If anyone has a Walmart horror story, it is P.K. Shader. The 70-year-old woman claimed that she was beaten senseless by a teenage Walmart employee after the pair got into a verbal argument. Shader, who is white, claims that she was punched in the face repeatedly by the teen employee, who is Black, while no one decided to intervene to help the old woman defend herself from the attacking worker, who was outraged at how Shader was treating her.
Now, Shader wants to encourage witnesses to risk their safety and step in to defend someone if they witness a Walmart employee attacking a customer. She wants to share her story with as many people as possible to spread awareness around safety issues at Walmart locations across the country – and not just at her preferred location in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.
After the alleged attack, police responded to a call around 7 pm that the elderly woman had been punched in the head several times by an angry Walmart worker. Although Shader suffered injuries to her head and face, she did not require any medical attention when the police arrived. Instead, she simply wanted the cops to arrest the Walmart worker and throw her in the back of the squad car with her hands cuffed.
The employee was a seventeen-year-old cashier named Jazareia Velasquez. The attack allegedly occurred after Shader asked Velasquez to get her manager so she could report a negative interaction that she had just had with the cashier. Shader was causing quite the stir while waiting for her cashier to check her out – and even tried to snap a picture of the Walmart employee without her consent.
“She went crazy. She flew, and she punched me, fist right here [in the face] over and over again,” Shader said. “I’m never walking into Walmart again, that’s for sure.”
Police were forced to side with Shader after she told them what had happened. The elderly woman had suffered several blows to the head and face. Velasquez was subsequently arrested and charged with aggravated assault of an elderly person as well as disorderly conduct.
Shader said that the attack was not the most surprising thing she experienced that day at the Wisconsin Walmart. Instead, she claimed that the most surprising thing was that no one stepped in to stop the attack from happening – even though coworkers “knew” that the seventeen-year-old cashier had a bad temperament, according to Shader.
“What if it was your grandmother? What if it was your mother?… The managers knew she was a loose cannon. The first manager said nothing. The second one told me so. So, why did they keep an employee like that? That’s a bigger problem than not having security,” said Shader.
Shader is currently recovering from the attack. But she wants people to listen to her and step in to stop this type of thing from happening to other old people shopping at Walmarts.
She added: “I just want to tell people: ‘Pull out your phone. Give somebody a break.’ No one’s asking you to dive in and be hurt, but pull out your phone and document it and yell, ‘Call the police.’”