Prior to his death, whistleblower John Barnett was testifying against Boeing over concerns about standards.

John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017.

In the days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.

Boeing said it was saddened to hear of Mr Barnett’s passing. The Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to the BBC on Monday.

It said the 62-year-old had died from a “self-inflicted” wound on 9 March and police were investigating.

  • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.ukEnglish
    109·
    9 months ago

    I’m not going to say that Boeing had this guy directly killed, but I can certainly see them and their legal team explicitly trying to make his life as hellish as possible until he felt that he only had one way out. Legal threats if you stop proceeding with your case, legals threats if you don’t, they want a terrible warning for any other whistleblowers.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
        29·
        9 months ago

        Yes the FBI wanted to make an example out of him for the crime of downloading research papers from a service he had legitimate access to. Even JSTOR thought the prosecution was absurd and didn’t want anything to do with it.

        • mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world
          10·
          9 months ago

          I’m fully expecting to learn in a decade or so that spez was behind it using his family connections to push out the one person dedicated to keeping reddit from becoming a profit machine.