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”