Jury Clears 2 Managers in Accidental Death of Salt Company Worker

It’s no accident that the horrible death of Jorge Torres was picked by prosecutors to be Los Angeles County’s first test of tough new state laws designed to protect employees from safety hazards in the workplace.

The 25-year-old Wilmington man suffocated four years ago after being buried when a 60-ton pile of salt caved in on him as he cleaned a storage bin at a Long Beach salt plant while his bosses were nearby.

With great fanfare, the district attorney’s office charged that employer negligence was to blame for Torres’ gruesome death and announced that it would seek prison terms for the salt plant’s two managers and a $1-million fine for Morton International Inc., the plant’s owner.

On Monday, however, jurors in a Compton courtroom decided that Torres’ death was just that: an accident.

They cleared plant manager Roger Keith Morgan and plant foreman Roy Allen Yount of felony involuntary manslaughter charges and of allegations that they did not have an adequate emergency rescue plan at their Long Beach plant. Jurors also deadlocked on an involuntary manslaughter charge against Morton International; a June 9 hearing was set to determine whether a retrial on that count will be held.

Twenty-one other counts--including the first local prosecution under the state’s 1989 Corporate Criminal Liability Act--were dismissed by the judge before jurors ever considered them.

The verdicts in the four-week trial brought sighs of relief to the two salt company supervisors, who could have faced up to four years in prison had they been convicted.

“It feels like a huge weight has been lifted,” said Morgan, 51, of Cypress.

Added Yount, 50, of Lakewood: “The last few years have been terrible. I’d never received anything other than a speeding ticket before this.”

Jurors who deliberated 2 1/2 days leaned 11-1 for conviction of Morton International on the involuntary manslaughter charge. Conviction could carry a $10,000 fine but no jail time for anyone.

Chicago-based Morton International spent more than $1 million to defend its managers and itself from the charges.

At issue in the trial was whether plant operating procedures and employee training efforts were authentic, or merely window dressing to give the illusion that the salt company was complying with the law.

The company argued that it acted properly at the time of the May 9, 1994, incident and was in full compliance with another set of workplace safety laws enacted by the state five months before the accident. Prosecutors said Torres died because he and his co-workers were ignorant of safety rules that govern how enclosed structures such as storage bins are cleaned.

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The precedent-setting nature of the case disappeared early in the proceedings.

The district attorney’s office had trumpeted its plan to prosecute under the Corporate Criminal Liability Act as the first local application of that measure, which was signed into law in 1989 to hold corporate officials more accountable in workplace accidents. The law provides for jail sentences for managers found guilty of knowingly concealing a hazard from a worker or the public, plus company fines of up to $1 million.

But those charges were dismissed 2 1/2 years ago after Morton attorneys complained that the law was poorly worded and violated the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Prosecutors plowed ahead with the three remaining felony manslaughter charges and 21 state labor code counts, however. In addition to the four-year prison sentences, conviction on those carried potential $10,000 fines for Morgan and Yount, plus fines totaling $70,000 for the company.

The case shrunk further as the trial got underway and Compton Superior Court Judge Jack W. Morgan (not related to the defendant) dismissed all but the manslaughter counts and the single labor code charge against the three defendants.

Prosecutors Alfred Coletta and Edward Nison tried to convince the jury that Morgan and Yount had a safety plan that looked good on paper, but was never fully implemented to give protection to workers.

“It was a Keystone Kops operation, but it didn’t have a comic ending,” Nison told jurors. Coletta added: “This is not a case of a mistake being made. There’s no excuse for what happened.”

Six lawyers representing Morton and the plant supervisors characterized Torres’ death as a sad accident.

Yount’s lawyer, Charles R. English, said the plant foreman followed the letter of the law as it was known to him at the time. And Morgan’s lawyer, James L. Sanders, attributed Torres’ death to the worker’s decision to leave extra slack in the safety rope attached to a harness he was wearing.

Scott Dunham, attorney for the salt company, said: “There’s been no crime committed here. This was a tragic accident, a freak accident.”

They blamed a disgruntled former Morton employee for prompting the prosecution by falsely suggesting to investigators that the plant lacked any real safety program.

In reality, jurors were told, Morton spent $1.4 million on safety equipment and initiated a series of new safety procedures after acquiring the Long Beach facility in 1990 from another salt company. The new rules were enacted to comply with tougher state laws that took effect in 1993 to protect employees who work in confined spaces such as tanks and silos.

But the ex-employee, former plant union steward Chuck Berck, told jurors that “safety procedures had been less than I thought they should be” and were “an ongoing problem.”

However, Berck also acknowledged that he failed to inform foreman Yount of a change in safety policy that was announced when Yount was on vacation and Berck was serving as acting plant foreman. That new procedure called for conveyor belts and other machinery to be locked in an “off” position when workers were inside the bin.

Berck said he didn’t mention the new policy to Yount, even when Yount announced at a safety meeting four days before the accident that an auger would be used to draw salt from the bin while workers cleaned it.

Explaining his silence, Berck said he didn’t want to make waves. “I have to go to work there every day. I don’t go to work to be in a war zone,” he told jurors. “Do I make it a hell for me every day? I don’t think so.”

After Monday’s verdicts were read, jurors criticized Berck for not raising an alarm in time to save Torres’ life. “He should have spoken up. He should have opened his mouth,” said panel member John Gladden, a Los Angeles plumber.

“Chuck Berck wasn’t on trial. We couldn’t figure out why,” said juror Kim Sherman, a Long Beach mail carrier.

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At the time of Torres’ death, the victim and another worker, Nick Rico, 28, also of Wilmington, were using a technique called “riding down the salt” that had been used for more than 20 years at the plant, testimony indicated. Rico was partially buried in the salt collapse, but managed to escape unharmed.

Gus Torres, the dead man’s brother and a plant worker who was at the scene of the incident, agreed that Morton International was safety-minded. Under the previous owner, Torres said, he had sometimes cleaned the salt bin without even wearing a rope and harness.

Torres testified that safety procedures were followed even as a layer of hardened salt that his brother was standing on broke and sent him tumbling to his death.

Plant manager Morgan was on top of the enclosed bin checking on the quality of air inside when the salt crust crumbled, he said.

“Mr. Morgan wanted to jump in and save whoever was inside,” Torres said. But that would have violated the company’s safety policy.

So “we wouldn’t let him,” Gus Torres said.