A Delaware corporation with a manufacturing facility in Ohio pleaded guilty today in federal court in the Southern District of Ohio to a charge of willfully violating an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule.
The criminal charge is related to an incident where an employee was killed when a pneumatic door closed on his head.
Fabcon Precast LLC (Fabcon) operates several facilities in the United States, including one in Grove City, Ohio, that manufactures precast concrete panels.
At Fabcon, employees known as batch operators were responsible for the operation and cleaning of the facility’s only concrete mixer.
Concrete was discharged from the bottom of the mixer through a pneumatic door. By design, the mixer had an exhaust valve that released the pneumatic energy powering the discharge door, rendering it inoperable.
Some months before June 6, 2020, the handle that operated the valve broke off and was not replaced.
On June 6, 2020, Zachary Ledbetter, 20, a batch operator since January 2020, was on duty when the discharge door failed to close after releasing a batch of concrete.
Because the valve was broken, Ledbetter could not perform the proper procedure to make the door safe to work around. When he attempted to free the door, it closed on his head, trapping him. Eventually, Ledbetter was freed and transported to a hospital, where he died five days later.
Federal law makes it a class B misdemeanour to willfully fail to follow an OSHA safety standard, where the failure causes the death of an employee. The class B misdemeanour is the only federal criminal charge covering such workplace safety violations.
