A 32-year-old male employee was crushed by/caught in a rotating machine roller while attempting to package a mattress. The victim was in the process of operating the machine, rolling, and wrapping a twin-sized mattress with cellophane to prepare it for packaging and shipping when he was caught by the roller. Two machines function together to first compress a mattress to a flat, thin state inside of a vacuum-sealed plastic bag and then roll the mattress into a tube to be placed in a box to be shipped.
The machines can process mattresses from twin sizes to king. It was explained that the size of the mattress that the facility processed could change multiple times a day as they were dependent on customer orders for each lot and the facility did not maintain a back-order of stock at any time. It was discovered that most of the time, there were two people working together to process an order; however, on the day of the incident, only the victim was operating both machines.