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Florida CVS customer finds herself locked inside after closing

By Ben Hooper
A Florida woman ended up locked inside a CVS after walking in just before closing time. The incident occurred just a few months after another woman was locked inside another Florida CVS when it closed for the night. Screenshot: WOFL-TV
A Florida woman ended up locked inside a CVS after walking in just before closing time. The incident occurred just a few months after another woman was locked inside another Florida CVS when it closed for the night. Screenshot: WOFL-TV

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May 24 (UPI) -- A woman who stopped into a Florida CVS store to buy a birthday card a few minutes before closing time said she ended up locked alone inside the store.

Lillian Rimmel of Orlando said she was visiting a friend in Titusville when she stopped into the town's CVS to buy a birthday card about 9:50 p.m. Friday.

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Rimmel, who said she was unaware that the store closed at 10 p.m., said she took her card up front just after 10 and discovered she was alone in the store.

"I'm walking back to pay for it, and all the alarms started going off," Rimmel told WESH-TV.

She said the motion sensor alarm was blaring a siren as she searched for a way out of the shop, which was locked down with a metal security gate over the front entrance.

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"I started screaming, 'Is anyone here? Can anyone help me?'" Rimmel recalled to Florida Today.

Rimmel called a friend who advised her to dial 911.

"All I could hear were alarms," the friend, Jacqueline Burt, said of the phone call. "I told her to call 911 because I didn't want them to go in there with guns."

Rimmel said she made sure she was in view of a security camera as she dialed 911, so it would be clear that she was not up to anything illegal.

"I was shaking. I was scared, but I wasn't scared for my life. I was just so nervous that I did something wrong," she said. "I didn't know how this could happen. I was dumbfounded," she said.

"They [police] told me to stay where I was and they would call me back when they found someone to let me out," Rimmel said.

Meanwhile, Burt called another local CVS store, where employees were able to reach the manager of the store where Rimmel was trapped.

Titusville Police Department Public Information Officer Amy Matthews said officers responded to Rimmel's 10:09 p.m. call and waited outside the store for the key holder to arrive. She said the officers determined there was no wrong-doing and sought to calm Rimmel, who appeared shaken up by the experience.

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Rimmel said the CVS manager arrived and allowed her to purchase the card before leaving.

Rimmel said she does not understand how employees could have been unaware that she was in the store. She said there was no announcement that the business was closing.

"I'm 6 feet tall. I can overlook all the partitions, I can look over every one of the aisles, so I don't know how they didn't see me. No one said anything to me. No one did nothing," she said. "There was no indication it was closing at all. The music was still on and so were the lights."

A CVS spokesman said employees are being retrained to avoid future incidents.

"We sincerely apologize for the incident at our Titusville store, and we are reinforcing the correct store closing procedures with all of our stores to prevent this from occurring again," the spokesman said.

A near-identical incident happened in February at a CVS in St. Cloud, Fla. Christian Hathaway said she went to the front of the store to check out around 9 p.m. only to discover she was alone and locked inside. She said there was no warning that the store was closing and employees did not make sure the business was empty before leaving.

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