Add The California Post on Google A Southern California supermarket is facing backlash after allegedly keeping its doors open for hours with a dead shopper lying in the bakery aisle — all in the name of business.
The shocking incident unfolded July 5 at a Vons in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Granada Hills, where a customer died inside the store. Rather than closing, store management reportedly continued serving shoppers as the body remained in the bakery section for hours.
Grocery employee Paszion Horner-Smith — who was working as a supervisor when the customer suffered a medical emergency — got choked up when recalling what happened.
“How can anybody do that,” Horner-Smith told CBS LA. “I mean the lack of empathy is just horrible. It is horrific.”
She and another employee tried to give the person CPR but said it was too late.
Horner-Smith said she then got a call from her managers at corporate who saw the body in a surveillance video and was told they needed to block the body.
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She said they were instructed to cover it using carts while the doors stayed open.
“I’m being called by someone in corporate because they’re looking at the cameras, telling me that I need to barricade the body by using carts,” Smith said.
Shoppers kept filling their carts with cold cuts, bread and groceries — all while a dead customer remained in the bakery aisle.
The grim scene dragged on for four hours as the victim’s grieving family was forced to wait inside the store for the mortuary to arrive, according to grocery supervisor Horner-Smith, who said the company should have handled the tragedy differently.
“Poor family that’s just sitting there,” Horner-Smith said. “They can’t even see their loved one.”
“They can’t touch their loved one. They sat in the store for four hours while people continued to shop around their deceased loved one.”
The UFCW Local 770 President Kathy Finn reached out to Von’s parent company Albertsons about the store’s protocols for such a situation, but told the outlet she had not heard back.
Albertson’s company also had yet to respond to the news outlet by the time of the report.
The California Post has reached out to the grocery supermarket company for more information about the store’s policies and if they were followed that night.
