Baked to Death

Walmart Worker Fatally Burned in Walmart Oven

Photo by Mike Mozart / CC BY 2.0 / Cropped from original

On Oct. 19, Gursimran Kaur was burned alive when she was trapped inside an industrial oven in a Walmart store in Halifax, New Scotia, Canada.

Kaur was a 19-year-old Walmart worker. She had been working for Walmart for two years alongside her mother. Her mother started to become worried when she didn’t see her daughter in the store for an hour and her cell phone was unreachable. Eventually, her mother opened the door to the walk-in oven and saw her charred remains.

“This was really sad,” freshmen Tucker Couch said. “It's a terrible way to go, burning alive.”

The bakery’s large walk-in oven was active when Kaur became trapped. Staff members tried to turn off the equipment, but she was dead before emergency services arrived. Flowers were placed in the store’s parking lot to honor her.

“It sounds like a dumb thing to have a walk-in oven,” Latin teacher Kristen Youngblood said. “Perhaps they should have better regulations on things like that. I’m guessing someone probably pushed her in.”

Not much is known about why she was trapped. The Halifax Regional Police is currently organizing an investigation with help from the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety and the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner Service. The investigation will be complex and lengthy due to the situation.

“I don’t even know how that could have happened,” freshmen Marshall Rosenberg said. “That is crazy.”

A GoFundMe page recently set up by the Maritime Sikh Society, which Kaur belonged to, has garnered about $200,000 to ease the financial burdens of her family. One of the donation requests on the GoFundMe page includes plane tickets for Kaur’s father and brother to travel from Punjab, India to Canada for the funeral. Although the mother is receiving psychological counseling, she is actively participating in interviews and speaking out about her daughter who needs justice. The bakery is currently closed to allow for investigations.

“We are heartbroken and our deepest thoughts are with our associate and their family,” a Walmart spokesperson said. “Our focus remains on taking care of our associates and making sure they have the support they need.”