The family of John “Mitch” Barnett, a Boeing whistleblower whose death last year brought fresh attention to the company’s persistent struggles with quality, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Charleston, South Carolina, blaming the aerospace company for Barnett’s suicide.
Barnett was found March 9, 2024, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 62. Beside his body in his truck outside a Charleston hotel, police recovered a note that accused company leaders of ruining his life and included, “I pray Boeing pays.” Charleston police told The Associated Press that Barnett’s death garnered “global attention.”
The 146-page civil complaint describes Barnett as a conscientious employee determined to keep air travel safe even if it meant challenging Boeing managers, who the lawsuit claims routinely batted down Barnett’s complaints. Over time, the grueling and often frustrating process of whistleblowing sapped Barnett emotionally, which his family’s lawyers contend set him on the path to suicide.
“The weight of years of Boeing’s harassment, abuse and humiliation became too much for John to bear,” the complaint states. It cites Barnett’s medical provider who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, panic attacks and anxiety stemming from a hostile work environment at Boeing.
Lawyers representing Barnett’s family in the new civil suit also represented him on whistleblower complaints to federal agencies that accused Boeing of risking safety to advance production, then retaliating against him for it. Charleston-based attorneys Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles blamed Boeing for Barnett’s death in a May 2024 news release.
“Mr. Barnett’s last words make clear that while Boeing may not have pulled the trigger, the company is responsible for his death,” their joint statement said.
Knowles and Turkewitz along with New York lawyer David Boies are representing Barnett’s family.
The complaint doubles down on that claim: “Whether or not Boeing intended to drive John to his death or merely destroy his ability to function, (Barnett’s death) was absolutely foreseeable. … Boeing’s conduct was the clear cause, and the clear foreseeable cause, of John’s death.”
Asked for its response to the lawsuit, Boeing spokesperson Bobbie Egan provided a written statement: “We are saddened by John Barnett’s death and extend our condolences to his family.”
The complaint alleges that late in his Boeing career, a manager frustrated by Barnett’s whistleblowing told him, “I’m going to push you until you break.”
Boeing employed Barnett for 32 years, first at its Everett, Washington, plant and then in South Carolina. After years of complaints at Boeing, Barnett filed a whistleblower retaliation complaint against the company in January 2017 with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, then abruptly retired two months later. Barnett’s lawyers said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his experience as a Boeing whistleblower, which led to his retirement. OSHA ruled against Barnett. He was appealing that ruling at the time of his death.
Barnett filed a federal lawsuit in 2021, alleging Boeing took intentional shortcuts when building planes. He was scheduled to testify in a deposition the day he died.
In his whistleblower complaint and subsequent lawsuit, Barnett accused Boeing of pressuring employees at its South Carolina plant to violate Federal Aviation Administration standards and internal guidelines by not recording or fixing defects on aircraft that were known to them. The result, Barnett claimed, was incomplete documentation that violates the law and jeopardizes the flying public.
Barnett’s suit focused on safety lapses that he accused high-level managers at the Boeing plant of ignoring. They included allowing mechanics to conduct inspections of their own work, ignoring conditions that threatened to cause electrical shorts and failing to replace defective oxygen tanks that passengers would rely on in an emergency.
In a 2021 email included in the complaint, Barnett describes himself as once “a very happy go lucky guy that loved his job, his company and the products they built.” But over time, he wrote, Boeing’s resistance to his safety critiques brought those perspectives to an end.
“Each time I do an interview, a deposition or other stressful discussion on what happened with me and Boeing, I re-live (sic) those years all over again. It puts me in a deep depression for a week or two. … I shut myself in, I don’t want family or friends coming over, I am angry at the world!”
Boeing was already under intense scrutiny at the time of Barnett’s death for the Jan. 5, 2024, midair blowout of a fuselage panel on an Alaska Airlines flight. Barnett’s death spotlighted the punishing emotional toll whistleblowers face at work and in the taxing federal system for speaking up about safety. He was in the middle of a series of depositions testifying to safety shortcomings at Boeing that he said he observed.
Attention on Boeing and the safety of its planes swelled again 52 days after Barnett’s death, when another high-profile whistleblower who raised safety concerns, Joshua Dean, died from a fast-moving infection. At the time of Dean’s death, he was testifying in a stockholder lawsuit against his employer, Boeing fuselage supplier Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kansas.
Together, the whistleblowers’ deaths cast even more attention on safety at Boeing as Congress held hearings on the fuselage blowout. The tragedies gave rise to conspiracy theories about Barnett and Dean’s deaths. However, the people closest to them accept the explanations that medical examiners provided but highlight that whistleblowing took a heavy toll on their health and well-being.
Under federal law, to prevail in wrongful-death lawsuits plaintiffs must prove the employer owed and shirked a duty of care to the defendant or acted negligently in a way that contributed to the death.
Following Barnett’s death, whistleblowers at the Boeing plant in South Carolina where he worked alleged that falsified records claiming to have conducted inspections that never happened were common. The FAA opened an investigation.
Barnett’s 2021 lawsuit alleges that instead of fixing the defects and improving its assembly processes, Boeing retaliated by giving him poor reviews and demoting him even though he had years of good performance appraisals. While the FAA found parts of Barnett’s whistleblower complaints valid, according to congressional records, Boeing at the time of his death said it had reviewed Barnett’s allegations and denied them.
Last June, then-CEO of Boeing David Calhoun told Congress the company was “committed to making sure every employee feels empowered to speak up if there’s a problem.”
Barnett’s family’s lawsuit against Boeing seeks unspecified damages including lost pay and bonuses spanning at least a decade, lost health and life insurance benefits, medical expenses, loss of retirement and company contribution benefits, emotional distress, expenses and attorney fees.
“I hope this filing will bring about justice and accountability for John and his family,” Knowles said.
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Source: American Military News