The horrible death of Walmart worker Gursimran Kaur probably wasn’t an accident. Investigating authorities aren’t saying a word about anything. Walmart employees, meanwhile, are vocally insisting that there is no way to lock yourself in their walk-in oven. There are too many safety features.
Worker death mystery
The death of Walmart worker Gursimran Kaur is much more of a mystery than a run of the mill preventable accident. Her unidentified mother was the one to discover her charred remains.
Both were employees of the retail giant in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That’s in Canada. The women recently moved there from India.
The mother’s story is that she went looking for her 19-year-old daughter and couldn’t find her. She claims walking around the store asking one worker after another if they had seen her. For over an hour.
Nobody had and didn’t make a big deal about it, either. She was probably helping a customer, they suggested. She wasn’t.
Mom eventually “found her ‘charred remains‘ inside” the industrial baking oven. That explains why her phone was “not reachable.” It’s not clear what led the mother to check inside the oven. A Walmart worker in another location was quick to point out that “it doesn’t make any sense.”
She made a video for social media explaining how the oven works. It apparently takes a considerable amount of force to close and latch the door. Then another latch needs to be engaged. Besides that, there is a safety lock on the inside.
Didn’t close by itself
“This door does not close by itself,” Mary notes. “It doesn’t latch. It’s designed not to do that. You have to push it, hear the click.” From inside, the worker demonstrated the safety release. All you have to do is push the emergency release. Other associates on social media pointed out that the inside release is made of metal which gets hot.
Burning your hand if you don’t have a piece of clothing to use as a pot holder is a small price to pay. It’s much better than roasting.
The worker wasn’t about to play detective. “I’m not trying to theorize or form a conspiracy, it’s just hard to wrap my head around it when Walmart’s bakery ovens are so safe to use,” she declared. That video has 3.6 million views and counting.
It sparked “an outpouring of responses from other Walmart employees across the nation, who agreed that the oven should not have been able to close easily.”
Police are investigating Kaur’s death but haven’t classified it as an accident or homicide, yet. The superstore shut down for a full week following the tragedy. According to the dispatch call transcript released by the police, the call came in of a “female employee locked in an oven in the bakery.”
Dispatch observed “Oven is on. Unsure if staff are able to turn it off.” A fundraising appeal has been set up for the family of the worker, a member of the Sikh community. “This family’s sufferings are unimaginable and indescribable” the Maritime Sikh Society notes in a statement.