This archive report was first published on 7 January 2020.
On January 7, 2020, the Pennsylvania State Police began investigating the discovery of bedbugs in a Walmart store in Washington Township, Pennsylvania.
A store manager reported that an employee found a closed pill bottle containing live bedbugs on Thursday, January 2, 2020, inside the men's changing room.
The bottle was found inside a boy's jacket that was for sale, according to the police.
Walmart disposed of the jacket and contacted Ecolab, a hygiene and energy technologies company, which sent an employee to the store on Friday, January 3, 2020.
The Ecolab employee reported finding bedbugs crawling around the men's fitting room, the police said.
On Saturday, January 4, 2020, a Walmart employee found a second closed pill bottle with several dead bedbugs on the floor of the men's department, near the belts, the police said.
A trooper collected that bottle for fingerprints, Trooper Cindy Schick, a Pennsylvania State Police spokeswoman, said on Monday, January 6, 2020.
Trooper Schick stated, 'I would hope that it was not a prank by an employee. It sounds as if two separate employees found two separate bottles two days in a row.'
No arrests have been made, and the police consider the episode to be an isolated incident of disorderly conduct.
Walmart stated that its third-party pest management service had visited the store and found no evidence of an infestation.
Bedbugs are small parasitic insects that feed on the blood of people and animals as they sleep, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
