Posted on 07/12/2026 4:00:21 AM PDT by DFG
Workers at a Granada Hills Vons said their managers kept the grocery store open for hours with a customer's dead body lying in an aisle.
Paszion Horner-Smith said she was working as a supervisor on July 5 when one of her customers suffered a medical emergency in the supermarket's bakery aisle.
"It's just something I've never, ever in my 27 years that I've worked for the company, ever encountered or dealt with," she said.
Horner-Smith and another employee performed CPR, but the customer died.
The Los Angeles Fire Department said crews were called to the store just after 7 p.m. that night for a report of a cardiac arrest.
Horner-Smith said her corporate managers told her to cover the body with carts and umbrellas while the store remained 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," she said.
Horner-Smith said the customer's family stayed at the store for four hours until a mortuary removed their loved one from the store.
"This 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."
UFCW Local 770 President Kathy Finn said she contacted the Albertson's labor relations department after learning about the incident. She said the company has not responded to her questions about protocols for handling a customer's death in the store. The union urged the company to review its emergency policies.
"This situation is just one incident of that kind of callous attitude towards the needs of the workers," Finn said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Why the heck doesn’t the local EMS remove the body? And the mortuary pick it up from the closest hospital morgue?
The family had all rights to that person. The store had none. Their obligation was to call 9-11...
4 hours to get a body. It’s LA baby. Thanks Karen Bass
Forget it Jack......it’s los angeles.
In 2000 a friend’s dad died the same way at home depot on a Saturday morning. One minute apparently felt fine, next minute he just collapsed and died.
Of course in my city and state, a body isn’t going to lie there for 4 friggin’ hours. SMH
Most stores have pallet jacks. They could have at least rolled the stiff on to one and rolled it out next to a dumpster out back.
“Clean-up in aisle 5.”
(5 minutes later)
“Medical examiner in aisle 5.”
CC
Exactly.
No policy overrides calling 9-11 and human kindness to the family.
Vons has ingredients for afterlife.
Reminds me of when high rise Hyatt Hotels had a designated Blanket Girl. She/he was the person who covered a body with a blanket after a visitor jumped to their death in the atrium.
“Horner-Smith said her corporate managers told her to cover the body with carts and umbrellas while the store remained open.” TCB, taking care of business.
Their cinnamon buns are to die for.
It’s Los Angeles - life has no worth and dad bodies to walk around or step over are the norm....hopefully the manager and someone at “Corporate” are lout of jobs. I can’t believe the family members didn’t tell them to go to Hell and get authorities there while protecting the body of their loved one.
A lot of macabre jokes about golf and players dying and other players playing around the body and EMTs.
” callous attitude towards the needs of the workers “
... workers ...
What a good little communist Ms Finn is.
We’re talking third-world dystopia here.
No excuse why the body should remain in the store for some four hours. I was an EMT for more than 20 years and in a CPR case we would have transported the patient to the hospital where they would officially be declared deceased.
Had a neighbor fall over stone cold dead while grocery shopping. Relatively young, in his 40s, died from an aneurism. I don’t think they left him lying there though.
He was Vietnamese, had 3 daughters, no relatives stateside, the gos had to move to Vietnam , which is where their mother was. I’m sure that would have been a culture shock.
The girls, not sure where gos come from. The girls would all be in their 40’s now.
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