Warning to all those planning to get their family pictures developed in Walmart — Walmart employees are very strict on bath-time photos! Even if the photos are clearly innocent family photos, Walmart employees will look at it as very sexual.
This is what happened to a poor couple who took a memory stick to a Walmart store in Arizona for processing. There were 144 photographs taken mostly during the family’s vacation in San Diego. There were seven to eight bath photos of their three girls partially nude and playing in the bath tub. The ignorant Walmart employee found the family photos offensive, lewd or pornographic and so Walmart turned over the photos to the police.
The girls, then ages 1 1/2, 4 and 5, were taken away from parents Lisa and Anthony Demaree by the Arizona Child Protective Services. The parents were prohibited from seeing their children for several days and did not regain custody for a month!
Imagine how devastating this situation was for the parents and for the kids! The parents were being persecuted because they took innocent photos of their kids having some playtime during a bath. Their names were on the list of sex offenders and the mother was fired from work!
The Walmart store employee was clearly ignorant and did not execute the proper power of reason. So was the employee trained into some porno detection? To jump at something as scary as this and scream “child abuse” is pure stupidity. Probably, this employee was deprived of childhood photos when he/she was young. And the supervisor who called the cops was just as ignorant as the employee. The actions of the employee and Walmart were unreasonable.
Yes, there are laws that protect children from abuse and neglect. And I have no problem with them. However, people, especially those in Walmart Arizona, must execute due diligence in interpreting the laws. They should know that real child abusers never take nude photos of children and have them processed in Walmart.
The couple is now suing Walmart and I really hope they will win!
