Bar Owner Charged With Manslaughter for Letting Customer Take 56 Shots
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The owner of a French bar is facing charges of “manslaughter by willful neglect” after a patron took 56 shots of liquor in one night to break the establishment’s posted record. The 57-year-old drinking champ later died at home of a heart attack, and his daughter says the bar owner had been cheering him on.
According to France’s Local, the competition went down last October at a Clermont-Ferrand bar called Le Starter. The customer, a 57-year-old man named Renaud, was reportedly already 14 shots in when he decided to challenge the record, and started off his run by consuming 30 in a single minute. Some of the “shooters” were mixed, not straight liquor, but by the time he broke the record of 55, he’d still gone through about a liter of alcohol.
A lawyer for the bar owner says the owner told Renaud he should stop, and that patrons are responsible for their own drinking decisions. The dead man’s daughter counters that the record was posted on a blackboard in the bar, and that the owner whispered to Renaud during the challenge, “only 12 more to go.”
“It is not known whether he would still be alive if he had not drunk the last 12 shots, but by making down those last shots, he was left with no chance,” said the daughter’s lawyer, Antoine Portal, according to the Local.
Google Street View photos of the bar from 2013 show several blackboards, but a shot record doesn’t appear to have been posted back then.