Family of a former Walmart employee files lawsuit over coronavirus death

Retail giant Walmart is being sued by an estate of a worker after failing to protect an employee who died from COVID-19 complications. Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Keenan breaks down the developing story.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: I want to move on to another issue here. There is the estate of a deceased Walmart worker who died from complications from coronavirus who has now sued the retailer saying that did not adequately protect him or provide transparency. Our Alexis Keenan has been covering that story. And this is pretty intriguing, Alexis, because one might imagine that there could be more of these cases to come up. Alexis, you there with us?

ALEXIS KEENAN: OK, sorry about that, Julie. So yes, I would anticipate that there are more lawsuits to come. This one in particular was filed in Cook County, Illinois. It's a wrongful death lawsuit by a 51-year-old prior Walmart worker. His name was Wando Evans. Now, his estate has brought this suit. He died on March 25 from COVID-19. Also at that same exact location-- it's in Evergreen Park, Illinois-- another co-worker died four days after Evans died.

So certainly some problems there in that area, in that specific store. Now, this case, what it alleges is that Evans did contract the virus at work and that it's Walmart's responsibility because of some of the failures that are being alleged here. Specifically, the lawsuit says that the company failed to adopt safety measures that were recommended both by the CDC and by OSHA for what they call high volume retailers.

Those are places where it's exactly what you'd expect, where there is a lot of people coming in and out of those stores, not to mention a lot of workers. They say that Walmart did not provide workers with PPE masks, gloves, did not implement social distancing rules for its stores, for its employees, and for its customers, and didn't properly disinfect the stores, also saying that Walmart took no action to do any of these things until Evans was already deceased.

Now, in response, Walmart is telling Yahoo Finance this. They said, we neither-- while neither associate had been at the store in more than a week, we took action to reinforce cleaning and sanitizing measures, which included deep cleaning, as well as a health department inspection. The company went on then to say that it was continuing to do temperature checks for all of its employees and also providing masks and gloves.

But interestingly, they say it's only for associates that want to use them, Walmart not mandating that masks and gloves be worn by their store workers at this point. Also the company is saying that they're doing extra sanitizing for some of the high-touch surfaces. And those are things like carts, some of the food areas specifically, the store entrances, as well as the cash registers and bathrooms.

They say that they're putting in decals on the floors so that social distancing-- that six feet that we've all heard about-- can be regarded by the employees and by customers. And they're also limiting the number of customers that can actually go inside of the Walmart, though there are a couple of potential roadblocks with this case.

One would be proximate cause. How do you show that this employee-- or any others, for that matter-- actually contracted COVID-19 at work? Certainly it could have been somewhere else, as far as we know. So where is really important here. Also, worker's compensation is typically the remedy for a workplace injury, so just another problem there. But perhaps with a lot of things we've seen that are really unprecedented with this pandemic, maybe something unprecedented will happen in the courts, as well. Julie?

JULIE HYMAN: Right. We shall see. Thanks, Alexis. Appreciate it.