Cincinnati Restaurant Employees Find Frozen, Dead Body Of Their Coworker In Walk-In Freezer
The frozen, dead body of an employee was found inside the walk-in freezer of a popular suburban Cincinnati restaurant, WCPO-TV (Cincinnati) is reporting.
Employees of Molly Malone’s Pub, in the city’s Pleasant Ridge area, showed up to work Monday morning to find the man, identified only as being in his 20s, dead in the freezer. He appears to have frozen to death, although as of this writing, police have not officially determined a cause of death.
Cincinnati Police Sgt. Michael Bell says that it doesn’t appear that the man had been locked in the freezer — and in fact, that scenario is probably impossible (more on that in a few paragraphs). Further, there was no sign of a struggle, and nothing appears to have been stolen from the restaurant.
“At this time we don’t suspect really anything, but we can’t provide any additional information until we determine the cause.”
Authorities will not be releasing the man’s name to the public until his family has been notified, Bell said.
It is unclear, as of this writing, how or why the man wound up dead in the freezer. Despite fears to the contrary, it is almost impossible to be locked in a modern restaurant walk-in freezer. That’s because they’re manufactured specifically so that they can be easily unlocked from the inside.
Police not sure of cause of death of worker found dead in cooler at Molly Malone’s in Pleasant Ridge. @WCPO pic.twitter.com/DsbotnbTHK
— Tom Mckee WCPO (@TMckeeWCPO) July 31, 2017
What’s more, federal law requires that employees have a means of egress from a walk-in cooler or freezer.
Of course, if the employee was somehow impaired — perhaps he’d worked too long and became exhausted or stayed too long in the freezer and got confused — it’s theoretically possible that he could have simply frozen to death even though he could have easily walked outside. Another possibility is that while the employee was inside, another employee perhaps moved boxes or equipment in front of the door in such a way as to block it.
New walk in freezer installed this week ?? pic.twitter.com/dzissaLVkF
— Heritage Fine Foods (@HeritageFFC) July 18, 2017
The unidentified Cincinnati employee was, unfortunately, not the only employee to freeze to death on the job. In 2015, as the New York Daily News reported at the time, 24-year-old Chelsea Patricia Ake-Salvacion was found frozen to death in a cryogenics chamber at a Las Vegas spa. The popular spa treatment, in which patrons are subjected to below-zero temperatures, is unregulated. What’s more, the spa where the incident took place was unlicensed and has subsequently been shut down.
[Featured Image by Brent+Hathaway/Thinkstock]
