To avoid any doubt, I'm definitely not asserting any degree of certainty about whether or not Mr. Barnett took his own life. Rather just trying to stay within my lane as SLF/attorney and commenting on the employment law, and general litigation, aspects.
Projecting outcomes of the legal case Mr. Barnett was pressing in the administrative law process of the U.S. Department of Labor is largely and maybe completely speculative without actual knowledge of what his Complaint - the legal filing actually made - asserts the company did as acts of retaliation. The Complaint (or other type of filing, if AIR21 cases have different terminology) might be accessible online but without more details, especially a case number, the DoL website for ALJ proceedings is pretty user-unfriendly. (If anyone has the complaint itself, feel free to post or DM.)
The best source I've found for what facts Mr. Barnett's claim probably asserts is an April 21 2019 New York Times article with the headline, "Claims of Shoddy Production Draw Scrutiny to a Second Boeing Jet." The article, generally, recaps many specific instances of employee concerns about 787 production, especially in a context of the company giving production rates higher priority than quality concerns. The article contains, in the pursuit of describing an overall set of problems in the plant, the quality concerns of several employees, some of whom filed whistleblower claims - presumably about the production issues themselves - and some of them also filed employment law claims.
Rather than trying to summarize the article's contents pertaining to Mr. Barnett, I'm posting a link to the article. As retaliation claims generally go under federal anti-discrimination statutes, the actions allegedly taken by the company, first, probably do evince retaliatory intent, but second, are far from the typically overt and severe actions (and stretch out over several years). In the aviation-related whistleblower arena, however, the legal and factual standards may be different - I don't know. And the employment ended with his retirement, rather than by a termination though - again without the DoL complaint he filed, whether the timing of the retirement was coerced isn't evident. Perhaps others are aware.
The NYT article link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/b...-problems.html