By Michael Tutton
A Sikh organization says the body of a 19-year-old employee was found in a Walmart bakery oven on Saturday by her mother — a co-worker at the Halifax store.
The Maritime Sikh Society on Thursday identified the victim as Gursimran Kaur, a Sikh woman originally from India. She was “a young beautiful girl who came to Canada with big dreams,” says an online fundraising page organized by the society.
Kaur had immigrated to Canada with her mother about two years ago. Balbir Singh, secretary of the society, said Kaur’s mother is still suffering from shock but she authorized the release of information about her daughter for the GoFundMe page.
The fundraising drive says the mother became frantic after her daughter didn’t answer her phone during the Saturday night shift. The mother, whose name was not released, eventually opened the walk-in bakery oven at the store and found her daughter’s burned body, it says.
The fundraiser, which had amassed more than $132,000 as of 4 p.m., requests donations to bring Kaur’s father and brother from the Punjab region of India to Nova Scotia for the funeral. “This family’s sufferings are unimaginable and indescribable. They need your support to get through this horrific time,” it says.
A spokeswoman from Walmart said the company has no further comment on the matter as a criminal investigation is underway.
Halifax Regional Police have said they are still attempting to determine the cause and manner of the young woman’s death and have said the investigation is “complex” and could be lengthy. In an emailed statement Thursday, police said they “have no new information to share with the public.”
In an interview, Singh said the mother is receiving psychological counselling, wants answers about how her daughter could die in an oven and no one know about it until she started searching for her.
“She (the mother) is not in a state where she wants all of this to be hushed up,” he said. “She is telling everyone that she wants justice for her daughter.”
In a radio broadcast between an emergency dispatcher to firefighters on the night of the incident, the dispatcher said, “A female is locked in an oven in the bakery,” and that the “oven was on and it’s unsure if staff are able to turn it off.”
Another voice comes on the transmission to say that the young woman had been removed from the oven by the time first responders reached the scene.
According to police, officers went to the store at about 9:30 p.m. on the night of Kaur’s death.
Simardeep Hundal, a former president of the Sikh society who also met with the mother, said in an interview she helped to organize the fundraiser after learning details of how her daughter died.
“It’s horrifying. I really, really cannot describe in words what she (the mother) endured at the time,” Hundal said.
Craig Walsh, president of the eastern provinces council of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, said in an interview Thursday that the death raises workplace safety questions. Workers at the Mumford Road store were not unionized.
Walsh said that if homicide is ruled out, then a thorough investigation is needed into the safety practices of the store and whether adequate inspections were carried out by the Labour Department.
“There’s obviously a lot we don’t know, but there’s usually a lot of safety protocols in place for equipment like this. But the safety protocols only work if they’re checked on later and verified that they’re still operating.”
Sarah MacNeil, a spokeswoman for the Labour Department, said the department is continuing its investigation. She noted that the province’s occupational health and safety regulations require that “all devices used in workplaces must be operated in accordance with manufacturer’s specifications.”
She said over the last five years, labour investigators have conducted nine inspections at the Walmart on Mumford Road. “No enforcement action was taken following those inspections … no orders or administrative penalties were issued,” she wrote in an email.
