Posted on 08/31/2024 5:15:13 AM PDT by Morgana
A 60-year-old Arizona Wells Fargo employee scanned into her office on a Friday on what appeared to be an ordinary workday. Then, four days later, she was found dead in her cubicle.
Denise Prudhomme, 60, was found dead on Aug. 20 in her office in Tempe, police said.
She had last scanned in the building at 7 a.m. on Aug. 16, a Friday, and there was no further scan in or out of the office, authorities said.
Tempe police responded to the Wells Fargo office in the 1100 block of West Washington Street after on-site security called about an employee they believed to be dead. She was pronounced dead at 4:55 p.m., police said.
The cause of death is pending determination by the Maricopa County medical examiner. Police said the preliminary investigation showed no obvious signs of foul play.
The investigation continues.
It's not clear how Prudhomme had gone unnoticed for so long. NBC affiliate KPNX of Phoenix reported that she worked in a cubicle on the third floor, away from the main aisle.
An employee who spoke with KPNX on the condition of anonymity said that a colleague found her at her desk while walking around the building and that several people had smelled a foul odor but believed it to be faulty plumbing.
Wells Fargo confirmed she sat in an underpopulated area of the building.
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague, Denise Prudhomme. Our thoughts are with her family and loved ones, and we are in contact to ensure they are well supported during this difficult time,” the company said in a statement Thursday.
It said that it is "committed to the safety and wellness of our workforce" and that it is "reviewing our own internal procedures after this event."
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Came in on a Friday. Died on Friday. Was ignored over the weekend (Sat-Sunday). Discovered Monday.
Now? All we can do is pray for her soul, her family. (If she had one - Many of today’s California-office-lifestyle women have killed their babies, left their former (or never had) husbands, do not keep in contact with any family still living.)
Note that not did her workers on that floor not notice she died, her boss, her boss’s boss, AND her family did not notice she died. Sad.
Which doesn’t really change that a lot of that time nobody was in the building. And who knows how many people were in the building even during work hours. Post shut downs a lot of places are mostly empty most of the time. I go to the office every day, but Mondays and Fridays I’m one of about 6 people. There’s a sales guy that comes in, but nobody sits in his area that has nobody else coming in at all. Unless janitorial says something he could be dead for weeks and nobody would know. One of the other regulars sits next to me, so we’re OK. This is no longer a world of teaming full offices. Many offices have become cabins in the woods, secluded and empty.
A very sad story. Sixty is way too young to go. It’s easy to become sedentary and overlooked working in a cubicle.
I wonder if she was one of the “essential” employees? Meaning, the work she did required her to be onsite. I wonder if someone noticed her car but was not responding to emails?
Do welfare checks typically include visiting the employee’s workspace and all restrooms across the campus?
Did she go on a hiking team building exercise with her team mates.
Something tells me a new policy will be to have every employee give a contact number and have the boss call if they’re 4 hours late on any given day. Intrusive but it might be proper. I’m sure the left would be happy to pass a law mandating it.
Denise Prudhomme, 60, was found dead on Aug. 20 in her office.
The 20th is a Tuesday.
Same. Tuesdays - Thursdays typically see @ 70% office occupancy on those three days @ my employer. Fridays and Monday's the place is a ghost town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Vincent
Joyce Carol Vincent (19 October 1965 – December 2003) was an English woman whose death went unnoticed for more than two years.
Neighbours had assumed the flat was unoccupied, and the odour of decomposing body tissue was attributed to nearby waste bins.
You're exactly correct. I've had four co-workers who were found dead in their homes when they didn't show up in-office or online after a few days.
One was found in bed (died in his sleep), two at their desks in their home offices and one on the floor in her kitchen. All four empty nesters and divorced/not married.
As a divorced empty-nester myself, it's one of my fears that I'll pass away @ home and no one will notice for awhile. Many of us are 55+ and have started our own informal network of checking up on each other daily to make sure we're ok. If we don't see each other for a day we know to do a health & wellness check so at least someone finds the body reasonably soon.
Kinda a morbid outlook there, but it's the reality we live in now.
It was only after her bank accounts ran out of money that the landscaping stopped that her property became overgrown and the lights didn't come on every day because the electricity got shut off that someone asked "has anyone seen so-and-so lately?" and the local PD did a health & welfare check. They had to force their way into the home and found her mummified body in a rocking chair.
Wish I knew how to search & find that article. It was a fascinating read into how we all don't really pay attention to our neighbors anymore.
My branch bank has become a mausoleum.
Before the scamdemic it always had at least three tellers any time of day.
Three people in the lobby at desks to handle questions.
Drive thru had at least two, sometimes four tellers to handle four different lanes.
I don’t give it another year.
Last time I was there it had one at desk, one walk-in teller and one drive thru teller.
The whole episode not that surprising. The dimwits who blamed the foul odor on plumbing and didn’t investigate to see if it really was a plumbing issue are very poor workers.
Who doesn’t care if a pile o’ poop is in their workspace?
Sounds like they run a tight ship.
One of my old employers paid double the death benefit off the group life if the employee died on the job. One coworker there said she'd told her still-at-home adult children to take her in to work and prop her up at her desk if she died at home.
Things are bad indeed. Cause even if you live with someone, they may be not helping you survive. Plenty of stories about toxic live in mates.
The card scanner system should have had a function enabled to alert security and management if a card was scanned in for over X hours and not scanned out.X being a variable set according to overtime policy.
All too many security officers are poorly trained,lazy,and incompetent.So building checks are too often cursory rather than thorough.
I know because of working with and attempting to train such people.
And it is mostly about money; security is seen as “non-productive” expense by the client so chooses the low bidder. The low bidder hires mostly people desparate for a paycheck but pays low wages and gives minimal training.Not only those things but I have been sent persons grossly obese or with other issues that in reality prevented them from making the required patrols of the grounds or buildings.Others could not,or would not, learn and remember fairly simple duties.
Better pay,much better training,more scructiny and careful selection and a philosophy of firm but compassionate continual improvement in job performance are all needed.
I have seen too many times that the only accomplished purpose of training documents was obtaining the employee signature,regardless of the training absorbed or even given.
People get so excited when they hear she was dead for four days. They don’t know anything about how the office was laid out, or how many cubicles were actually in use. She went in on Friday. She was there over the weekend when nobody else would have seen her. That’s almost three of the four days. Then all of the people working from home wouldn’t have noticed her and only the people who were there would have any idea that someone had died in the office, and that would be because they would smell her. But let me post an entirely unimportant screed about how Wells Fargo is negligent because an employee had a heart attack or stroke on a Friday and nobody noticed.
LOL! It does help to check the calendar doesn’t it?
I have worked with people that it would have taken longer to notice. The level of work would performed not have been much different.
Died suddenly?
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