Bit of a mystery here:
“Foul play is not suspected.”
One senses that certain lawyers who are featured on billboards in the area have already contacted the next of kin.
The headline says she was ‘crammed inside’ the freezer. Which doesn’t jive with ‘no foul play is suspected’. Further into the article it says that it doesn’t appear she was ‘forced’ into the freezer. I’m guessing she was just ‘in’ the freezer and maybe the freezer and whoever wrote the headline added the word ‘crammed’
It also says she was naked. So, assuming the police are correct and there’s no foul play, that makes me think it’s drugs/alcohol or a mental issue.
Even ignoring the lack of clothing part, the freezer can be (should be able to be) opened from the inside, suggesting she didn’t try to get out.
Somehow, I’m skeptical about there being a non-foul play explanation for a body in a grocery store freezer, especially if the deceased was not an employee of the store (thus would have no good reason to be in an area larger than the customer-side door to the shelves).
I too am moderately skeptical of no-foul-play.
But if one was suicidal, entering a commercial walk-in freezer near closing time and removing one’s clothes would be a non-messy non-violent way to do that. Adding some preparatory relaxing drugs might help one’s resolve.
Ending up curled in the fetal position would be expected. And when the frozen = rigid body is later extracted from the spacious freezer, the body’s posture can certainly suggest “crammed” to somebody who only saw them outside the freezer. Such as whichever store employee presumably said that word to some reporter.
Or the reporter simply assumed a small home-type freezer, not a large walk-in. There’s no way to put an adult into a home size freezer that doesn’t amount to “crammed”.
Mental health issues.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that customers regularly walk into the backroom of stores. And I’m not talking about wandering back there by mistake, I’m talking about people that, for example, will walk past the cashier, past multiple employees and walk right into the backroom to ask someone where the milk is.
I keep saying, and only half joking, that I want to put up a sign at the door that says “No matter what your question is, please ask the cashier first”. But they already ignore the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign, so why would they pay attention to this one.
I’ve had customers walk in the back door, after closing, because they want to buy something.
In any case, I’m guessing that’s not what happened here, just that it’s probably not entirely unusual to see a customer in the back room. Also, it’s not like we never have non-employees in the backroom. It’s possible someone saw her and thought it was a vendor or some other person that, even though they don’t recognize, is allowed to be back there.
From what I understand, Dollar Tree stores are very very under-staffed. By (greedy) design.
Were the body found clothed, I could see someone entering a walk-in seeking the merchandise in there, and only too late discovering the inside door handle was broken. Or needed some tricky fiddling the employees knew but they did not.
A Doper who works in a restaurant kitchen recently had that happen to them when the door mechanism failed just after they went in to get [whatever]. Fortunately the rest of the crew was at work and noticed them missing in just a few minutes. But it was a scary few minutes.
The combo of found naked and was seen walking around the store freely under their own power earlier and no sign of restraints on the body (that anyone has told the public) sure smells like a suicide.
OTOH …
I just recalled reading of something where frozen bodies are sometimes found naked in very unexpected circumstances. It seems that something in human physiology alters their perception of hot and cold when they’re near freezing to death. Such that in their terminal delerium they remove their clothes, believing themselves to be hot.
If that happened here, that really re-opens the accidental, not suicidal, angle.
No one expects to find a dead body at the Dollar Tree…
…especially not at that price point.
Another reason to avoid the place. IMHO
But, poor lady. She must’ve had some real problems.
Yep. I’ve only heard of it with respect to hypothermia victims out in the wilderness, but Wikipedia’s article on hypothermia has an entire section about it.
If you haven’t priced a human skeleton anatomical model recently, they’re amazingly expensive.
To get one at Dollar Tree would be quite a bargain. Some disassembly and reassembly required.
Possibly some similarity to this case?
That’s interesting because every walk-in I’ve used (and it’s quite a few, when I was working in a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility) has a knob on the inside. Turn it until it comes off, and the whole latching mechanism disconnects from the door, letting you out. I assumed this was required,
All I know it they discovered the hard way that the inside door opening mechanism was broken. If there is some more detailed backup emergency egress procedure they didn’t know it.
Once released, the restaurant management arranged for a refrigerator repairman and until they arrived workers had to use the fridge in pairs; one inside getting [whatever] and one holding the door from the outside.
The magical backroom, larger than the inside of a dozen tardis? Where every merchandise item resides?
And a bathroom. 
How many turns does it take to disconnect the latching mechanism? If it takes a lot of turns, I could understand a regular person not figuring it out. They might think it’s like a regular doorknob which just takes a 1/2 a turn to open the door. If it needs to be turned many times to completely unscrew it, that would be non intuitive to most people. Most people would think it’s like a doorknob and would be hesitant to unscrew it completely.
The ones I’ve seen are a large knob, sorta like the handle on an outside hose bib. It definitely takes several turns as you’re removing a bolt that’s a couple inches long and I’m sure there are different styles.
as I said, I assumed they were a safety requirement but don’t know that for a fact.
Or this one?