Originally Posted by
OldnGrounded
The unfounded speculation in this thread has already slipped into the realm of "conspiranoia." There's absolutely no good reason to think that Barnett's death would provide Boeing (or anyone else, as far as we know) a major advantage or benefit, certainly not one that would outweigh the surge in reputational damage in an already-damaging case. And we don't really believe Boeing is assassinating whistleblowers, now do we?
According to the reports by the police and coroner, so far, this tragic event looks very much like a suicide. Some of you seem to think that the local authorities were likely bribed or otherwise influenced to alter their findings. That's not impossible, of course, but it is unlikely in the extreme — so unlikely that promoting the notion without evidence is both nonsensical and reckless.
You should stop it.
Originally Posted by
WillowRun 6-3
I'd like to add, cautiously, a little bit different perspective. The whistleblower's deposition was in progress, set of continue (if I recall the news reports) the next day.
First, a somewhat sanitized story about a suicide of a prinicipal witness in a case I worked on some years back. The man was not a whistleblower per se, but rather the "ringleader" of the defection of a large cadre of employees of a client, who picked up en masse and moved to a competitor in the exact same line(s) of business. A competitor who was (at that time) only about ten times larger, and who also happened to be based in a large, and distant, U.S. ally. Fact-paced litigation ensued, based on the departing employees being subject to contractual agreements barring their use of company trade secrets in the service of a competitor. The case was resolved on terms mostly favoring my firm's client, with the ringleader being ordered by the court to adhere to more stringent restrictions than the others in the cadre (and to say more would leech over into "inside baseball").
Some time later we learned the ringleader had taken his own life. The word we received was that as he planned to lead the scheme to raid his employer and take an entire group to the competitor business, he had developed significant expectations of financial and other big-time status and success. And that these expectations spread to the group of employees who left the client with him. Which expectations, due to the illegality of the raid and the success in the court action against it, had not materialized, or not materialized nearly enough. This explanation was consistent with other information of a factual nature in the case record. Including deposition testimony.
It seems quite reasonable to think the whistleblower in similar fashion plausibly may have anticipated some level of reward - perhaps financial, perhaps in other forms - for his courageous exposure of Boeing's problems. Possibly in the course of the deposition, which still was in progress, the cold, harsh realities of the American legal process were brought into painfully stark relief. Lengthy and very difficult and tedious phases of the litigation process were yet to unfold, and if some rewards beyond the moral high ground had been envisioned, perhaps those hopes or expectations had crashed beyond recovery. I'm not saying this is what pushed the man to the brink and then over it - only that severely disappointed expectations relating to a major and risky personal decision could be the reason.
I hope his attorneys find a way to weave this tragic loss of a courageous seeker of truth into the claims still being litigated; just as an individual SLF who happens also to practice law, I believe Boeing holds indirect responsibility, morally at least, if not legally.
Well, John Barnett himself stated that if something happened to him, it was not a suicide.