A 15-year-old girl in China died after falling from the fifth floor while attempting to throw a returned parcel down to a courier, with a court ruling that the courier company, the girl’s mother and the teenager herself all shared responsibility for the fatal accident.
The incident happened after the girl’s mother, identified as Zhang, arranged for a pair of jeans bought online to be returned through a door-to-door collection service. When courier Liu arrived at the residential complex, Zhang told him that the parcel would be thrown down from the fifth-floor apartment.
After the collection code was confirmed, Zhang instructed her daughter, identified as Ma, to throw the parcel downstairs. Ma reportedly stood on a tatami mat near the window and attempted to toss the package outside. She lost her balance and fell from the fifth floor. Emergency efforts to save her were unsuccessful.
The family later sued the courier company, seeking more than 744,000 yuan in compensation. The case reached the Ningxia Guyuan Intermediate People’s Court, which issued its appeal ruling on Sept. 20.
The court found that the courier had failed to properly respond to the dangerous collection method. He did not firmly refuse the arrangement or provide an adequate safety warning when asked to accept the parcel being thrown from the building.
The courier company was therefore assigned 30 per cent of the responsibility and ordered to pay more than 296,000 yuan in compensation. The company had previously paid the family 200,000 yuan, leaving an additional payment of more than 96,000 yuan under the latest ruling.
However, the court placed the primary responsibility on the girl’s mother, finding that she should have foreseen the danger of instructing her teenage daughter to lean out of a fifth-floor window to throw the parcel.
The court also found the 15-year-old partly responsible, stating that at her age she was capable of understanding that throwing an object from such a height created a serious risk of falling.
The ruling divided responsibility among all four parties involved: the courier, his employer, the mother and the teenager. The case has drawn attention to the safety risks of improvised parcel collection methods and the responsibilities of both customers and delivery companies when a collection arrangement involves an obvious hazard.
