8-Year-Old Sued By Garbage Person Aunt Over Damaging Birthday Hug

By Kristy Puchko | Miscellaneous | October 14, 2015 |

By Kristy Puchko | Miscellaneous | October 14, 2015 |

It was a brisk day in March 2011, and 50-year-old Jennifer Connell was on her way to see her nephew, Sean Tarala who’d just turned eight. What should have been a lovely occasion of family warmth and celebration turned ugly when Tarala lept off his two-wheel bicycle and propelled himself at Connell for what she would later describe in court as an “unreasonably forceful” hug. “All of a sudden he was there in the air, I had to catch him and we tumbled onto the ground,” she testified before a Connecticut court yesterday. “I remember him shouting, ‘Auntie Jen, I love you,’ and there he was flying at me.”

In the playful melee, Tarala broke Connell’s wrist. And she wasn’t about to just take that. ‘Accidents happen’ you might think. Or ‘He’s just a kid. A kid who’s gone through enough considering his mom died last year.’ But hey, Connell has suffered too.

NY Magazine shares Connelly’s harrowing struggles. “I was at a party recently,” she recalled to the jury, “And it was difficult to hold my hors d’oeuvre plate.”

The lawsuit she filed against her now 12-year-old nephew demanded $127,000 for “the injuries, losses and harms to the plaintiff caused by the negligence and carelessness of the minor defendant in that a reasonable eight-year-old under those circumstances would know or should have known that a forceful greeting such as the one delivered by the defendant to the plaintiff could cause the harms and losses suffered by the plaintiff.”

Unfortunately for Connell, it took the jury only 25 minutes to decide that it was a damn hug and an accident and she should shove her hors d’oeuvre-loving head up her own ass.

Kristy Puchko can’t even sometimes.