The Boeing whistleblower was late.
It was just after 10 a.m. and Rob Turkewitz was waiting for his client John Barnett to testify and further his crusade for safety in the skies. Turkewitz wasn’t totally surprised that Barnett was running behind schedule. “Downtown Charleston was flooded by one of the worst rainstorms I’ve ever seen,” he recalls.
Turkewitz was especially buzzed about this session because Barnett was slated to continue the account of the production gaffes he had allegedly witnessed up close on the Boeing factory floor, a dramatic narrative that he had started the previous day. Barnett, 62, had worked from late 2010 to 2017 as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant that assembles the 787 Dreamliner. In that role, he’d alerted senior managers to what he called violations of legally required processes and procedures and maintained that his warnings were being ignored. In the years following his departure, Barnett emerged as arguably the most renowned Boeing whistleblower, recounting the quality abuses he claimed to have witnessed to multiple media outlets.
But as Turkewitz waited, local law enforcement would make a shocking discovery. Barnett’s body was found in his truck, parked in the Holiday Inn lot where he was staying. A silver pistol was still in his hand, his finger on the trigger. The Charleston County coroner ruled the cause of death as “a self-inflicted wound.”
It was a terrible twist in one of the most high-profile whistleblower cases in corporate America. And Barnett’s claims had gained fresh traction in the wake of the January 737 Max door-plug blowout on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, followed by a string of other mishaps on Boeing aircraft.
You can read the full story of Barnett’s life and long career at Boeing—and what made him turn on his former employer, in Shawn Tully’s feature here.
