AUBURN – The family of a 21-year-old woman who was killed in a press accident at a Lisbon printer is suing its Japanese manufacturer.

Sharon H. Cox filed a civil suit in Androscoggin County Superior Court on behalf of her late daughter, Kayla Autumn Cox, who lived in Dixfield.

Cox died Sept. 2, 2005, after she became caught between a roll of paper and the framework of the roll stand as a new roll of paper was being spun into position, according to a report later issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Another worker had injured two fingers on the same machine earlier that year, a company spokesman had said.

Cox’s family is suing Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Inc., which made the GPX 2500 press. Cox worked at Dingley Press in Lisbon, where the 150-foot-long press prints on rolls of paper then cuts them to size and sorts them. In 2004, Dingley bought the then-7-year-old press from Perry Judd’s Inc., a Wisconsin printer.

Neither Perry Judd’s nor Dingley Press modified the press from its original design, the suit claims.

Dingley hired Cox as a so-called roll tender to work on the press, according to the suit. It was one of her duties to assist with moving the rolls of paper into place when they needed to be changed.

About 10 p.m. the day she died, she was assisting with a manual changing of the rolls when the “press started up, without warning to her, and crushed her head between a roll of paper and a beam of the press,” the suit says. She died from those injuries about 15 minutes later.

The suit claims that Mitsubishi sold a machine in “defective condition,” which made it “unreasonably dangerous” to the people who operated it during the process of printing.

Mitsubishi made a machine that was defective in its design and/or manufacture, the suit says, because:

• It didn’t have an audible signal or visual device to warn workers before the press started up and the rolls of paper began to rotate;

• It didn’t have a light shield to stop the press if a worker was in a dangerous position regarding the press;

• It had no physical barrier to protect body parts from the moving rolls in the press;

• It had a design that required the worker who operated the press controls be in a position so as not to see the worker who was changing the roll of paper on the press; and

• It lacked adequate and reasonable warning that the design of the product could cause serious personal injury and/or death during a roll change.

The suit claims that Mitsubishi represented itself as a company that made machines fit for safe operation to print magazine materials at a high rate of speed and should have had the skill and judgment to design and manufacture it correctly.

During the 15 minutes from the time Cox became caught in the machine and the time she died, she suffered conscious terror and pain, the suit says.

A jury trial was requested.