A group of Walmart employees say they caught a coworker being a peeping Tom - in a ladies’ room that’s also open to customers.

Incident reports from DeKalb County Police show three women alleging one janitor recording them as they used the restroom at the Walmart at 3580 Memorial Drive in Decatur. The incidents happened 2.5 weeks apart, and two of the women were targeted in the same day.

Ashley Jones is still shaken after the February 21, 2023 incident at a Memorial Drive store.

“It scarred me. I have dreams about it,” she says. “I really do.”

That night, she was using the restroom when a sudden shadow on the wall of her stall caught her attention, and she looked up to see what was casting it.

“I’d seen the phone at the corner of my bathroom stall and I jumped up and I yelled,” says Jones. “You could just hear him jumping down from the toilet or whatever he was standing on and running out the restroom.”

After exiting the bathroom and seeing no one nearby, the asset protection specialist was able to use security video to identify the alleged peeper who had run out of the bathroom--a janitor.

Hours before Jones’s experience that night, however, another Walmart employee says she had already reported being spied on in the restroom by the same man.

Jahvanna Ruff tells WSB that when she entered a bathroom the afternoon of February 21, she heard someone leave the large stall on one end to enter the one next to hers.

“Then I hear somebody, like, step up on something,” says Ruff. “He’s stepping up on the toilet seat and I just see like his little spikes on his hair. So I’m like, ‘Am I trippin’?’ So I looked back at him and he looked back at me and I look up--his phone is at the top.”

Ruff says the 26-year-old custodian then left the restroom and that she reported it to her supervisor immediately.

“She told me there was nothing we could do about it because it was a he-say, she-say situation,” says Ruff.

About eight hours later, she went to the bathroom again--and says she saw the same janitor recording her once again. The supervisor, she says, told her a second time there was nothing that could be done.

Attorney Jonathan Johnson represents these two women and a third who also caught the peeping Tom recording her in a store restroom.

“My third client was surveillanced in the bathroom on March 5th--two weeks after they had complained to management and the police,” says Johnson. “For a period of weeks, he was systematically photographing women in the bathroom stalls, so I believe there were probably many women exposed to this. This was a publicly available ladies room.”

Johnson notes children could have been among the store visitors who used that Walmart bathroom.

Ruff says that day she was targeted, she kept an eye on the ladies’ room to see if the janitor went back into it. She contends that he did--and that he stayed in there for more than an hour. She warned coworkers repeatedly that there was a male janitor inside the women’s room without the required tell-tale blocking-off of the door to alert women that a cleaner--especially a male one--was working in there.

DeKalb County Police confirm the case is open and say investigators are gathering evidence.

Walmart sent WSB a statement about the case:

“We prioritize the safety of everyone in our stores, and respect for the individual is among our founding principles. Mr. ****** ***** is no longer with the company and we’ll continue working with law enforcement as they investigate these allegations.”

WSB Radio is not publishing the name of the alleged peeping Tom at this time because he has not been arrested.

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