saw things differently. They initiated decisive and unusually strong legal
measures. Citing “exigent circumstances,” CPSC investigators obtained a
court subpoena and seized Green’s phone from the Louisville Fire
Department the day after the fire. The team drove it to a laboratory in
Bethesda, Maryland, where they got to work on an urgent succession of
tests. The gravity of the situation was becoming clearer. It’s one thing for a
company to issue a recall. It’s another for that same company to reissue
replacement products—labeled safe—that continue to pose a severe danger
to the public.
While Samsung remained unmoved by the public inquiry, thirteen-
year-old Abby Zuis was picking up her siblings two days later at North
Trail Elementary School in Farmington, Minnesota. Playing with her
replacement Galaxy Note 7, she suddenly felt a strange burning sensation
on her hand, “like pins and needles,” she recalled, “except a lot more
intense.”
Her immediate reflex was to throw the phone on the floor—thankfully
with no more than a burn mark on her thumb. The school principal raced
forward and kicked the smoldering device out of the building.
“I’m glad it was in my hand and not my pocket,” Zuis told the media
later.
“We thought we were safe with the new phone,” her father said.—
MICHAEL KLERING AND HIS wife woke up at 4:00 A.M. in his Kentucky
home to a hissing noise. “The whole room just covered in smoke, smells
awful,” Klering told a local radio station. “I look over and my phone is on
fire.” Later that day, Klering started vomiting black fluid; he checked in to
the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with acute bronchitis.
Doctors determined that he suffered from smoke inhalation.
A Samsung representative contacted Klering and asked him to return
the Note 7. Klering refused. Then he received a text message sent
accidentally to him by a Samsung employee.
“I can try and slow him down if we think it will matter,” the text read,
“or we just let him do what he keeps threatening to do and see if he does
it.”
Klering was aghast. What the heck was going on?