On Sunday, August 7th, employees at a Texas Wal-Mart murdered a man for shoplifting some diapers and a BB gun. Well… to be fair, he was also taking a pair of sunglasses and a package of BBs. The terrible economic loss that Wal-Mart will suffer from these goods certainly justifies the torture and death of a 2-month-old boy’s father.

Before I cave in to temptation and start ranting about how our culture values material goods over living things (er… too late), let’s go over the details of the event, just for those of you who haven’t heard. A 30-year-old man named Stacy Clay Driver pilfered some stuff from the Atascocita Wal-Mart. A bunch of employees spotted him and chased him out into the parking lot. Three of them caught Driver, “who twisted and turned until his shirt came off.” “Four or five” of them tackled him to the ground. And held him there.

The high temperature that day at a nearby airport was 96 degrees Fahrenheit. The employees held him, facedown, chest naked, on scorching blacktop. They held him down for eight minutes while he pleaded and begged to be let up, while a crowd of around 30 people gathered and pleaded with the employees to show some mercy.

“About 30 people were saying, ‘Let him up, it’s too hot,’ ” Portz said. He said another employee brought a rug for Driver to lie on, but one of those holding Driver said he was fine where he was. “After about five minutes, (Driver) said, ‘I’m dying, I can’t breathe, call an ambulance,’ ” Portz said.
….
After Driver was handcuffed, Portz said one employee had his knee on the man’s neck and others were putting pressure on his back.
“Finally the guy stopped moving” and the employees got off him, Portz said. “They wouldn’t call an ambulance.
“I looked at him and said, ‘Hey, he’s not breathing,’ but one guy told me (Driver) was just on drugs. I told them his fingernails were all gray, and finally they called an ambulance.”

Once Driver was already under control and in handcuffs, there was no reason to not take him back into the store and have him wait for the cops to show up. Instead, these employees sadistically tortured the man for eight full minutes until he died of cardiac arrest. They couldn’t have known that it didn’t hurt him: Driver asked them to call an ambulance, the crowd asked them to stop, and even one of the employees recognized the danger and got a rug. Any Southerner knows that on such hot days, you can fry an egg on the blacktop. So why didn’t they stop?

Sadly, this kind of situation is not unique to Wal-Mart, or even America. At a grocery store in Toronto, security guards killed a man who was stealing baby formula. (Sidenote: Do these guys specifically target people who are stealing stuff for babies? You know, just to make themselves look even worse?) Outside a Lord & Taylor in Dearborn, Michigan, security guards killed a man whose 11-year-old stepdaughter stole a bracelet.

The question on everybody’s minds, of course, is: who’s to blame? Do sociopaths with no sense of empathy and a tendency towards violence like to take security guard jobs because of the power rush they offer? Do companies like Wal-Mart train their employees to restrain shoplifters - or suspected shoplifters - by any means necessary? Is this a result of the pathology of the corporation? Or a result of desensitization to violence?

Those Wal-Mart employees had eight minutes to think about what they were doing. They had eight minutes to remember the hot summers they’d spent in Texas, knowing full well that to stand for even a second on gravel with their bare feet was unbearably painful. They had eight minutes to wonder what they were doing to this man, and several minutes to listen to him tell them that they were killing him; to listen to the crowd tell them that they were killing him. They had eight minutes to wonder whether they could just pick him up and drag him back inside. They had eight minutes to wonder if the loss of a bag of diapers was worth cruelly torturing a man over. And in those eight minutes, they apparently decided that it was.

Regardless of who’s at fault, that’s some twisted-ass logic.