Former safety manager sentenced for lying & conspiracy to obstruct justice

This is the culmination of a workplace fatality that occurred seven years ago. We have posted numerous incidents over the years. Here is the latest.

An ex-manager at aluminium company in the USA who tried to hide from investigators the circumstances of an employee’s death in 2012 was given three months home confinement for his role in the attempted cover-up.

Former plant safety coordinator and human resources director (name removed), at sentencing one day during the week of October 2019 in federal court, was also fined $1,000 and placed on three years of supervised release when his house arrest expires.

His home confinement will be monitored electronically.

The defendant , pleaded guilty July 2019 to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice after initially facing charges that also included obstruction of justice, obstruction of proceedings and making false statements to law enforcement.

In additional the former plant manager was sentenced during the 2^nd week of October 2019 to five months in prison, fined $20,000 and given three years of supervised release for his part trying to hide details from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The former plant manager also pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice. He had originally faced the same charges as the former safety manager minus making false statements to law enforcement charge.

The charges stemmed from an investigation into the 2012 death of an aluminium worker .

The aluminium worker was killed October 2012, during an incident at the plant when two metal racks stacked on top of each other, weighing between 4,000 and 5,000 pounds, tipped over onto him and another employee. The two men were pushing the racks on a roller conveyor system, according to a police report.

OSHA began its investigation Oct. 31, 2012, and learned of multiple emails concerning safety issues with the roller system.

The former plant manager and the former safety manager devised a plan to lie to an OSHA investigator, an indictment against the pair states. They persuaded employees, by suggesting their jobs might be in jeopardy, to draft statements recanting previous emails about safety issues, according to the indictment. Also during an interview with OSHA, the former safety manager gave false information about safety issues, the indictment states.

The aluminium company, which has a foreign parent company, pleaded guilty in April 2019 to a charge of misprision of a felony in connection with a conspiracy to obstruct justice related to the OSHA investigation, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Misprision is the deliberate concealment of one’s knowledge of a treasonable act or a felony.

When the company was sentenced in August, it was fined $250,000 and placed on three years of probation.

Prosecutors alleged the aluminium company, through its employees, concealed felony obstruction of justice offenses from aluminium company management in (the foreign country) and didn’t tell law enforcement of those offenses. This took place between April 2016 and Jan. 1, 2018, according to the federal attorney’s office.

We offer our sincere condolences to the deceased worker’s family and friends. We also pray that the injured worker has recovered fully.

We purposely omit the company name and any worker’s name(s) if the incident involves an injury or a fatality. We try not to place blame on the company nor the worker. But with the hope that bringing awareness to these incidents will prevent recurrence. With that said, in this incident we anguished on ever post we made. The sentencing for both the former plant manager and former safety manager was not for the death of their coworker. But, for the cover-up and lying to the federal investigators on the incident. Through the investigation from OSHA it was found that both the former plant manager and former safety manager knew of this hazard prior to the fatal incident. Instead of correcting the hazard. They did nothing and one worker is dead and another was seriously injured.

Both of the former managers’ career as managers in our industry is done in our opinion. They have both been convicted of Federal crimes. The former plant manager received a prison sentence while the former safety manager received a sentencing of home confinement. Both received monetary fines and long probation terms. We hope at some point that both former managers will think what if. What if they fixed the known hazard. If they did none of the subsequent events would have happened. Their coworker would be alive, the managers' lives would be much different.

We pray that every reader remembers the poor choices that these former managers made and promise to always correct a safety hazard when you know about it.

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