Amazon worker died by suicide at Las Vegas facility

Employees were sent home with pay shortly after the incident, an Amazon spokesperson said.

A man who appeared to have “fallen or jumped” was pronounced dead inside an Amazon facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada, early Monday, police said. The coroner later determined the man died by suicide.

Officers arrived just before 7 a.m. and found the man inside the building on East Tropical Parkway, in the northeast corner of metropolitan Las Vegas, said Alexander Cuevas, a spokesperson for the North Las Vegas Police Department.

On Tuesday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the Clark County Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner identified the man as 48-year-old Paul Vilscek, who lived in Las Vegas. She said that the cause of death was “blunt or injury to the head, trunk and extremities” and that the manner of death was suicide.

Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski said: “We’re deeply saddened by this tragic incident. Their family and loved ones are in our thoughts, and we’re supporting our employees during this difficult time.”

She said that employees were sent home with pay shortly after the incident and that they were being offered grief counseling.

An Amazon employee who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of losing her job said that when she arrived for work just after 7 a.m., police cars and ambulances were in the parking lot.

Shortly afterward, Amazon staff members began installing barricades adjacent to where the worker was found, the employee said.

“Nobody knew what was going on,” she said. “Everyone was so confused.”

The woman said supervisors told workers to continue working until about 9:40 a.m., when they were all sent home.

“That really upsets me,” she said. “The managers knew what was going on and were going to the area but didn’t send us home immediately. Someone just passed away. It just proves to me that managers at Amazon don’t really care as long as they get their numbers done.”

The facility, known as LAS7 after the airport code for the nearby Las Vegas airport, opened in May 2019. It is the largest Amazon fulfillment center in the state, at 855,000 square feet.

According to a post on Reddit, management texted LAS7 workers telling night shift workers not to come to work and saying both day and night workers would be paid for their regular shifts.