employees are culpable in the death because they did not properly train personnel and did not provide adequate security during the store’s overnight hours.

Footage from several security cameras captured the incident.

Gaines, 32, was a bartender at a downtown motel who, after finishing a shift, went with a few colleagues to have a drink at Mother Hubbard’s — a bar located next to the 7-Eleven, according to the suit.

After leaving the bar, Gaines went into the 7-Eleven to buy a bag of chips and upon exiting, got into a confrontation with another man who’d just been kicked out of the 7-Eleven by a security guard employed by the store, according to the suit.

The man who’d been booted from the store assaulted Gaines and left him out cold in the street.

Neither the security guard nor a store clerk ever attempted to help Gaines “in any manner whatsoever and, instead, simply stood on the sidewalk as he lay unconscious and unprotected in the street,” the suit stated.

After lying on the street for two minutes, Gaines was run over by a cab; he was pinned underneath for three minutes, according to the suit.

He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and had emergency surgery but died shortly thereafter, according to the suit.

The lawsuit filed Thursday is an amended version of an earlier lawsuit that named two taxi companies and a taxi driver.

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