Karen Turner wants to know why Walmart employees told her that their bathroom stalls were unoccupied, even though they contained the body of Karen’s husband, 41-year-old airline mechanic Steven Turner. Karen needlessly spent hours searching for her husband, who went missing after dropping off his car that morning for an oil change. Walmart has yet to respond to a letter Karen sent in September. No condolences, no explanation. Nothing but silence.
Steve Turner was an airline mechanic. The day that he went to the Wal-Mart he was scheduled to work a shift beginning at about noon. He got to the store shortly before 8 a.m. and called Karen to ask if there was anything that she wanted him to pick up while he was there.
“We said that we loved each other and that was it,” she said. “Then, when I didn’t hear from him by noon, I knew something was wrong. He was never late.”
Karen went to the store and asked employees to help her search for her husband. One of the first places they checked was the bathroom. She said that a custodian had the door blocked for cleaning and told her the room was empty. She would learn later that her husband had died in one of the stalls of an aortic dissection, a weakened blood vessel that ruptured. It’s the same condition that killed actor John Ritter.
“Steve showed no signs of anything being wrong,” she said. “I was told that he probably died suddenly at 8:30 that morning.”
Karen called the police. She roamed the store for hours. But it wasn’t until 5 p.m., when another janitor mentioned that a customer seemed to be spending the afternoon in the bathroom that she rushed in and found Steve’s body.
Attorney Douglas Belknap later wrote a letter for her to Wal-Mart officials. It reads in part:
“I do not ‘represent’ Karen in the usual sense and I do not intend to file a lawsuit. Karen simply wants to make sure that someone at Wal-Mart’s corporate level understand the excruciating mental anguish she suffered as a result of almost unbelievable set of circumstances that she hopes Wal-Mart will prevent from recurring.”
The Arizona Republic contacted Walmart for comment, but like Karen, received no response.
Karen’s son is 5. She was hoping to show him correspondence from Wal-Mart when he’s older as a way of explaining what happened. It’s still possible a note of some kind will arrive.
Wal-Mart has no answers to widow’s letter [The Arizona Republic]
(Photo: chasingfun)
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Honestly…..nybody out there, what the hell else would you expect from Walmart? Would you really expect such a large entinty to respond with any respect or sympathy? Get real!
Respect and sympathy are integral to the Wal-Mart culture; if in the long term they cease to be, Wal-Mart will cease to be a large entity.
You can’t possibly expect Walmart to respond to a letter from an attorney. First they were not at fault for his death. If someone looked under my stall, I would be damn sure to be calling management and the home office. As per the wages discussed previously, don’t forget the wage differential which is in addition to the base pay, usually for work overnight (and adds $1 or more per hour).
…So did they check the wife’s receipt as they brought her husband’s corpse out the door?
Back in my youth, when I was a bagger at a grocery store, I would sweep the floors and check the bathrooms once an hour. If there was a person in the stall, I might wait a minute or two for them to finish up, but if they took longer than that, I would clean what I could and sign the sheet, I wasn’t waiting around for someone to finish expelling last night’s taco dinner. I probably would’ve gotten suspicious if I couldn’t get into the same stall for several hours in a row, but by the time I’d think to see if it was the same pair of shoes under there it would probably be someone else’s turn to sweep. My point being that, baring the first janitor saying the room was empty when it wasn’t, it isn’t too hard to see how this could have happened.
@JHoward88: Yes, because knocking on a stall door and asking “Is anybody in there?” twice over a period of a few minutes is a violation of privacy.
You’re an idiot.
Janitors aren’t going to knock on the door…if they see feet, they’ll simply ignore the stall. Walmart will create a policy which requires them to open the stall and peeps will start complaining. Seems like some folks want camera’s installed in the bathroom. You could say all the *consumers* which used the bathroom during this time simply ignored a person that was probably crying pain during his last few moments…
@causticitty: @brent_w: Noon (when the search started) to 5 pm is 5 hours.
And the story is not about how much people make at wallyworld or the crosses in the picture.
@Fry: Thanks for your wonderful and insightful wallyworld ‘isn’t at fault’ post.
@trai_dep: good call, but you were beat by cecilsaxon (or was that an homage?)
Hey…I took that picture around 3 years ago.
Sweet.
That particular Wal-Mart is in Baton Rouge, LA in case anyone’s wondering where those awesome crosses are.
I’d just like to point out, that she could have gone into the bathroom in question and found her husband herself. If she felt that he was in there, she could have pounded on the door, yelled and went in. In places where I have have been, some of the women’s restrooms were terrible, no soap, no tp, ect, so I would go into the vacant men’s room and get whatever I needed, after pounding on the door first. If it came to it, she might be asked to leave the store, but then she would have been able to sue because the janitor lied to her, and then when she tried to rectify the situation, she was asked to leave. It’s terrible what happened, and there’s no excuse for it.
Sad story… Why oh why do I continue reading Consumerist?
Could she have called his cell phone (if he had one-seems to have had one) and listened at the door of the bathroom? Unless he is one of those noodle heads who use the stock ringer she could have heard a distintive ring?
If I’m a low-paid retail employee, I’m going to shout his name and see if anyone responds. I’m not going to bother people who are currently in the process of “using” the stalls.
@jooverz: Then just stop reading consumerist, don’t post up “WHY AM I STILL READING” like an attention ho.
What I want to know is the position of the body.
Her mistake was saying she WASN’T going to sue. Wal-Mart doesn’t give a fuck about people. It only cares about the bottom line, and a grieving widow with no intention to drain the coffers isn’t a priority apparently.
I wonder how fast she gets a reply after all this bad press?
…as opposed to “don’t trust them.”
@gokor: Pretty much amounts to the same thing though doesn’t it?
If the janitor had noticed that someone, “Seemed to be spending the afternoon” in the bathroom, that would warrant some serious banging on the stall door, investigation of some kind.
I am going to have to agree with Jhoward. Walmart is not at fault. Any kind of civil suit against them would be without merit.
Janitors at any kind of establishment, even airports, will not knock on a stall door if they see that it is occupied. Period. Now, the janitor leaves and maybe checks the bathroom again. He doesn’t know who is in the stall. It could be a new person in there taking a crap. Again, the will not knock on the door.
Walmart did nothing wrong. It is a tragedy that this occurred and my condolences go out to the lady and her family.
I know WalMart is’nt at fault. But the idea of passing away at one of their stores really disturbs me. And I have this creeping sensation that a WalMart employee may have walked thru the bathroom, looked under one of the stall doors and seen this guys feet and figured it was’nt him and did’nt want to investigate further out of fear the guy really was dead. The employee would have had to fill out paperwork and talk with police and did’nt want the “hassle”.
Walmart sucked his life and soul right out his bottom, proof that Walmart is a one stop 666 shop!!
SO where do they keep the succubus’s?
@stinkingbob: Agreed! Those stalls are checked all the time, but it’s not the same person refilling the soap containers every hour for 5 hours. A better search probably could have been done, this is true, but as the woman said Steve never had any indication of a medical condition, so it probably didn’t seem that severe of a problem.
@CurbRunner: Please don’t paint it out like the employees of Walmart are just heartless bastards. Many years ago a man collapsed at my local walmart in front of the soda machine, stricken with a heart attack; everyone behind him stepped over him to refill their drinks. YEAH customers.
Most likely their legal department didn’t allow them to express condolences, for obvious reasons. WalMart’s not to blame. But at times of grief, people want to blame someone, anyone, no matter how misdirected.
“I do not ‘represent’ Karen in the usual sense and I do not intend to file a lawsuit.”
/case closed.
@goller321:
11/hr + double time on Sundays and Holidays (22/hr for 9 hours), plus time and a half over 8 hours, so add an extra 17 per day.
440 + 198 = 683
Becomes with 1.5,
525 + 198 = 723
723 a week, for 52 weeks COMES OUT TO $37,586 to all the doubters who can’t do math.
Thank you. =)
I know Karen personally, and am sickened by some of the comments. Asking if the greeter checked the receipt for Steve’s body? Sick.
Karen did not retain the lawyer, she is not paying him at all. Steve died between 8 and 8:30 and wasn’t found until 5pm…that’s 9 hours by my clock.
The cleaning lady had seen Steve in the stall throughout the day and never told anyone about it until about 4:30.
Karen is heartbroken. She lost the love of her life, her best friend and the father of her child. She had to tell her four year old son that his daddy was never coming home. The least Walmart could have done was issued a letter of condolance.
What’s Wal-Mart supposed to do?
Their business model involves hiring people with no skills at $8 an hour.
Of course they make stupid mistakes.
My advice is that if you want service that requires more than minimal intelligence, don’t shop at Wal-Mart. Target’s making a fortune by hiring people who can at least figure out some basic tasks.
Their business model may involve hiring people with limited skills, but since when is common sense a skill? When a dead man is allowed to remain in a public bathroom for 9 hours, a bathroom that should have been checked every hour, there’s something wrong.
His death was not Wal-Mart’s fault — the article clearly states that. But I think asking why a dead man sat in a public bathroom for 9 hours is a fair question and it requires a corporate response.
Wow, how quickly some of you are to place blame on Karen. How pathetic.
I also know Karen. I know how hard she searched. There are events that took place that day that were left out of the article.
True, Steve’s death was not Walmart’s fault. However, having a security/cleaning system in place that would allow a man to go undiscovered in your establishment for 9 hours IS their fault.
Make no mistake, had this been a child, he/she would have been found.
When you are told by the Manager to check the bathrooms, you are supposed to check. The employee LIED and that fact cannot be ignored.
Walmart could have and should have acknowledged Karen’s loss. Fact is they (home office and local store) ignored it.
Another thought…
What if this man had been stabbed? or was suffering some other sort of debilitating, but not immediatly lethal malady?
Would it have been any better or worse if he’d has a stroke while on the toilet and he spent the next 5 hours developing permanent brain damage?
Or bleeding all over?
Or having a heart attack?
Or any number of things that could cause him to suffer?
it doesn’t matter if he died at 8:30, 12, or 2 minutes before they found him… no one found him. and he’d been there all day.
THAT is the problem.
@Topcat:
It does not seem that Karen has done anything wrong – even having a lawyer send a letter. WalMart, on the other hand, seems to think that ingnorance is bliss. First, they ignore a person known to be in their bathroom stall for several hours. Ahm – hello – that is a definite signal that something is wrong. Management should have been informed and then investigated the matter. This would have been the right way to handle things even though there is nothing anyone could have done to save this gentleman’s life due to the nature of the medical event. Speaking of what is right, WalMart should formally respond, through their attorney, with a letter recognizing the loss to this family. There would be no harm, because – as the attorney writing Karen’s letter knows – s/he’d have to prove that this gentleman would have survived but for the inaction of WalMart employees. Again, this injury is catastrophic and it is highly unlikely that his life could have been saved. WalMart’s legal counsel should recognize this and simply send the letter.
Why – because WalMart has a larger corporate image to uphold, number one. In addition, WalMart participates in the Code Adam program, which is where a store or other public place goes on lockdown mode using a pre-set search plan immediately upon receiving a report of a missing child on corporate property. If WalMart cannot find a person in their bathroom for 9 hours – and it WAS about that – what good is their Code Adam plan?
WallyWorld – write this family a letter as soon as you learn how to write.