Woman whose disappearance sparked frantic search by parents and friends spent night asleep in a women's room stall in a downtown bar

UPDATE: Board rules no violation, but orders bar to file written plan to ensure something like this doesn't happen again.

A worker at the White Bull Tavern on Union Street today apologized to his boss and the Boston Licensing Board for an April incident in which he was only trying to do a woman a favor.

The South Boston woman showed up at the door not long before closing on a slow night on April 13, but the worker, manning the door, said he took pity on her when she said she was supposed to meet some friends there and he agreed to let her wait inside to get out of the cold, wet night.

At a hearing this morning, he told the licensing board he was particularly mindful of trying to keep the woman safe, a couple months after two well publicized kidnappings outside Boston bars and clubs, one outside Hennessy's, just down the street from the White Bull, in which the woman wound up captive in a Charlestown apartment, the other of which ended with the woman dead.

Once inside, though, the woman, whom he said did not appear at all intoxicated, headed straight to the women's room - where she entered a stall and fell asleep. And then she stayed there, still asleep, until 5:30 a.m. when a security guard making a routine inspection of the bar, found her, he and a police detective said. The friends whom she said would be meeting her there never showed.

The worker said that it was his job to check the restrooms as part of closing down the bar for the night and that he simply failed to that night.

Meanwhile, the woman's family and friends, who had eaten with her earlier in the evening at a South Boston restaurant, were growing increasingly frantic. A police detective told the board that the woman had called one of them around 12:15 am., saying she was in an Uber downtown, and feeling very sleepy - he said they were puzzled why the South Boston woman, after eating with them in South Boston, would be downtown.

"We can only apologize," bar attorney Dennis Quilty said. "She was safe, nothing happened to her."

The board decides Thursday whether the bar merits any punishment for the incident.