A restaurant owner was found deceased in a walk-in cooler, but not for reasons one might expect. You can read the full article here, and I’ll provide a quick summary below.
- An electrical outage prompted the restaurant to fill the cooler with dry ice to prevent spoilage
- The button for exiting the cooler from the inside had been broken for some time
- One of the owners went to check on the food at an unusual time, because he was worried it might be spoiling
- No one was scheduled to be at the restaurant for many hours after his visit, which was closed due to the power outage
- He triggered an alarm, but police treated it as a false alarm when the restaurant appeared closed and locked
- He was overcome by the carbon dioxide fumes when he could not exit the cooler and died
The case includes:
- A minor incident (power outage) prompting unusual behavior (use of dry ice, checking on the food in the evening)
- Failure to maintain safety equipment (the exit button)
- Questionable design of safety equipment (Why use a button instead of a door handle?)
- Response bias to a likely “false alarm”