Lopez explained a hectic scene in the San Fernando Valley store amid customers looking for video games soon after the sale started.
"I listen blaring and I heard shouting," said Lopez, 18. "After few minutes, my throat throbbed. I was coughing in reality bad and watering up."
Lopez said shoppers were already in the store when a whistle indicated the launch of Black Friday at 10 p.m., sending customers hurtling in search of intensely low-priced items.
By the time Lopez entered at the video games, the display had been torn down. Workers tried to hold back the scrum of customers and pick up products even as shoppers crushed the video games and DVDs strewn on the floor.
"It was entirely extreme," he said.
Another client said yells blown up after about a hundred people waiting in line to snag Xbox gaming comforts and Wii video games got into a propelling match.
Alejandra Seminario, 24, said she was waiting in line to grip some toys at the store around 9:55 p.m. when people the next passageway over initiated yelling and tearing at the plastic wrap covering gaming consoles, which was thought to be opened at 10 p.m.
"People begun crying loudly, pulling and pushing each other, and then the entire spots covered up with pepper spray," the Selmar resident said. "I suppose what activated it was people began pulling the plastic off the pallets and then shoving and attacking the display of games. It started with people pushing and yelling because they were acquiring shoved onto the boxes."
Alejandra Seminario, 24, said she was waiting in line to grip some toys at the store around 9:55 p.m. when people the next passageway over initiated yelling and tearing at the plastic wrap covering gaming consoles, which was thought to be opened at 10 p.m.
"People begun crying loudly, pulling and pushing each other, and then the entire spots covered up with pepper spray," the Selmar resident said. "I suppose what activated it was people began pulling the plastic off the pallets and then shoving and attacking the display of games. It started with people pushing and yelling because they were acquiring shoved onto the boxes."
The pepper spray come through the air, Seminario said, and she breathed some in and started coughing. Her face also began burning.
"I did not want to get engaged. I was too afraid. I only stayed in the toy walkway," she said.
By the time she and her husband, 27-year-old Cesar Seminario, obtained to the cash register after 20 minutes with a Wii gaming soothe and some Barbie dolls, the air still smelled of pepper spray, she said.
By the time she and her husband, 27-year-old Cesar Seminario, obtained to the cash register after 20 minutes with a Wii gaming soothe and some Barbie dolls, the air still smelled of pepper spray, she said.
Wal-Mart workers were taking proclamations from about eight shoppers who had been pepper sprayed near the front of the store, Seminario said. "After we paid, we looked five that were in actually awful pose," she said. "They had been sprayed in the face, it seemed like, and they had puffiness of the face, in fact extreme swelling of face, redness, coughing."
Joseph Poulose, who also was punched with the spray near the DVD and video games exhibit, condemned the store for deteriorating to tackle the mobs.
"There were way a large numbers of people in a building that size. Every passageway was covered," he said. Shoppers were stomping on image frames and other products on the floor, said Poulose, who attempted to secure his pregnant wife from the crowed of customers inside.
"
It was certainly the most horrible Black Friday I’ve ever experienced," he said.
