A former employee of Walmart store in Michigan claims that the company fired him this week after he stepped into a physical altercation in the store’s parking lot, and attempted to save a woman who was being physically assaulted. Oswald had worked at the store for seven weeks before he was fired.
According to the ABC affiliate WXYZ, Kristopher Oswald, 30, was taking a lunch break during an overnight shift at the Livingston County branch when he heard shouting. Oswald said he was sitting in his parked car at the time, and looked up to see a man hanging onto her car’s hood.
“I observed a person on a vehicle kinda like ‘Die Hard’ mode holding onto the hood,” he said. “But then I saw who the driver was: it was this tiny, little, blonde girl who got out and tried to force this person off of her vehicle. And she’s screaming, and he jumped off the car, grabbed her by the arms… and forced her by the car.”
At first, Oswald said he thought that the two were just joking around. But when he got closer, he realized that the woman was in physical danger. When he tried to intervene, the assailant jumped out at Oswald, punching him in the head and shouting, “I’m going to kill you.”
“I asked her, ‘Do you need help? What’s wrong?’ and the individual grabbed my hand from inside the vehicle and pulled me into the vehicle and just started pounding me with his right hand,” Oswald said.
At one point, Oswald said that he managed to get on top of his assailant, but before he knew it, two other men were attacking him from behind. Although Livingston County Sheriff deputies arrived on the scene quickly, Oswald says Walmart was less understanding, firing him for allegedly violating company policy.
The “Manager Comments” of his termination papers stated that “after a violation of company policy on his lunch break, it was determined to end [Oswald’s] temporary assignment.”
It’s not the first time a former employee has attracted public attention for alleging wrongful termination by the retail conglomerate. In July, Carla Cheney, a former employee at a Kemptville Walmart claimed that she had been fired for calling the police on a customer who left his dog parked in his car in their lot on a hot day.
Cheney claimed that when she explained the incident to her manager, he told her that there was nothing she was permitted to do about it.
"So I [told him] if I did see something unsafe, that I would just go to the police if I thought it was necessary," Cheney said. "He told me then that I was terminated, he wanted my vest, my badge, and to clean out my locker and that I needed to leave."
"The last thing I expected was to not have a job," Oswald said. "I don't even know what to put on an application about all of this. How do I say this ended?" When asked if he would have acted differently if he had known that his actions would lead to firing, Oswald responded, “I would always do the right thing.”
Walmart Employee Kristopher Oswald Fired For 'Violating Company Policy' After Helping Assaulted Woman
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