Are we sure she wasn’t already dead and someone stashed her body in the oven? Seems like a clever way to hide time of death.
I don’t think this is an oven accident.
That’s certainly what I was thinking; that foul play was involved.
Man, I’ve been in some rough Wal-Mart stores, but straight-up murder?
I’m far more convinced - with nothing to go on here besides my knowledge of human nature, industrial accidents, safety regulations, the safety mechanisms on dangerous machinery, and the non-failsafe aspect of all of those things - that ^^ or something similar is way more likely to have been the cause.
It seems very plausible to me: employee cleaning in an enclosed space, then passing out from the fumes, someone else looking in the oven doesn’t see anyone standing while not looking down, door gets closed, victim dies from asphyxiation or heat.
When I was at the baking school we toured a huge commercial bakery. I saw a dough mixer nearly the size of a coffin. There were two switches to turn it on and it was explained that both needed to be further apart than the span of the fingers on a hand. You needed to use both hands at the same time to engage. This was so that it couldn’t be paused and have someone reach inside and adjust things, and possibly getting dragged in.
I’ve worked in many places that had a walk in freezer, but none that had a walk in oven. There was no lockout/tag out device on the freezer, but there was always a push knob that you could activate in case the door was closed behind you.
I used to suffer from bad allergies / hay fever, and sometimes it was great to go in there.
It was a half-baked murder plan, they were just trying to finish it properly.
I’ve also been to factories that produce baked goods for some of the biggest household names in the world and they’re dangerous as heck. The mixers, silos (explosive and suffocation risks!), ovens, washdown burns/slides and conveyers that are sort of bakery/food specific are in addition to the usual factory hazards of trucks, forklifts, overhead lifting work, machinery pinches, tall aisles, low lighting, etc.
But a retail Walmart is pretty well cleared of industrially dangerous hazards. There is a forklift or two, a cardboard baler, trash/dumpster compactor, maybe some things in the auto shop?, certainly toxics in the pharmacy and elsewhere but a pretty safe both as a workplace and an overall public place. This is not the type of environment a deadly oven can easy exist.
I worked in a commercial bakery, though it was on a modest scale, but it had a big Hobart mixer that spun at a ferocious rate, and the head baker was careful to only use it at higher speed when there were multiple people around, and he would occasionally remind us where the big red stop button was.
We didn’t have roll-in ovens, just roll-in proof boxes, but the thing that’s confusing me is that the oven would even be on. You wouldn’t turn it on without rolling a rack into it (they don’t need pre-heating AFAIK), so why was it on? I do wonder if it was a prank (“haha I’ll turn this on for a minute”) gone horribly wrong, but I guess there’s also some more benign possibilities than that.
They don’t mix dough at Walmart nor do most places that bake like pizzas joints, Panera, Subway, grocers. In fact, the French-sounding baguette that’s fresh baked in my neighborhood market and sold for $1.99, all hot and steamy, is quietly imported. From Canada, frozen.
But yes, even those big uprights can be deadly in an instant. Catch a sleeve or scarf…
lazy bastards!
ETA: well, confession, we also got in a lot of frozen dough, but then we’d repurpose basic bread dough in the mixer to make other breads, or we’d cut it with a bench knife and hand-roll rolls (I used to be able to do that with both hands at once).
I could do four at once. Had to take off my shoes…
:flees:
From Ace Bakery, probably. I love their baguettes. What they ship to stores (apparently now all over North America) is frozen partially baked loaves. It’s a great idea because when the store finishes the baking, the result is fresh-baked bread of much higher quality than the normal products of most grocery store bakeries. The Ace baguettes I buy are often still warm and absolutely delicious.
No wonder your legs are Jello…
ETA: hey, I followed my ellipsis with a goddamned period like yer supposed to, why is it showing as 3, not 4?
Almost forty years ago, I worked at Chuck E Cheese making pizza and I think we made the dough daily in one of those big Hobart mixers and then rolled out the rounds in a roller machine.
Only one leg. Want a cookie?
A Walmart employee posted a TikTok showing that it was basically impossible to get locked into one of those ovens if you have any physical capacity to get out. It was subsequently deleted, but of course the internet is forever; someone on Twitter has saved it.
Has anyone suspected suicide yet? Crazy way to go but turning it on and sitting down inside when no one is around is a pretty straight forward way to end it all.
And if she was suicidal in the past it would make sense that her mother panicked from her simply not immediately answering her phone.
I think that’s what almost everybody suspects, but it’s not something that should be openly speculated until all other possibilities have been explored.