The Strange Death of a Boeing Whistleblower

[Ocelot II]

...Sitting before a commemorative plaque from his work on the Space Shuttle program, on which he worked before Boeing bought the Rockwell division that managed the shuttle contract, Swampy gently described how his team had been taken off a job for finding 300 defects on a section of fuselage, and his failed efforts to prevent mechanics from breaking into the cage where defective parts were stored before suppliers retrieved them to be repaired. Managers stole parts from the cage so frequently that he had the locks changed, Turkewitz told the Prospect, but higher-ups directed him to have 200 new keys made so they could continue swiping bad parts to install on planes. And that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of what Swampy witnessed in his six torturous years in North Charleston, Turkewitz says.

And while Barnett conducted numerous high-profile interviews over the years with the likes of The New York Times, the producers of the Netflix documentary Downfall, and the Today show, what was most unusual from his lawyers’ perspective was that he had the receipts. Unlike would-be whistleblower clients who find themselves “perp walked” out of the plant without access to their phones or email accounts, Turkewitz told the Prospect, “John had meticulously documented everything, he had thousands of pages stored on his computer.” Those documents were especially invaluable because of the meager force of the “AIR 21” statute governing aviation whistleblowers, which forces industry employees who are fired for speaking out about unsafe practices to litigate their grievances in a secret court system operated by the Department of Labor that lacks subpoena power.

If nothing else, Turkewitz hopes to use Barnett’s death to make a case for reform to the AIR 21 statute, the creation of an obscure 2000 law that places near-impossible demands on whistleblowers—including an absurd 90-day statute of limitations on retaliatory conduct—and is still so woefully underfunded it can barely handle the cases it has, which is why Swampy’s case had dragged on more than seven years.

But the end was almost in sight. “He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him,” Turkewitz said. “We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life. We need more information … No one can believe it.”

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-03-14-strange-death-boeing-whistleblower/