Workplace Deaths--D.A.’s Rollout Team Picks Up Pace

A Pomona chicken processing plant and a Downey scrap metal yard may seem light years removed from the “Twilight Zone” film set where Vic Morrow and two child actors perished in a 1982 movie-making accident.

But in the last year, staffers of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office have responded quickly to 33 such unglamorous but similarly gruesome sites of workplace deaths to gather evidence for possible prosecutions.

The district attorney’s occupational safety rollout program--announced with fanfare by Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner in August, 1985--got off to a somewhat shaky start, officials acknowledge.

In some cases, investigators did not learn of the tragedies until days later. And thus far, only one case of involuntary manslaughter has been filed as a result of a rollout. That is the same charge for which “Twilight Zone” director John Landis and four associates stand accused. Eight other defendants face misdemeanor charges over occupational deaths.

Reiner maintains that the program, the first of its kind in the nation, is an important investigative tool that is only beginning to bear fruit. He contends that it is necessitated by an inadequate job done by the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA).

“Given the seriousness of the circumstances involved--that is, a death--you should roll out in every instance,” Reiner said in a recent interview. “Treating this as you treat any homicide . . . will have a chilling effect on industry. . . . If I had the resources, I would expand the program right now.”

The rollouts, conducted by four deputy district attorneys and eight office investigators, are designed to help gather evidence before witnesses “have a chance to reflect,” according to John Lynch, a deputy district attorney who heads the program. If too much time elapses before prosecutors conduct interviews, he said, witnesses are more likely to “think it might not be the best thing for my salary and pension if I make a statement on negligence.”

Lynch estimates that approximately 100 industrial deaths occur each year in Los Angeles County. But Lynch’s staffers, most of whom also investigate environmental crimes, were able to respond immediately to only 33 industrial sites in which 44 people were killed during the program’s first year.

In the months after the program began, Lynch said, the district attorney’s office had problems receiving timely notice of workplace deaths.

“You have to train people who have reacted one way to react another,” he explained. “You have to educate the coroner’s people to notify the district attorney, you have to explain to state OSHA people and the Sheriff’s Department and the local police department what it is you’re looking for.”

While Reiner’s special assistant for OSHA cases, Jan Chatten-Brown, estimates that 10 or more potential manslaughter prosecutions had gone unfiled each year in Los Angeles County, the office has ended up filing only one involuntary manslaughter case during the program’s first 14 months.

“We are reserving those for the most egregious cases, a situation where the conduct is so outrageous it absolutely has to be filed as involuntary manslaughter,” Brown said.

In that one case, drilling firm president Michael Maggio pleaded no contest this week in the death of a 23-year-old employee, Kevin Bauman, at a downtown Los Angeles construction site. Maggio lowered Bauman into a shaft without a safety harness and, according to the charges, also failed to monitor the air quality in the hole and to shore up its sides. In exchange for the plea, he will face a jail sentence of no more than 90 days.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Joseph D. Shidler said the agreement was reached because Maggio had no previous criminal record and he has agreed to attend future safety classes and pay restitution to Bauman’s 3-year-old son. The stiffest penalty Maggio could have faced was four years in prison.

Reiner’s deputies say that the Landis case and that of Gerald J. Gaglione, superintendent of the Burbank city water reclamation plant, are the only other involuntary manslaughter cases ever filed on worker-related deaths by the district attorney’s office. Gaglione was convicted in 1981 of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of two employees overcome by hydrogen sulfide gas when they entered a manhole without gas masks or safety harnesses. He was sentenced to a year in county jail but the time was stayed under the condition that he spend at least 150 hours lecturing about safety.

In addition, they say, no second-degree murder cases have ever been filed here similar to the precedent-setting 1985 Chicago case in which three supervisors at Film Recovery Systems Inc. were sentenced to 25 years in prison in the death of an employee who was overcome by chemicals.

In the Gaglione and “Twilight Zone” cases, the initial investigations were conducted by sheriff’s deputies and state OSHA enforcement workers. But Reiner asserts that police officials don’t always know what to look for in a work-related death and that the Cal/OSHA program is understaffed and underproductive.

“In these cases, our referrals should be coming from Cal/OSHA,” he said. “But in point of fact, Cal/OSHA doesn’t make referrals. Virtually every case we have in our office is self-generated.”

Reiner’s team has thus far rolled out to a variety of industrial death sites, among them a poultry firm in which an employee was crushed in a mixer for waste products, a scrap metal yard in which a worker was crushed in a metal baler, a carnival where an employee was electrocuted and three oil refineries in which eight workers were killed in fires and explosions.

The only misdemeanor case thus far settled was one in which two supervisors of a Westchester-area tree-cutting firm pleaded no contest to labor code violations in the electrocution of an employee. Rogelio Esquer was killed while trying to remove palm tree stalks from high-voltage lines. One defendant was fined $8,500 and the other was fined $850 and ordered to spend 30 days in jail.

Thus far, the rollout program has appeared to cause little resentment among businesses.

“It doesn’t seem to be harassment to me,” said Unocal spokesman Barry Lane, where two workers were killed in a March refinery fire. “When there is an accident, it does warrant a full and open investigation.”

“We have really no problem with the procedure that we encountered at the refinery during the accident,” echoed an Arco spokesman concerning the investigation of a 1985 refinery explosion in Carson that left five men dead. “We felt it was appropriate that all the agencies that felt a need to be there were there.”

The two refinery cases are among several in which no filing decisions have yet been made.

Cal/OSHA’s interim chief, Bob Stranberg, meanwhile, termed the rollout program “duplicative because we have to investigate the (deaths) according to the law.” Stranberg, however, added, “I suppose ‘the more the merrier’ could result in better coverage of any fatality, and it all works for the same goal of precluding one from happening in the future from the same causes.”

Stranberg acknowledged that his office has only five investigators available for the entire Southern California region and therefore frequently cannot begin investigations until several days after an accident occurs.