(Content Warning: bullying, harassment, suicide.)
Evan Seyfried was a loving son, brother, and friend, and a dedicated worker. For 19 years, with a virtually spotless record, Evan worked at a local Kroger grocery store in Milford, Ohio, where he eventually became the dairy department manager. From October 2020 to March 2021, however, Evan suffered a torturous litany of bullying, harassment, and sabotage, according to a lawsuit filed by the Seyfried family. As the lawsuit alleges, it was this treatment, which was the result of a “conspiracy” involving numerous actors, including management-level supervisors at the Milford store, that caused Evan to eventually suffer a “transient episodic break” and take his own life. In this episode, we talk with Evan’s mother Linda, his father Ken, and his brother Eric about the beautiful person he was, the horrific treatment he endured, and the need to hold those who wronged him accountable.

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Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)

Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

TRANSCRIPT

Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and supported entirely by listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. So if you’re looking for more worker and labor-focused podcasts and radio shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network.

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My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got a really important and a really serious episode for y’all today. But as you’ll hear for yourself, this episode is also a tribute that is filled with enough love to light up the darkest night. I want to give every listener out there a content warning right from the start. This episode deals with topics of bullying, harassment, and suicide. If you are able to, I implore you to listen. If you are not, then please help us spread the word. Obviously, we believe that every interview that we do for this show is important and deserves to be heard by as many people as possible. But in this instance, we are making a special ask of all of our wonderful caring listeners to share this episode far and wide.

As is always the case with our regular season episodes, a tradition that we began with the very first episode of the show. The title for this episode bears the name of the beautiful human being whose life and work we are here to discuss. Today, we are here to celebrate and honor the life of Evan Seyfried, but we are also here to talk about the tragic, horrific, and unforgivable reasons that Evan himself is no longer with us. We are here to make sure that people know Evan’s story, told by the people who knew him best and loved him most. And we are here to demand justice: justice for Evan and his family, justice for every worker who is bullied, belittled, and exploited.

True justice, of course, is unattainable in this case. True justice would mean that Evan was still here and that the people who wronged him and who failed him were stopped long before their despicable actions drove a loving man and a dedicated worker to end his life. If not justice, then we demand accountability. If we are too late to help Evan, then we hope that we can reach others out there who are being isolated, disrespected, and dehumanized. We want you all to know that you are not alone, and we want you to know that like Evan, you deserve better.

This, as you’ll hear, is the message that Evan’s mother Linda, his father Ken, and his brother Eric want people to hear. And I want to take this moment to personally thank Linda, Ken, and Eric for coming on the show, for sharing Evan’s story with us, for letting us know about the beautiful person that he was, and for demonstrating a truly superhuman amount of strength, bravery, and love to do so when their hearts have been shattered by this unbearable loss. To Linda, Ken, and Eric, our hearts are with you and we stand with you.

I also want to assure listeners that from the planning to recording, to editing this episode, we made sure to get the family’s approval every step of the way.

Now, we have provided links in the show notes so that listeners can read up on the facts of Evan’s case as well as links to support groups on social media where you can connect with and get updates from others who are seeking justice for Evan and his family. Of course, in the conversation you’re about to hear, Evan’s family and I lay out the timeline and detail many of the events leading up to Evan’s death. To make sure that you have a firm grounding up front though, I’m going to read at length some passages from a Washington Post article that was written by Julian Mark, which was published on July 15th, and which you can read in its entirety following the link in the show notes. So let’s see.

Mark writes, “In the early hours of March 9th, Ken Seyfried found his 40-year-old son, Evan, dead in his childhood room at their Loveland, Ohio home. Evan had taken his own life. In a lawsuit filed Monday in Hamilton County Court, Evan Seyfried’s family members allege his workplace. A Kroger grocery store in Milford, Ohio, is responsible for his suicide, a ‘wrongful death’ that was the result of an alleged six-month harassment campaign by two of his co-workers. The lawsuit alleges the co-workers sabotaged Seyfried at work, had people stalk him outside of his home, and threatened to frame him for possessing child pornography. Despite Evan Seyfried’s attempts to alert Kroger management of the alleged abuses, the company did not help him, the lawsuit alleges. The family is suing for monetary damages. ‘Evan was dedicated to his career with Kroger,’ the lawsuit said of the 19-year employee. ‘In return, Kroger intentionally subjected Evan to torturous conditions that were directly responsible for his death.’

Kroger spokeswoman Kristal Howard told The Post on Thursday that the company was unable to comment on the pending litigation. She said the company is ‘offering counseling services to our associates at the Milford, Ohio location after Seyfried’s death.’

After graduating from high school, Seyfried got a job at a Kroger in nearby Milford and eventually became the dairy department manager. He stayed 19 years, quitting only days before his death. His parents, Ken and Linda, and his older brother, Eric, described Seyfried as a sensitive and empathetic person who liked to read and care deeply about justice and social causes. In October 2020, as the country remained in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, Seyfried’s life became a ‘living hell at work,’ the lawsuit claims. One of the store supervisors allegedly began harassing Seyfried for wearing a mask at work and highlighted the difference in their political beliefs. Some of Seyfried’s co-workers allegedly began calling him antifa, referring to a loosely-knit group of far-left activists.

The supervisor also allegedly made several unwanted sexual advances toward Seyfried, ‘which he reported with zero recourse,’ the lawsuit says. Soon, according to the lawsuit, the supervisor’s harassment turned into sabotage. The lawsuit alleges the supervisor would intentionally leave holes in dairy department’s schedules, creating extra work for Seyfried. Then people began following Seyfried home from work, the lawsuit says. Neighbors noticed ‘occupied, unfamiliar vehicles parked on the street for unusually long periods of time,’ and Seyfried believed the people outside his home were co-workers, his supervisor had pitted against him.

In January, Seyfried began receiving threats, the lawsuit says. A second supervisor at the store allegedly told Seyfried he could track his internet usage ‘at all times.’ Also on the receiving end of alleged workplace sabotage, one of Seyfried’s co-workers called the company’s ethics help line and reported she and Seyfried were being bullied. But no action was taken. Seyfried had also made multiple complaints to the union, but he saw no changes, the lawsuit alleges. Kroger, the lawsuit claims, denied a request from Seyfried to transfer to another store. Seyfried, meanwhile, helped two female employees file sexual harassment complaints against one of their supervisors. This is when Seyfried began receiving text messages from unknown numbers. ‘Are you going to try to get us?’ one of the texts read. Another said, ‘Are you going to sue the company?’ Then the person sending the threatening texts allegedly started sending Seyfried messages ‘containing explicit child pornography,’ the lawsuit states.

Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges Seyfried’s co-workers sabotaged him on the day of a regional audit by placing old milk on his shelves. Seyfried was written up nine times, despite never having received a formal reprimand in his 19-year career, it adds, and he feared he would be fired. ‘Evan was distraught,’ the lawsuit says. ‘Between the audit, the stalkers, the threatening text messages and child pornography, and the general toxic workplace environment, Evan felt unsafe.’

He moved in with his parents. In the ensuing days, Seyfried was frantic, the lawsuit says. He was worried about the results of the audit, but more so that his co-workers were monitoring his phone and were planning to frame him. So Seyfried quit, and he and his father visited a law firm ‘to see if anything could be done about Evan’s phone.’ Before entering the office though, Seyfried experienced a ‘transient episodic break,’ the lawsuit says. He ran into a building without his father, and he threw away all of his possessions. Two hours later, Seyfried’s father found him wandering the streets. When they got back home, Seyfried said he would seek medical attention. Around midnight, he told his father his supervisors were going ‘to get him’ and that ‘things would get ugly.’ According to the lawsuit, those are the last words he said to his father. Two hours later, Ken Seyfried found his son dead.”

So the lawsuit filed by the family and their attorney, Austin LiPuma, names the parties against whom the charges are being filed, and they include the Kroger company itself as well as the Milford store manager Shannon Frazee and Joseph Pigg, another manager at the Milford store. But as you guys will hear in our conversation, there were many other people who failed Evan, and their failure contributed to his demise. The union failed Evan. There can be absolutely no tiptoeing around that. The union representatives who were charged with protecting him abandoned him.

Kroger failed Evan, and Kroger’s failure extends from the hell that was unleashed on Evan at his own store to the district manager’s office, to the HR office, to the highest office at the company, which is occupied by CEO Rodney McMullen. They failed him, and because of their failure, Evan is gone. His family has a hole in it that can never be filled. Because of their failure, Evan spent his final months on earth suffering a pain that no one deserves to feel. Wherever you are now, Evan, I hope you are at peace, and I hope that you know that you were loved and that you didn’t deserve this.

Again, I want to ask everyone listening out there to please help us share Evan’s story and to please join the call to secure justice for his family and to hold the people responsible for his death accountable. I also want to ask everyone listening out there to please take care of yourselves and take care of each other. If you know someone who is suffering at work, check in on them, support them, fight for them, and check in on your friends, family and co-workers in general because they may be suffering without you knowing it, and you have no idea how life-saving it can be to let them know that you are with them and that they are not alone. So thank you for listening, thank you for caring, and thank you for fighting. And one more time, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank Evan’s family for sharing his story with us, for sharing their boundless love for him with us, and for giving us a glimpse of the incredible son, brother, and person that he was. This is his story.

Eric Seyfried: I’m Eric Seyfried, Evan’s older Brother.

Ken Seyfried: I’m Ken Seyfried, Evan’s father.

Linda Seyfried: And I’m Linda Seyfried, Evan’s mother.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, thank you all so much for sitting down and chatting with me. Cannot tell you how much we appreciate it, and I honestly cannot convey to you how much we are all sending all of our love and solidarity and condolences to you. We really wanted to take this opportunity to have you on the show, not just to talk about the tragic and horrific circumstances that led to Evan’s death and the struggle to hold those accountable who wronged Evan.

We’ll talk about that in a bit so that listeners can know what happened and especially what they can do to show y’all support. But we also wanted to really take this chance to honor Evan and celebrate his life and get to know more about who Evan was as a person. This is really the heart and soul of this show since the beginning, was to talk to working people, not just about their jobs, but about their lives, where they come from, how they came to be, the people they are, because so often we live in labor in this system that doesn’t treat us like human beings. It just treats us like name tags or job positions, right? And we lose sight of that beautiful humanity that all of us possess. We try to honor that humanity on this show, and this is really no different. We think it’s especially important to take this moment to honor Evan, to hear from the folks closest to him, who he was, how he came to be the person he was and all that he was.

So I wanted to ask if we can kind of just as if we’re sitting in a living room together, if you could tell me a little bit about Evan. What sort of memories stand out from the early age? What kind of person was he?

Eric Seyfried: Well, Max, thanks for talking a little bit about the purpose of the show, it’s a beautiful thing, and Evan was a beautiful person. He was my partner in life, the only person that really knew me from my origins to my current state. And I’m really lucky to have had him as a brother because I know no other person on the planet that is as kind as my brother was, and as empathetic. He put other people before himself always, in his thoughts and in his actions. He was an incredibly hardworking person, because he was dedicated to not just providing for himself, but also providing and supporting his coworkers, pulling his weight and then some. That’s just the way he lived life. He was a principled person. He was an incredibly intelligent person, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He was a great travel partner, and he was a joy to have around. He was the center of attention. He was the glue that held our family together. He was the peacemaker. He always led with kindness, and he always reminded us to do that.

Ken Seyfried: Maybe I’m going to talk a little bit about Evan. If my wife would like to chime in and say some things, I’ll leave that up to her. I just want to go back to when we had Evan. He was a shy kid, a quiet kid, very sensitive, where his older brother was the exact opposite. He was very close to his mom. He was close to the family in general, and his family was everything to him when he was younger. And I noticed with Evan as he got older, my son was really a survivor. He didn’t have a lot of friends. He valued friendship, and he always wanted to have a lot of friends, but he was socially shy and he struggled with that when he was younger. But he always pulled through when it came to going to school and getting the grades and graduating and making us proud of him.

But as he got older, I noticed in Evan, he got more self-confident. He went to Europe with his brother on a five-week trip when they both got out of high school. That I think did a lot in terms of their relationship and a lot for Evan. And when he came back from that trip, even though we didn’t think he was ready, he wanted to move out of the house and go on his own. Again, we didn’t think he was ready for that, but he was insistent. He was working at Kroger at the time. He wanted to move back at his own apartment. So he was obviously old enough to do that. And he did it. And he survived the living on his own successfully to a point where in his years that he spent at Kroger, he was able to get his own home. He financed it, got it approved, got it on his own, and took over homeownership. He was very proud of that, that he was working for a company at that time for 10 years. Was proud of that. Was proud of being able to afford and have his own home.

But what I would really like everybody to know about Evan is, particularly through this COVID period, he took care of mom and dad. He did everything for us. He did our shopping when we needed it. He visited us every week. He talked to his mom, if not every day, it seemed like every day for hours at a time. He talked to his dad a couple of times a week. He was there for us. Eric used the perfect word for Evan. Evan was kind, but he was selfless. He put everything and everyone ahead of himself, particularly his parents and his brother.

I couldn’t think of a more giving, kind person that didn’t have a harmful bone in his body. I don’t think he’s ever been in a fight in his life that deserved this kind of treatment that we’re going to talk about later. It hurts. But he was a big part of our life, a huge part of our life, particularly with this COVID going around. We relied on him for everything, because Eric was out in Oregon and obviously couldn’t be there for us on a day-to-day basis, even though our oldest son kept in contact with us as much as he could too. So he was kind. He was as kind as a person could be, and he was selfless. And we love him, and we miss him.

Maximillian Alvarez: So you say he had never been in a fight. I’m the third of three brothers, and I have one younger sibling, my sister MacKenna. But I was just wondering, Eric, it sounds like you guys had that kind of A-B personality. So did that kind of always gel for you guys? Were you ever kind of butting heads? I mean, it sounds like y’all got along really well.

Eric Seyfried: We had differences in terms of our personalities, but there was no being mad at Evan. You couldn’t really conflict with Evan because Evan was so understanding. He always understood where you came from, and if he didn’t, he tried to understand where you were coming from before making any judgments about your motivations. So he’s a pretty hard person to be in conflict with unless you’re up to no good, unless you want to do something bad to somebody or especially to somebody that he cares about. So no, we didn’t conflict a lot.

We went to different high schools and kind of ran with different crowds in high school. But then after high school we came together and did just a wonderful five-week trip together in Europe, which I’ll always treasure for the rest of my life. And we’ve been close ever since. We saw eye to eye on a lot of things politically and just the way we live life. I respected my brother so much. I wanted to be more like my brother in the way that he treated people. So it was a lot more admiration than conflict when it came to me and my brother’s relationship.

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, that’s definitely something that I identify with. I mean, my brothers and I are very different. I’d say my oldest brother Jesse and I, we’re definitely different types of personalities. But what y’all are saying about Evan reminds me a lot of my oldest brother, Jesse. He didn’t always have the easiest time in going through K through 12 school, but he fiercely valued family and friendship even though the latter was often hard to come by. Because I mean, let’s face it, kids are often very cruel and school? School sucks for all of us most of the time. I mean, it’s a really tough time to grow into being a person really. But Ken and Linda, on that note, I was curious if-

Eric Seyfried: Can I say one more thing about my relationship with Evan real quick? I apologize for interrupting, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, please.

Eric Seyfried: But I also wanted just to mention that one of the things that I find myself missing most about Evan, and my relationship that I had with Evan, and it’s the kind of thing that I guess siblings probably have if you’re lucky, and it’s that Evan understood what I was trying to say every time I said it the first time I said it, I didn’t have to explain myself to Evan. I didn’t even have to explain where I was coming from or my motivations. He intuitively understood me and my thought process. And the way that we could connect when we spoke about things and when we conversated, there was no time for explaining or no interruptions or misunderstandings. We were just so attuned with each other. And that’s just something special that siblings have, and it’s something that I expected to have for 40 more years, and maybe I just took it for granted, but it’s one of the things I miss the most about my relationship with my brother and one of the things you just can’t recreate.

Linda Seyfried: I agree with Eric in that Evan was a good listener. He was my son, my baby, who grew up into a wonderful man who became my best friend.

I’m sorry.

Ken Seyfried: Hey, Max, if I could just share with you my favorite story about Evan for a minute.

Linda Seyfried: Please. Evan was really struggling one school year. I think it was the fifth or sixth grade.

I’ll finish-

Ken Seyfried: The fifth or sixth grade and he was upset that he didn’t have a lot of friends, and I had come home from work and he had told me about that. And I sat down and I wrote him a letter after he shared that with me, about how special he was as a person and how proud we were of him. And I gave him the letter and he read it and he sort of sloughed it off. And about two years later, I was in his room and I found the little cigar box that he kept his important things that were important to him in. A couple of baseball cards and some things, and I found that letter in there. He kept that letter and he put in his important box. And I’ll always keep that memory of him doing that. But my wife wanted to finish what she was trying to say, so I’ll turn it over to her.

Linda Seyfried: I was trying to say and agree with Eric about what a good friend he is, what a good listener. Like I said, he was my child who became a adult who became my friend. And he did have friends, but they were few and special. We’ve had three of his girlfriends, just another one just recently got in touch with me after they had heard what happened to him. And each one of them expressed how much he meant to them at that point in his life through early teens through now. So the people that he was friends with knew how special he was, and I felt blessed knowing him and have come forward to share that with me and that’s a wonderful thing,

Ken Seyfried: Max, we haven’t seen one negative comment on social media through all of this about Evan. Not one negative comment. Everything we’ve seen on social media from co-workers or classmates or neighbors have been so complimentary of him. And I think that says a lot in itself, that it’s all been so positive and so loving for him.

Eric Seyfried: Yeah. I also want to say that my dad’s right to point out that my brother was shy. But my mom’s also right to point out that he did have quite a few friends. He was fiercely loyal to his friends. Actually, that was probably one of the reasons why he was limited in friends is because he had a pretty high standard for who could be his friend. The kind of integrity that he required in friendship that he gave to his friends, he required that kind of reciprocation. And not a lot of people foot the bill for what it took to be my brother’s friend.

But he was fiercely loyal to those friends and everybody in his life that he cared about. And he was also fiercely loyal to Kroger and he was fiercely loyal to his colleagues. And I think that betrayal that we’re going to talk about a little bit later of that loyalty, that 20 year relationship that he had with Kroger, was one of the things that led to his undoing. And I think it ties a lot back into how he viewed friendships and relationships and how he treated people and how he acted with integrity and he expected that in return.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and I mean, it’s just so clear hearing from y’all about Evan, just how bright of a soul he was, how loving of a person he was. And it’s also clear from hearing you three talk about it that that was something that you all cultivated together. Evan, being the incredibly special human being that he was, still was part of what sounds like a loving family.

And I wanted to, I mean even just the thought of, Ken, you were sharing that beautiful story about writing that letter to your son. And I can attest as someone who was once a adolescent in the throes of the social awkwardness and all the self-doubt, that the little comments, the little pieces of encouragement, the little notes that my parents would give me, even if I didn’t know how to show it at the time, even if I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, I can sit here 20 years later and pinpoint those moments as moments when my family kept me from falling down, kept me from receding into myself. My family kept me feeling like I belonged in the world and that I had value and that I was loved. I wanted to, I guess kind of ask a little bit about that, about the sort of family dynamic, how y’all got along? Did y’all ever take kind of family trips together? I guess could we just get a little more of a sense of how all four of you interacted growing up?

Eric Seyfried: Yeah, I’ll talk a little bit about our upbringing because we experienced it together. We lived a very, I guess you could say, American dream kind of childhood. We grew up in the suburbs. My parents built a house when I was five and my brother was three in Milford, Ohio. We grew up there. My brother went to Milford, Ohio, or Milford Exempted Schools from K through 12, and he worked at the Milford store up until his passing.

So he loved the area. We spent a lot of time together, obviously. We were very close in age growing up. My father had a long career at Ford and my mother was a homemaker so we got to spend a lot of time together. We had a woods behind our house and we spent so much time back there building forts and doing woods related things. That was before we had cable or before any kind of internet or anything. We spent a lot of time together outside just hanging out.

He was always very interested in history and he was always very interested in gaining knowledge. We all connected on that. Me and my brother were always kind of interested in the same topics so we interacted a lot around those interests. And I’ll let my mom and dad fill in a little bit more color around the childhood.

Ken Seyfried: I’d like to share with you that there was a period of time where Evan and I took a week off by ourselves and visited seven or eight major cities across the country together, just the two of us, all the way from New York City down to New Orleans.

And it was sort of like going with a travel agent. He would plan the trips. All I had to do was pay for them. But he would plan the trips on what we would do every day and all I had to do was follow him. And what was so great about that, he was like a tour guide. I remember when we were down in New Orleans, we saw the original Louisiana Purchase document in a private collection in New Orleans. I don’t know how he found this, how he got us into that, but he did. And he explained that Louisiana Purchase in detail from beginning to end. Well, Max, it was like that with every city we want to and everything that he planned for us to see. He knew everything about where we were going and what we were seeing. And I was able to do that with him over a series of seven or eight different cities. And I’m so glad I did that with him.

Eric Seyfried: My brother and I used to sit in our room and look at the globe and talk about the world and talk about where we wanted to go and I was so fortunate to be able to take that five-week trip to Europe when we were just out of high school that I had mentioned before.

And you asked if we had taken vacations as a child in our childhood, and we did. We took a summer vacation every summer and some of them were more vacationy than others. But we always went away and got to see a little bit more of the world and it definitely sparked a love for travel in both of us and it’s something that we connected on our whole lives. And I have to say, I took that Europe trip with my brother in 1999. And I’ve been fortunate to be back to Europe probably 11, 12 times since. And every travel partner I’ve been back with has suffered for the fact that I went with my brother the first time because he was the best travel partner you could ever have. We were so on the same page about what we wanted to see and what we wanted to know. And he knew things and I knew things and we could just talk and talk about what we were seeing and just nobody’s ever been able to meet that test or to meet that standard as I’ve been back so many times.

So he was a special person. A special person because he was so smart and so kind and so funny. And he was also so tolerant and cared about everybody else and always put everybody else before him. It just made him the perfect travel partner. So we were both lucky. We we’re all lucky to be able to see Evan travel because also like my dad had said before, he was a shy kid, but when he was traveling, he kind of came out of his shell a little bit. The people that he met, they weren’t important. He could be who he wanted to be when he traveled, and he was. He really valued those moments.

About six years ago, I moved out to Portland, Oregon. And I was worried that it would lead to a disconnect with my family but it’s been fortunate that we’ve gotten to spend a lot of time together in visits out here. My folks come out a lot and my brother would come out one or two times a year. In fact, we were planning a trip, a visit in June that we were very excited about, and tragically he wasn’t able to make. We hadn’t seen each other in a year and a half prior because of Coronavirus. And we were all very much looking forward to that trip.

But he visited out here five or six times throughout the time that I was out here before he passed away. And we took a lot of great road trips, saw a lot of beautiful views, climbed a lot of beautiful mountains together, and had a lot of special moments. So we were all just really lucky to be able to have Evan as a travel partner when we did. Had a lot of plans for trips that we’re never going to get to take with Evan. But I plan to take them and I plan to keep him with me in spirit and always remember the lessons that he taught me.

Linda Seyfried: Eric spoke very well there. A good partner. A good partner in everything. And with travel with Eric, and then he was just a good partner for everything. When you did something with him, you enjoyed it. We enjoyed cooking together, talking together. When we went to see Eric, we also did some side hiking trips by ourselves and it was fabulous. He poked along for the old mom. He didn’t hurry me along. We talked all the way. He was a great partner in making Christmas wonderful, holidays wonderful.

Eric Seyfried: He sure was. He made our holidays very special. And as we approach the holidays slowly, we plan to spend them together out here in Portland and we don’t really know how we’re going to get through it, but we’re going to do it together.

Maximillian Alvarez: I’m glad. Yeah, I’m glad that at least y’all will be together for that. And as I said before, our hearts will be with you. Everyone who’s listening to this is with you. We have a great audience that really cares about working people as much as we do. And so just please know that all of us are with you, our hearts are with you, and we’re here for you guys whenever you need us. And I know that this is beyond painful to talk about, but I can’t thank y’all enough for sharing these beautiful memories with us and helping us get to know more about Evan.

One thing that also kind of strikes me from hearing y’all, and I know that this was something that he carried over into his work. I mean, I’ve read the reports. I’ve read kind of the articles about how Evan defended people at work. Evan defended coworkers who were facing harassment. Evan took very seriously taking care of himself, his coworkers, and customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It just seemed abundant just from me over here in Baltimore reading about this human being that I’d never met, it seemed very clear to me. And it’s even clear now listening to his loved ones that he did have kind of a burning core of principle that connected him to other people, that made him feel protective of people, and that made him want to stand up against injustice.

And I guess I wanted to ask, was that always, I guess, kind of part of who he was? And I ask that because I’ve told the story on the show many times, I was a very different person growing up. I am not the bleeding heart leftist that I am now. I was not that when I was growing up. I was raised very conservative. I had much different politics, a lot different ways of looking at the world. But myself and my family grew together over the years to change the ways that we saw the world. So I guess I wanted to ask a little more about that, I guess, where his politics came from?

Eric Seyfried: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think Evan wasn’t a political as a young man, but his politics came from something that was his very essence and that is his empathy. Everything that he believed and every way he acted flowed from the fact that he put himself in everybody else’s shoes. So when he approached politics, that’s the lens that he viewed politics through.

So there wasn’t a lot of change in Evan’s outlook throughout his life. He always had that empathy as kind of his North Star and everything else kind of flowed from it. So there wasn’t a lot of hypocrisy going on there. He was very, very dedicated to treating people right and that was just kind of built into who he was and his character and the politics just kind of flowed from that.

Ken Seyfried: Max, I just want to say you commented on him standing up for people at work and was that in his character to do that. I think what Evan found when he started working and he was getting older and maturing, he started getting feedback from people that he worked with about how hard of a worker he was and how good of a person he was to talk to when they needed advice and how they saw him taking care of people when they were in need at work.

And that built up, I think, his image of himself to a point where he started feeling really good about himself and confident about himself. And he got to a point, where as we go through some of the things that happened at work that resulted in his death, he started having people in the store come to him for advice on what to do when they were being mistreated. And he really felt good about them coming to him, because in his mind he felt that they felt highly of him to do that. So wasn’t always, I would call a defender of people, but as he got older and as he got the feedback about how hard he worked and how well he was thought of, I think he morphed into that kind of person. And it was really, as a parent, great to watch and great to see.

Eric Seyfried: Yeah, I think his job at Kroger, especially after COVID in the last year of his employment there, gave him a lot of opportunities to be helpful, to stand up for people, and to stand up for what was right.

I think the first one is what you mentioned. There are a couple of young females that he worked with that were complaining about being sexually harassed, and he helped guide them to make a sexual harassment complaint. That’s one of the conspirators that sabotaged Evan and harassed Evan. He, during COVID, was very dedicated to wearing masks and protecting customers as well as my parents, who he saw on a weekly basis, despite a lot of negative peer pressure against doing that, in an area that’s very conservative.

So he stood up a lot for other people. He noticed at Kroger, like we had mentioned, he’s been at Kroger for 20 years. He was very proud to work at Kroger. Kroger, if you don’t know, it’s a Cincinnati grocery store that throughout the course of our lifetime has become the largest national grocery store through acquisitions and growth and doing the right thing. He was proud to work for a hometown company that had become so successful but frequently over the last five years or so and more and more, he just was distressed at the direction of the company, at the focus of the company of profits over people. That managers could basically do whatever they want as long as their same store sales were growing period over period. That the sole focus of the company seemed to be share price and whenever the company had some success, that money went to the investors and went to the corporate executives and not to the workers.

And that just exasperated during the pandemic where essential workers were forced to take risks every single day and deal with a scared emotional public and the executives at the company did not have to deal with that. Yet during the pandemic, the average essential worker at Kroger, salary stayed flat, when the CEO gave himself a $6 million bonus and did a billion dollar stock buyback which helped the value of his $150 million of stock that he owns. So my brother was distressed that the company that had a union allegedly, that was supposed to be protecting them, was so focused on growth and on profitability and on driving that stock price and cared so little about the employees. So that was an observation that he made frequently and more and more frequently over the years. And it really came to a head during the pandemic.

Linda Seyfried: The reason why what has happened came to us as such a shock was because we had many talks with Evan about his job, but it was exactly what Eric just said. But it was an ongoing story of how bad things were, how bad things were getting, how he didn’t see anything getting any better, adding more hours on adding more work and squeezing it in in less hours, just the miserableness of every day at the job. So when he was telling us about that we didn’t pick up on when it changed to what happened at the end, the extremes of it. Because it was just an ongoing same old, same old, of the misery of how Kroger was treating their employees and how it was just a daily grind of the same old, same old. So it’s a shock to us of what happened because that’s what we thought it was, same old, same old of the miserableness of it. Until we now know more details of what brought this to happen.

Ken Seyfried: Max, what’s really shocking to me, and I don’t want to get ahead of this, so stop me if I am. I had a 25 year career in HR at the Ford Motor Company and I designed management development and training programs and delivered them there. And I know, and I kept telling Evan, management’s number one responsibility when it comes to their employee, above anything else, is to create a safe working environment. That’s their number one responsibility, in any organization. In this particular case here, not only did McMullen, the CEO, and his management team, not create a safe working environment, they conspired with my son to create a hostile environment that was focused on terrorizing him. It was the exact opposite of what their responsibility as a management team in any company is. They created an environment that targeted him and they terrorized him. I often refer to his store manager, Shannon Frazee, as a person that had a toolbox of terror. And I’m going to talk about that for a minute because I want to make real clear with you that this is not a lawsuit based on conservative versus liberal or Republican versus Democrat. This is a whistleblower lawsuit. The reason they terrorized my son and they wanted him out of the company is because he would not accept a hostile working environment. Every time they got hostile with them or a coworker, he would throw up the red flag.

He would go to the union. He would go to HR. He would go to line management. He would go outside the store if he could to get attention with the red flags. And they saw that as a problem all the way from the store manager to the district manager. They had a person throwing up too many red flags and they wanted him gone. So this is a whistleblower case. It has nothing to do with politics because in this community here, most of our supporters in this community are conservatives that voted for Donald Trump, and they are in our camp. They are behind our cause. So it has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with Evan being a whistleblower. And I just wanted to share that with you.

Maximillian Alvarez: I really appreciate all of you sharing that with me. I think it’s incredibly important for everyone listening to understand what I think, Ken, you described in perfectly harrowing detail this toolbox of terror that supervisors, superiors at this Kroger in Milford in Ohio used against Evan. And for folks listening, I gave a bit of a rundown of the case in the introduction, and we have included links in the show notes for you to learn more about this. Obviously, we don’t want to make Evan’s family go through step-by-step all the horror and pain that Evan and his coworkers endured, but especially Evan. But I guess just to make sure that everyone is on the same page who’s listening to this.

You guys mentioned that going all the way back to when Evan started working at Kroger, that he was very proud to work at a hometown company. I know Kroger mainly because I lived in Michigan for eight years, so I definitely frequented Kroger. But back home in Southern California, we were Yvonne’s family or a Ralph’s family, but I get that. I get the kind of pride that comes with working at… even if a company has gotten big and successful, if it’s based in where you grew up, there is some hometown attachment. I guess for us, back home, the closest equivalent would be working for In-N-Out Burger. The bigger it gets, the more of a conglomerate it becomes. That doesn’t get rid of people’s hometown love for In-N-Out Burger.

But you had mentioned, Eric, that over the 20 years that Evan had worked at Kroger, the bigger it got as a company, the more that he communicated to you all the changes that he was seeing on the job, how the endless thirst for growth and profit came at the expense of customer service, came at the expense of all sorts of things that Evan was charged with handling on a day-to-day basis; quality control, customer service, managing employees and making sure that their concerns were heard and all of that stuff. And then you mentioned that things got worse during the pandemic. So I guess this is a long way of asking, could we at least give listeners a sense of the timeline of how and when things started to get worse both at the job and especially for Evan himself?

Eric Seyfried: Sure. First, I’d say that you can be in California and shop at a Kroger’s because Kroger’s owns a good 20 different grocery stores that you’re very familiar with, including Frys and Fred Meyers. So I encourage all the listeners to get familiar with all the different grocery stores that are managed and owned by Kroger and take your business elsewhere.

Maximillian Alvarez: I think Vons is owned by Kroger now that I think about it.

Eric Seyfried: Yeah, they own everybody just about, except for Meyers and Costco these days. And they got there by pinching every penny away from their workers as they can and investing in expanding their company as opposed to expanding their workers’ quality of life. Well, but that being said, our lawsuit lays out the timeline pretty well of events. I think in terms of when Evan started to see a deterioration, personally, Evan and I talked a lot. We didn’t talk a whole lot about work, but for the first, I’d say 10 years, I didn’t hear a whole lot of complaints about the way that the place was being managed, the way the company was being managed. I think over the last 10 years and then increasingly over the last five years, especially since Rodney McMullen has taken over as CEO, the focus of the company has been so much on profits.

My brother initially, I think I remember first him complaining five years ago about staffing levels at the stores, that stores being intentionally understaffed in order to drive up the same store quarter over quarter profitability and that it was putting a lot of pressure on people. So was that that that was happening in the background in the years leading up to the pandemic. But then once the pandemic happened, it exasperated everything, you take that environment of misery already and then you add masks, you add emotion, you add angry people, you add fear, and you add a bunch of people that are sitting at home that really don’t have to do anything about the pandemic. And then you have essential workers that we task to feed us, but we don’t pay them a living wage. So it was a very difficult period of time throughout the pandemic just from working for the company.

In his specific situation, right about that time, and Austin may be able to fill in more specifics on when Shannon was hired and when she arrived at the Milford store, and sadly into my brother’s life, but that was about a year prior to my brother’s passing. Initially, she recognized that my brother was one of the best managers, the hardest working people she’s ever seen, but she quickly realized that my brother was not the type of person that was going to go along with her scheming and her harassment and her sick management and control techniques that she employed. He was not going to hurt people just to get on her good side. And when she realized that he was an enemy, she made him an enemy. She said that she was going to get him. She said that she was going to make his life a living hell, and then she proceeded to recruit a bunch of people to do that.

She made promises, made exchanges of management positions for help in sabotaging my brother’s work and harassing my brother and making threats to my brother and not turning in complaints that my brother filed. And that’s in terms of the union steward did not submit the sexual harassment complaint that my brother filed against Shannon Frazee. So the working environment evolved into a much more challenging place, both because of the pandemic and then because of Shannon Frazee’s arrival at the store as the store manager. So he was hit with the double whammy when he was already struggling to keep up with the workload that Kroger had put on them, increasingly undoable workload, all with the goal of increasing that share price just a little bit more for that next quarter, making sure that Ronnie McMullen could justify his $14 million salary in 2019 and in his $20 million salary in 2020 that nobody asked any questions.

When he decided to do a billion-dollar stock buyback, nobody asked how much stock he owned and what kind of effect that might’ve had on his net worth, but I think they’re starting to have to answer these questions. Kroger made the decision to close down four stores in California instead of pay hero pay during the pandemic. I think it was a 2 or $3 bump in the wages. And instead of paying their essential workers in the middle of a pandemic an additional two or $3 an hour, Ronnie McMullen decided to close those stores down. So that just, I think it tells you a whole lot about the mentality that was driving the decision making at Kroger, what their clear goals are.

And I just want to say this, if you are a current worker at Kroger’s, now is the time to look for a better job. The unemployment rate is low. There are opportunities out there. There are employers out there that realize that they have to treat you right, and you don’t have to work for a company that doesn’t respect you or value you. You don’t have to be at the whim of whatever manager because you don’t have any recourse because nobody answers the hotline when you make a complaint and your union steward ignores you because they’re looking for a promotion. You don’t have to deal with that environment anymore. There’s lots of jobs out there. So I encourage anybody that’s in my brother’s situation to get out because there’s opportunities, and there’s no reason to stick by this company because they don’t seem to value you and the contribution that you make to their bottom line.

Ken Seyfried: Let me add something to that if I could, Max. I want to go back to what Eric said earlier. I think Evan started seeing a real change about the same time that Rodney McMullen took over the company, to be quite frank. He took over the company in 2014, I think. He’s a Kroger through and through old style kind of guy that worked up through the system, took the company over in 2014. And Evan started noticing, like Eric said, hours being cut, really switching out store managers, I mean mass movement. He would go across a number of stores and remove the store managers, terminate them, and bring in a new breed.

And I think that organization started to reflect the leadership style of Rodney McMullen, a man, as Eric stated, who would give himself a 6% increase from 2019 through 2020 as the median wage worker and the hourly ranks lost 8% of their wages over that same time period. He’s the guy that is initiating stock buyback programs that enhance his holdings as he only gives his store stockers $2 an hour of hero pay for two months, and we’re in what, 18 month of our pandemic? He gave him hero pay for two months and then stopped it. His response was, “Well, I ended up giving him a 100 to $300 bonus at the end of that two months.”

Well, when you look at getting $2 an hour over a year for hero pay, that’s $4,000 a year for someone making 25,000 a year. He only did that for two months. There’s no question that organization in Evan’s eyes started changing when McMullen took over the company because then the organization started reflecting what Evan thought are McMullen’s values and what he saw in his workers to the point where Evan made a comment to me one day, “Dad, it’s almost like he has a disdain for us in what we see him doing.” I think McMullen was a real key to what was going on in those stores in terms of how they were changing and what the focus of Evan’s mind went from a focus on the worker to a focus on profits.

Linda Seyfried: And then as time went on, it became more personal. The personal misery on top of what Eric and Ken just said was the starting point in the big picture. And then the big picture started narrowing down to the manager that came to the store and his daily life of what was happening because of what they said.

Eric Seyfried: I think it’s important to get this message out that Kroger is no longer the Kroger that you knew growing up. They’re not the mom-and-pop Kroger store that we think of when we hear Kroger. The shock in our local community had a lot to do with people’s perception of Kroger as a wholesome company, as a company that treated their people right, as a hometown company. And I’m here to tell everybody that that’s not who Kroger is anymore. They’re a corporate behemoth. And they got that way by being ruthless and not just ruthless with the competition, but ruthless with their people and ruthless with my brother. And when you treat people that way as commodities, these things are bound to happen. These things are going to happen because they had no interest in protecting my brother. They saw the same store sales increasing at Shannon Frazee’s store, and they were going to let her do whatever she wanted to achieve those same store sales increases.

They were going to ignore whatever complaints came in. They were going to ignore the fact that she had similar complaints when she worked at Target before Kroger. They ignored the fact that she had similar complaints at other stores within Kroger before she came to the Milford store. And then they were going to ignore my brother’s complaints. And you know what happened when all those things were ignored? They didn’t protect my brother and they let my brother be harassed, even though he was a 20-year employee. She was a two-year employee, but they took her side because she was driving up same-store sales for that store during the pandemic. So that’s the connection. The values come straight from the top. The behavior of the store managers is a reflection of the company culture, and that company culture is what killed my brother. It’s the reason my brother isn’t here today. If he wasn’t working for Shannon Frazee in that store, if the union steward would’ve listened to his complaints, if HR would’ve listened to his complaints, my brother would be here with us today, but he’s not. And it’s all because of Kroger greed.

Ken Seyfried: What I’d like to add to that, if I could, Max, is the first time I ever heard about a Shannon Frazee from Evan was this. When she came to that store, she walked around and introduced herself to all the departmental managers. Now this is from Evan. She came into Evan’s department and said, “Are you Evan Seyfried?” And he said, “Yes.” She said, “I’m Shannon Frazee, the new store manager, and I want to let you know right now that I’ve come to work in a bad mood. I have a 10-year-old son that is a disaster in my life-

Linda Seyfried: That piece of shit.

Ken Seyfried: … and I just want to let you know that I’m in a bad mood,” and she walked off. That was this first encounter with Shannon Frazee. And he asked me, he says, “Dad, why does a person say something like that? How can a person be that way?” And I told them that, from what I’m hearing, she sounds like a psychopath to me, “I suggest, you’ve got a great reputation, you’re a hard worker, just put your head down and do your job and stay away from her.” But that was his first interaction with her.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and as y’all have pointed out, this story among many of the tragedies is a story of failure across all parties. Evan was failed by supervisors in his own store. He was failed by Kroger HR, and he was failed by the union. He did not get the help that he needed, and it’s important for us to understand that, that as Eric said, it did not have to be this way. There were steps that could have been taken that would have led to not just a better work culture, but to a human being with a life and a family still being here today. We talk a lot about this stuff on the show, you guys, but I think we all know these are the actual stakes of the stuff that we talk to other workers about, being treated inhumanely at work, being bullied, being harassed, not being listened to, not having people who have your back.

That takes a tremendous mental toll that so many of us have probably felt at one point or another in our lives, and we call it inhumane for a reason, because that’s what it is. This is what it can lead to. And I hope that folks listening really understand that it’s not just rhetoric when we talk about the need for people to actually take stronger action to protect their union members, that HR actually listen to these complaints and care about its employees instead of just seeing them as warm bodies to move around in this chess game for bigger profits and all that crap. And I think that the one parentheses that I wanted to give here for listeners is, as I mentioned in the introduction, is that this lawsuit has been filed. The case is in process right now, and we will be trying to give y’all updates on the show as we get them.

But just to take everything that we have put on the table here and lay it out again, from 2020 to Evan’s death in March on March 9, 2021, it really was a horror show, as has been laid out in the case in this lawsuit. The alleged claims that are detailed in the articles that we’ve shared in the show notes show this timeline that Ken, Linda and Eric have laid out for us, from the fact that both Evan’s politics and the fact that he was adamant about mask wearing during the middle of a deadly pandemic, he was allegedly called Antifa by coworkers and mocked for his leftist politics, and that also was translated to day-to-day harassment and bullying. Along with that, as was mentioned, this longer trend of increasing productivity, squeezing more out of workers and managers.

Evan was the dairy manager and picked up a lot of that work. So along with those changes that led to trying to squeeze more work out of workers with fewer people to increase profits, Evan was noticing, as the lawsuit alleges, that he was really working a lot more. Then you add into it the new store manager, Shannon Frazee, who’s named in the lawsuit as the primary bullier and abuser and saboteur of Evan, who allegedly made sexual advances that Evan reported that when Evan rejected them, he was told, as the case lays out, that he was now going to be ostracized, that he feared retaliation every single day, that he communicated this both to the union, to Kroger, to his coworkers, to his family, and the company didn’t do anything. The union didn’t do nearly enough. There are records of these complaints being filed.

Then things got even worse with, as the case lays out, that Evan was receiving threatening text messages from people who he suspected like to be in that inner circle at the store in Milford, even text messages that were threatening to frame him with very serious charges of putting child pornography on his phone to try to blackmail him. It’s really a devastating and gross litany of abuse and bullying that Evan faced in the months leading up to his death. And I just wanted to, again, sum up some of that for listeners ’cause I know we’ve got a lot on the table. There’s a lot that is being discussed in the lawsuit. But I guess I wanted to ask y’all, does that, I guess, give listeners at least some of a sense of the hell that Evan was put through?

Ken Seyfried: Let me just add a couple of things to that, please. I just want to, in that toolbox of terror that I referred to, they ended up, Max, sabotaging his work. The store manager would have her weekly audits in the departments. She had people go into his department and put dated material on his shelves that shouldn’t have been on the shelves. She was having people slash his yogurt cups open, spill milk in the department so that when she came around, she could fail him on the audit. It got to that point where they were sabotaging his work.

And I think the breaking point for Evan, for me, was on March the 4th, about four days before he took his life, that store had an annual audit that was conducted by the district manager. It was a big deal, the annual audits, and they did not schedule him to be there for the audit and his department, which was unheard of. It’s unheard of. So when the audit schedule came out, he saw that his department was the second department on that annual audit to be audited by the district manager. So he decided to stay on his own time in that department so that when the inspection came through, he was there. Well, they went through the first department and inspected it. Then they were ready to come down to his department and saw that he was there waiting for him. The district manager moved his audit down or his inspection down on the schedule and went to another department and they kept doing that. Moving him down while he was still there, until he decided, “To hell with it. I’ve been here two hours, I’m going home.” He went home and after he went home, they went into his department and found numerous violations. When he came to us that night after waiting to be audited and inspected, he was devastated because he saw that the district manager was in on it, was a part of that conspiracy to fail him on that annual audit. He was devastated by that, Max. He saw that district manager moving his department down on that inspection until he left the store.

So after Evan had seen that the district manager was involved in delaying that inspection until after he left the building. He was devastated by that, Max. He really didn’t have any idea that the conspiracy went beyond the walls of the store. And he told me that they’re out to get him. They’ve got the district manager involved in this, and he went back into the store the next day after the inspection and found out how many violations they had found. And he was absolutely devastated by that when he came home that night, because by this time he had moved in with us. He didn’t feel like it was safe to stay in his house and he was now living with us his last four or five days.

When he came home on that Friday, he said to us that they were going to fire him. They had set him up and they sabotaged his department for the annual inspection and he was going to be fired. So the very next morning he called his union. This was on a Saturday morning. He called his union and he quit the company. His rationale was, I tried to talk him out of this to no avail. His rationale was he had to look for another job when they fired him and he didn’t want to have a firing on his record. He wanted to have a voluntary quit on his work record. So he called the union. He would not call Frazee and quit.

He called the union and told the union he was resigning after 19 years with the company.

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, this goes back to kind of what we had talked about earlier, right? As you just mentioned, Ken. Evan had been with the company for 19 years. He was fiercely loyal to that company. He took great pride in his work. And as I understand it, he had an exceedingly clean record in those 19 years. And so the very thought that as the dairy manager in a very important yearly inspection, that his department would be found to have outdated dairy products or products that had been opened. Of course, that’s going to be terrifying in general, right?

Even if you don’t have to worry about this kind of conspiracy of people working against you to sabotage you, it’s already a lot of pressure knowing that so much rides on keeping your department up to code, keeping it clean, keeping all out of date and expired products off the shelves. And so then when you add on to that, everything that Evan was going through, and as the lawsuit kind of lays out, there were multiple instances where Evan was very suspicious and in fact, pretty damn sure that people were sabotaging him, that people were putting outdated products in his aisle after he had already gone through and made sure that everything was fine.

He’d even taken pictures of his aisle and then would hear about later that day, whether it was Shannon Frazee or someone else, “We found this or that thing in your aisle that shows you’re not doing your job right.” It’s this kind of psychological war, the psychological torture really that’s being done. I hesitate to call it a war because it’s not like Evan was going the opposite way. These were people torturing your son. And then when he had this inspection coming up, just to make sure that listeners were all following along, Evan was worried that his supervisor and people aligned with her would sabotage him, which would lead to a bad grade on his inspection and possibly be used as justification for firing him.

And I think one detail to mention is that Evan had requested to be transferred and that request was denied as a way to kind of get around the harassment that he was facing. And so he was very worried, as I understand it, that if this inspection found kind of out of date products, that that would be used to fire him, which is why he waited around when the inspector was there to kind of be there and oversee the inspection. And yet when that inspector came through and they saw that Evan was still there, they kept kicking the dairy section inspection down the line until he eventually left. And then lo and behold, after he leaves, he finds out that the inspector found nine violations. Did I summarize that okay?

Ken Seyfried: Exactly. Let me just correct you on one thing. He did sign the paperwork to step down from a departmental manager’s job and transfer it to another store. It’s in the contract that if you’re promoted to a departmental manager as a union employee and you decide to step down, you can pick three stores that you want to go to, and within 60 days, the store manager has to transfer you to one of those three stores. When he stepped down, Shannon Frazee came to him and told him, “We have a right to hold you for 60 days for training purposes and we’re going to hold you for 60 days.” He read that to mean that gave them 60 days to sabotage him at work and to fire him.

Eric Seyfried: Now, I was just going to add that, Shannon, I think that working people that are listening to this podcast have all had a bad boss before. So I think this Evan story has touched a chord with people because a lot of people have been in a situation where this bully has power over their livelihoods and they’re willing to do whatever just to control that person and use all that power that they have over their livelihood to control that person. And that’s what happened here, and I think that’s why it’s touched a chord. But Shannon was particularly sick in the way that she enjoyed controlling the store, and she used a lot of really sick tactics, and my brother wasn’t going to go along with those tactics.

But one of those tactics was to divide my brother from his coworkers. And going back to the politics for a second, my brother was political, but he was not political at work. And the area that he worked in is in Claremont County, Ohio, one of the most conservative counties in the country. And he never challenged his coworkers on politics. And he always challenged me to see the opposition as people and talked about the people that he worked with as human beings and their struggles and why they were drawn to the politics that they were drawn to, and he treated them as people. But Shannon saw that that was a difference. This isn’t about politics.

It’s about Shannon using my brother’s politics to divide him from the rest of his store to single him out, to bully him. It wasn’t about her believing in an opposite type of politics. It was only a way to isolate my brother, and it was one of the many tools that she had in her belt, including sabotage, including sexual harassment, which wasn’t so much to get in a relationship with my brother, but it was to get him into a situation where he responded to the sexual harassment and then she can accuse him of sexual harassment and get him fired.

She used these type of tools in her history too, is what we’ve come to find out, is that she had these problems and these complaints at her previous employment, and Kroger had not discovered that in their background checks and then ignored when she did those same behaviors to control the people in her own store. So she just had a sick bag of control tactics that she used, and dividing my brother with masks or politics from his colleagues was just one of those sick tools that she used to exert control over the store.

Ken Seyfried: Let me add to that, Max, if I could. This really goes well beyond Shannon Frazee. It’s just not Shannon Frazee. We’re talking about the Kroger company itself. That district manager was bought into this conspiracy. Joe Pig, the security manager. He was sexually harassing younger workers in the store. They went to Evan for help. He took them to the union. As a result of going to the union, Pig was removed out of the store and two weeks later reinstated back into the store as the security manager by that district manager. So this went well beyond Frazee. It went to the district manager to Joe Pig, the security manager.

I think Rodney McMullen has culpability in this because he set an example for these people. We’re talking about Kroger management putting my son in this position. Frazee, she was a leader in the pack, but she was one of many that was a part of this. And I just want to make it real clear, it’s not all about Shannon Frazee. There were other managers involved in this.

Eric Seyfried: That’s right.

Ken Seyfried: Life a living hell.

Eric Seyfried: There was a company culture here that allowed for this type of behavior to happen. Another person that played a key role that had it in their ability to stop what happened was the union steward in the store. My brother submitted that sexual harassment complaint to the union steward. It was never submitted. We come to find out after my brother passed away, that union steward was promoted by Shannon Frazee to the bakery manager role. I wonder why that harassment complaint was never submitted. And by the way, a month and a half after my brother died, Shannon Frazee had that harassment complaint in her hand, and she used that harassment complaint to intimidate our witnesses from my brother’s case.

My brother’s colleagues that have come out and spoken up for my brother and confirmed what my brother saw and did. Well, she used that harassment complaint to harass one of our witnesses. She put that harassment complaint in her department next to an inspection report so she could find it and realized that Shannon Frazee had control over the store. That whatever complaints happened, they got back to Shannon. And Shannon was not going to let her sabotage Shannon’s career in the store, was not going to let her talk about what she saw happening to Evan. So she used that sexual harassment complaint that she got from the union steward to harass and intimidate our witnesses.

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, I remember reading this kind of detail and it was really just sickening, right? I mean, it makes me really sick to my stomach. But that again, I guess just for listeners to make sure we’re crystal clear. Evan had filed with the union steward at the store, a sexual harassment complaint against the store manager, Shannon Frazee. That steward never processed that complaint.

And then later after Evan died, that store manager put that complaint, that un-filed complaint, where someone at the store who has been vocal in speaking up for Evan and speaking out against these abuses would find it and get the very clear message that there is no external party to help you here. Like all roads run through me is basically the message that’s being sent there.

Ken Seyfried: Let me add to that. Evan told me he had a good friend that worked in the bakery department. That good friend told Evan that her bakery manager, who was the part-time union steward told her that if she continued her friendship with Evan, she would be next. This is what the union steward who was promoted to the bakery manager by Frazee told her, that she would be next if she continued her friendship with Evan.

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, it just really is, I don’t know, heartbreaking, infuriating, and everything else I can think of all wrapped into one. But this is really what I meant earlier when I said that there were many people who failed Evan and because of that failure, especially the kind of… Whether they were deliberate or not, and it sounds like quite a lot of this was very god-damn deliberate, that contributed to his death, and that is what the lawsuit is being put forward to say. That is where things are right now, and I hope that listeners will take all of this and read the links in the show notes to get an even more fuller sense of what happened in the days leading up and the months leading up to Evan’s death.

And I guess I wanted to, again, thank you all a million times for taking this time. I know it’s been painful and I’ve taken up more of your time than I would have liked, but I wanted to, maybe by way of kind of rounding us out, ask if you could kind of tell listeners where things stand right now and what they can do to show support for you all, support for Evan. What can listeners do?

Eric Seyfried: Hey, Max, real quick. I just wanted to say that Evan didn’t want to die. Evan did not want to kill himself. Evan has not lived a life of depression or being near suicide. It’s never something that’s come up in his entire life. He did not spend his whole life fighting depression, thinking about killing himself, wanting to leave this world. He loved life. He had plans for the future. Everybody you talked to that he was close to, his girlfriend, his family, his friends, can recount that. He had plans to come visit us. He was driven to such a state of fear and panic by the harassment and the targeted bullying and sabotage and all the people ganging up against him, that he had a mental break.

And in that mental break, he took his life. We did not see this coming. There were no signs. It wasn’t how we understood suicide to happen. We thought suicide was kind of a slow struggle and then one day somebody just has had enough and they end it. But that’s not what happened here, even though that’s also similarly tragic. What happened here was my brother was living his life and supporting his family, and he was targeted because he wanted to go along with a manager that liked to harass people and he wanted to go along with doing the wrong thing.

And because of that, he was threatened and harassed to a state of fear, and he had a psychotic break and took his own life. So I just wanted to make clear that if it wasn’t for Kroger, if it wasn’t for Shannon, if it wasn’t for Joe Pig and the people that supported her conspiracy, my brother would be here today. He wasn’t looking to die, he was looking to live, and we want justice.

Ken Seyfried: Amen. To summarize where the family’s at with this and what we want to say to the people listening to this podcast. Our biggest concern right now is for the people that are currently working in those stores. As we speak, we know people are being targeted and abused. And I would ask any of your listeners to this podcast that if you know anyone that works for Kroger and a store in your community, talk to them and ask them how they’re doing. Ask them how they’re being treated. Ask them if they need help, because we don’t want to see anyone get to the point that our son got to and take their own life.

We just don’t want to see that happen again. So that would be the message that I think our family would want to give to your listeners. Check with the people that you know that work for Kroger and see if they’re okay and if they’re not, get them help because there is no oversight in this company at all. There’s none. There’s no place to go, and that’s the message we want to share with your viewers. We want justice for Evan, but we also want justice for the people that are working in those stores as we speak. We’re very concerned about that.

Attorney Austin LiPuma: Hey, Max, if you could ask it again too, there are channels these days by the benevolence of loved ones and friends and family members that have created groups on Evan’s behalf and have just been pillars of support. I think that that would be a great way to pay some lip service to those groups that have been formed as a byproduct of what Evan had to suffer. So I think the family should spend just one moment plugging that because these channels on social media, there’s a few of them that have really grown exponentially.

Eric Seyfried: If you would like to get involved or learn more about the case, I would first advocate visiting Justice for Evan’s Facebook page. That’s a Facebook group that has sprung up to advocate for Evan. As part of that Facebook group if you’re a Kroger worker, there’s a separate subsection of the group that you can get in there and you could talk with other Kroger workers, hear their stories, and share your story and get support for the harassment that you’re facing and the unfair labor practices from other Kroger employees.

In addition to the Facebook group, Justice for Evan, please follow us on Twitter. We’re making announcements and sharing news on Twitter as well, and that’s Justice for Evan on Twitter.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you all so much for sitting down with me and spending this time with us telling us about Evan’s story. My heart is with you. Everyone who listens to the show, I know that they’ll be sending their love and solidarity to all of you. Please do keep us posted as things develop. If the show can be of any help in any way, we can be signal boosting things on social media. If you ever want to come back on the show, all you have to do is just let me know when, but please know that you have friends around the country and that we’re all with you.

Ken Seyfried: That means a lot, Max. Thank you.

Linda Seyfried: Thank you.

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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
 
Email: max@therealnews.com
 
Follow: @maximillian_alv