Maria Pineda, whose 11-year-old son died during last week’s record-breaking freeze in Texas, has filed a $100-million wrongful death lawsuit against Texas power providers Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and Entergy Corporation, this according to ABC News.
“Despite having knowledge of the dire weather forecast for at least a week in advance, and the knowledge that the system was not prepared for more than a decade, ERCOT and Entergy failed to take any preemptory action that could have averted the crisis and were wholly unprepared to deal with the crisis at hand,” the lawsuit states.
Pineda’s son, Cristian, died last Tuesday (Feb. 16) in his family’s mobile home in Conroe, a suburb of Houston. The home lost power during the winter storm. Pineda found him unresponsive in a bed that he was sharing with his 3-year-old brother. The family suspects he died of hypothermia. The official cause of death is still pending the results of an autopsy.
“This is a young man who died for no reason other than corporate decisions,” the family’s attorney Tony Buzbee told ABC News. “There are a lot of decisions that were made a long time ago that led to the death of this young man. That is unacceptable.”
Originally from Honduras, the family had been living in the United States for two years, according to the Houston Chronicle. Pineda is now trying to get her son’s remains transported back to Honduras for burial.
According to the Associated Press, more than a dozen people, most of them in Texas, died last week while in a home that lost heat.
Here’s the GoFundMe link if you’d like to support.
