Jail time for two bosses who disregarded safety warnings

Summary;Two supervisors who ignored repeated warnings about an unsafe excavation were found criminally liable for their roles in the death of a worker who was buried under 15,000 pounds of dirt.

The incident:Even though the New York City Department of Buildings had approved an excavation plan for a job site in Brooklyn, NY, Jiaxi Liu, owner of WSC Group, LLC, and his foreman on the project, Wilson Garcia, decided to ignore the plan.

As a result, a retaining wall that was about 30 feet high by 20 feet wide wasn’t properly secured. Employees at the site warned Liu and Garcia that the wall of dirt was shifting forward and that it needed to be supported, but they were ordered to keep working.

So Luis Sanchez Almonte, an employee who’d emigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic two years earlier, continued to toil at the bottom of the excavation.

Unfortunately, the warnings about the unsafe job site proved prophetic when the dirt pile shifted and then collapsed on Almonte. The 47-year-old man was buried under 15,000 pounds of dirt.
The response

The collapse occurred on a rainy, windy day, so it took nearly 28 hours for the dirt to be cleared and Almonte’s remains to be extricated.

The aftermath:Because Liu and Garcia had ignored warnings about the unsafe trench, officials lodged criminal charges against both managers. Liu was just found guilty of criminally negligent homicide, which could lead to 16 years in prison, and Garcia was convicted of criminal mischief, which could mean one year in jail.

“This was no mistake,” said Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s district attorney. “This was no accident. This was the direct result of recklessness and negligence.”

(From the March 27, 2023, issue of Safety Alert for Supervisors. To start your no-obligation trial subscription to the publication right now, please click here.)