Wal-Mart Bury's Tortoises Alive

North Palm Beach County shoppers looking for low-priced pants, patio furniture and DVD players will owe an awesome debt to five dead reptiles.

The five gopher tortoises had the bad luck to dig their burrows on the site of a future Wal-Mart in Lake Park. And they paid a ghastly price: The state allowed the store's developers to bury the tortoises alive earlier this year, leaving them to starve or gasp for air for the weeks or months it would take them to die. Wal-Mart paid $11,409 for the permit.