Why didn’t Cinemark just apologize?

Posted on | January 17, 2012 | 1 Comment

A few days ago there was information on social media that a Loveland, Colorado man was missing, and his family was reaching out to the local community to help find him. He was in poor physical health, and they were concerned that he suffered some sort of medical incident – perhaps a stroke – that left him unable to return to his car (which was found parked outside a theater in Fort Collins), or to lose some cognitive ability and wander off.

That was January 9. On January 14, 66-year-old George DeGrazio’s body was discovered in a public restroom at a movie theater in Fort Collins. The Larimer County coroner’s report suggests that he passed of a heart attack on the day he went missing. Which means his body was in the restroom, behind a locked door, for five full days — while theater employees served thousands of theater patrons, showed dozens of movies and collected thousands of dollars for tickets and concessions. What ultimately alerted them to his presence was the scent of his decomposing body.

I think it is important to note that this wasn’t a big, main restroom off the main lobby with a long row of sinks, urinals and stalls that sees huge amounts of traffic. It was a small satellite restroom with one sink and one toilet and a door that locks from the inside.

But still . . . it seems odd, at the very least, that a public restroom facility would go unchecked — and uncleaned — for five straight days.

Now, compounding that issue/image problem for the theater, it seems that the management of the Cinemark movie complex at Timberline and Harmony in Fort Collins, Colorado, has failed to apologize to the DeGrazio family for allowing George’s body to go undetected for the duration of a work week. This, according to a family member who appeared in a story that aired on the Denver NBC affiliate last night.

Here’s a link to the 9News story:
http://www.9news.com/news/article/242761/188/Family-asks-for-answers-after-body-found-in-movie-theater

It astounds me that Cinemark would not have immediately issued a personal apology to this family. One can only theorize as to why they did not. Were they embarrassed? Likely. Were they concerned with some sort of liability? No doubt.  Were the local employees scared more about their jobs than anything else? I’m betting that. Were they truly clueless that mis-handling this could blow up in their face and generate bad publicity on a national — international — scale? It would seem so.

No matter what it is that they were afraid, concerned, embarrassed or ignorant of, there is simply no excuse for failing to take the simple, empathetic, human step of issuing a heartfelt apology to the family. One that should have been offered even if no one on the planet realized what had happened — let alone when all of northern Colorado was looking for this man, and when it was clear that the entire nation, and beyond, was soon to read about this in the weird news section of their favorite print or web news outlet.

It seems certain to me that this incident will change the daily operating procedure at this particular Cinemark facility, and probably at all of the chain’s locations — which is wise. And that should also serve to take away the need to ever apologize to a deceased patron’s family for neglecting to realize they’d been unwittingly hosting a corpse for an extended period of time. But Cinemark should get itself in the habit of empathizing with its patrons asap, and start with a genuine apology to the DeGrazios immediately.

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