Boeing whistleblower found dead in US
 

Poor fellow... Whistle-blowing and its decision/regret/sustain spin-off always applies almost unimaginable pressures to the individual concerned. Its associated backlash can make them simply unendurable.

Now he at least has found some peace...

Very sad. RIP, John Barnett.

Unable at this point to find any indication of which hotel the parking lot is attached to. Charleston seems to me to be a potentially hostile environment for a well known ex-Boeing North Charleston plant employee-turned whistleblower to give evidence in a lawsuit against his former employer.

Whatever the circumstances of Mr Barnett's passing prove to be, here is hoping that the contributions he has already made and any that come to light now that he is gone succeed in achieving the improvements and accountability in airline safety that Mr Barnett was aiming for.

Just too sad.

MHHH, hopefully the DOJ investigation will be more interesting from now on.

A note from a moderator:

This is very sad, I think that we all agree about that. Let's withhold speculation about exactly what happened, or possible factors or associations, until those who might investigate have reported their findings. This event is not like an aviation accident, which we might discuss with some expertise. This event is a personal tragedy, with respect to which, at present, we have no information to associate anyone else.

Pilot DAR

You can’t stop news speculation and for those involved in corporate damage limitation this is a difficult time.

Mass media love this sort of stuff.

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1767311900411642119

Yes, please, folks. We don't know and can't know, and feeding the storm of speculation building around this helps no one and no cause.

Statement from Barnett's lawyers:

The MH 370 posts have been moved to the appropriate thread.
Members are reminded to not pollute this thread with further digression into that event.
Thank you all in advance.

He is now a Boeing Martyr

Typical reasons someone dies from a gunshot in America:

1) 50% of shootings are someone the victim knew or a misidentification in a purposeful shooting (more typical in drive-bys)
2) around 30% of shootings are from the demons they were fighting and could no longer overcome.
3) a large number remaining are during robberies.
4) a smaller number are accidents or mishandling the weapon. Gets more likely if the person got a gun for self-defense recently.

No one can tell about the demons. Many fight them so long they manage to let no one know.

Telling the difference between that and the others? Not at this point.

I cannot imagine any conspiracy to kill a whistleblower during testimony. As the British postal disaster points out, it is far easier to discredit the witness and bury the evidence. Much of what he claimed the FAA had already investigated; the FAA would have the most to gain. but why would they care?

Let the investigation continue, with the knowledge that coming to any conclusion may be problematic.

Some clarification from those of ample legal wisdom and insight…

The media keeps reporting Barnett as a whistleblower in connection with the lawsuit that he was providing deposition for.

Some reports say this deposition was for a defamation lawsuit against Boeing with my assumption then being that Barnett was the plaintiff? If so, he wouldn’t have had whistleblower status (AIR21 WPP protections). I get it that Boeing’s potential defamation would be related to his previous whistleblower activity but a whistleblower claim would have been addressed through DOL/OSHA rather than a individual lawsuit.

I also wonder about the wisdom of Barnett’s attorneys advising him to pursue defamation against a large corporation that can afford top-tier lawyers with a loss putting Barnett in financial peril (depending on the billing arrangement with his attorneys).

No claim of legal wisdom or insight is made here - and it's not as if I needed to carry "the drag chain of the law" in order to consult the Times of New York. (description of law attributed to the late Howard Cosell, an American attorney prior to his sports broadcasting career)

"Mr. Barnett filed the complaint against Boeing with the U.S. Labor Department in 2017 under the AIR21 Whistleblower Protection Program, which protects employees of plane manufacturers who report information pertaining to air carrier safety violations. He left the company that year.
* * *
An administrative law judge with the Labor Department was hearing the whistle-blower case, which was in discovery. A trial had been set for June."

The claim reportedly was for retaliation. The NYT article in any event doesn't reference any defamation claim or lawsuit, so I don't know. Possibly the DOL complaint includes allegations about defamatory remarks made by management as part of an alleged pattern or scheme of retaliatory steps taken by the Company.

The article also reports that Counsel for Mr. Barnett indicated the family will continue to pursue the legal action.
(excerpt from NYT, March 12 2024, S. Ember by-line).

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-03...whistleblower/

Death by suicide can be very convenient for those subject to the testimony of the decedent.
A certain well known wealthy sex offender comes to mind.
Who knows?

Were I to write a novel, who would want to end him would be among the mechanics who he knew were putting defective parts into airplanes.

Or he recently got a gun "for protection" and fumbled it trying to get it into a pocket or out of a holster in the confines of a car seat.

Unless there is a camera recording someone leaving that vehicle after the shot it's going to be unclear.

If suicide, there should be plenty of supporting forensic evidence.

Reminds me of the old Soviet intelligence apparatus saying (paraphrasing), “it’s easy to commit murder; it’s much harder to commit a good natural death.”

Hmmmmm
 

You know, I really try not to believe in conspiracy theories. The vast majority are just utter rubbish. But this I'm really struggling with. Just all seems too convenient.

It would seem the police has concluded it was suicide ( see below) but it today's connected world it has become easy to bring someone to suicide using either social media ( normally traceable) but also phone calls. or simple F2F conversations. involving blackmail.
What I fond odd is the location , if you ae single in a hotel room , why using a shotgun in a parking lot? I hope someone finds out if there was foul play . I'm sure lots of lawyers are going to look into that on behalf of the family. .

Someone sent me this yesterday :

Neither am I Jonty, but it all seems very very convenient doesn't it?
Let's hope the local Sherrif and or Coroner haven't suddenly become significantly wealthier.

The reports I’ve seen indicate a silver handgun though it is certainly possible to suicide with a shotgun. As for the location, quite common for suicides to occur in vehicles, sometimes in commercial or business parking lots/garages.

One curiosity is the media’s continued use of images for the Holiday Inn Riverview even though the location of the suicide was the Holiday Inn Express at 17 & 526, which is a couple of miles west of the Riverview location.

"but they will be conveniently understated..."

AFAICR, the depositions would remain admissible, and could only be impeached by evidence showing they were altered, at least under the laws of another English speaking nation.

This has provided us with a new quote.
' He was JFK'd, he was Epstein'ed, he was Boeing'ed.

I wonder who is under a massive amount of pressure and would stand to gain. ?

The rain around the time of 'the incident' would conveniently wash away any evidence.
Also,


Spirit mechanics were reportedly found using a hotel key card to check a door seal, which isn’t standard practice.
Sound a bit like a Mercedes Benz mechanic setting the valve clearances using a ringpull tab.

Or could he have been Navalnyed?

Or 'Arkancided.'

If he was harbouring a grievance against Boeing and was already suicidal then intimating that he was not suicidal - and that should anything happen it definitely wasn’t suicide - then taking your own life would certainly be a way of upping the ante so to speak.

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.

I am not saying that this wasn’t a suicide, but it is far, far more likely to be more to this story than with the other two you mentioned!

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. Fast-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.

Excellent post. Yes, I believe Barnett's counsel said that he had, the day before his death, finished being deposed by Boeing's attorneys and that cross-examination by his own lawyer was scheduled for the following day.

As you know, but not everyone does, being deposed is seldom a peasant experience and being deposed by high-powered, take-no-prisoners litigators in a case as hotly contested as this one is likely to be a pretty brutal experience. I've seen people shattered in relatively-minor business lawsuits where the stakes weren't nearly as high.

Absolutely. Amen.

The country is run by genocide supporting bandits, and an intelligence agency that has been doing it for decades. Of course, the entity known as Boeing wouldn't do it. But someone who is suffering financially as a result of the exposè might. So personally? Yes.

Somewhat different circumstances I feel, Barnett was acting alone, he wasn't a 'ringleader' as such, and I don't get the feeling he was in it for the money, as an employee of Boeing of some 32 years standing, he would have known a time when engineering counted, when getting it right trumped getting it out the door.

What makes you believe that Boeing wouldn't?

Hypothetically the benefit would be to scare other whistle-blowers who have been retaliated against, coming forward and launching their own court cases. Also the reputational damage of a 'suicide' is far less than the publicity of a precedent being set against Boeing and the media focussing on this poor person, when he won his court case.