Dying In A Walmart Oven
Anything to see in the case of Gursimran Kaur?
This case happened in October up in Halifax. Gursimran Kaur was 19 years old. She had moved to Canada from India with her mom; both worked at Walmart. Kaur was found deceased inside the bread oven at said Walmart. As soon as this case became a news item, suddenly TikTok (where else?) exploded with lots of theories from current and former Walmart staffers about Walmart bread ovens — notably, of course, that you can exit easily from the inside (unless the safety latch jams). Also, many people came out and said that Walmart procedure is that you open the door to the oven, wait some time (30 minutes or more), and then clean it with a hose as you stand outside of it — so, in that scenario, you’d have no reason to even enter the oven at all except maybe to periodically grab trays of bread.
This video covers most of the theories and borrows pretty heavily from Reddit:
Now, let’s start with two basic realities:
This is a horrible way to die, and pretty much all horrible ways to die create conspiracy theories of some sort.
Whenever people post on Reddit or X and claim “I worked at that Walmart and let me tell you…,” just take it with a grain of salt, because oftentimes it’s faceless people looking for Internet attention.
All that said, this case is vaguely interesting from afar. Halifax police said seven days ago that it’s “not foul play,” and I’ll take that at their word. It was, in all likelihood, just a terrible accident — or maybe she entered the oven and had a seizure or some other episode and couldn’t get out. Weird stuff happens in the world every day.
One immediate take is “Mom is guilty,” and/or (probably because they’re Indian and we don’t understand other cultures super well) “honor killing.” We know it couldn’t be the father or brother, as they’re both in India — and apparently still trying to get to Canada to see the mom. Since the mom and daughter both worked at this Walmart, maybe they had a blow-up and that's what happened here. Apparently, it’s standard practice for Walmart to not put cameras in the bread oven area, even though they have cameras almost everywhere else, usually to prevent employees from stealing. I guess Walmart doesn’t care about stealing bread. Hmmm. OK. Do I think it’s the mom? No. But that theory floats in the ether for sure.
It took about four weeks for the police to say “This isn’t foul play,” and I would imagine during those four weeks they talked to every single employee at that location about their relationship with the decedent. Once they had done that and thought “OK, there’s no beef here, even though we lack video of the actual area,” they probably felt safe to declare it an accident. (Maybe something in the autopsy too, obviously.) I’m sure they had to check out every potential beef with a colleague that could have led to something this awful.
I would still lean accident, just because that’s the most logical place a brain can land on something like this, but the safety latch thing does get me. Unless the latch was utterly jammed, it would have to be a pretty insane accident that disabled her from getting to the door or reaching for her phone (assuming it wasn’t locked up) and calling for help from within.
What’s your take on this one?