Abigail Shimniok

A former employee of Boeing, John Barnett, 62, was found dead on March 9. Police were summoned for a welfare check on Barnett at the Holiday Inn where he was staying, where he was discovered in his vehicle with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Barnett was in Charleston, SC to testify against his former employer for concerns he held about their airliners’ quality and general safety, concerns of which he came upon while working as a quality control manager for the company. The day prior to his death, he had just testified in a disposition related to said issues. The welfare check was called as he was due to appear once again in court on the day of his passing.
Barnett had spoken against the company in 2019 in the New York Times where he detailed an incident where his bosses refused to remove metal shavings that were hanging on the wiring of the flight controls. According to Lynn Lunsford, a spokesman of the Federal Aviation Administration, such contamination could lead to electrical shorts and fires. The FAA had inspected Boeing planes that were supposedly free of said contamination, but many were not. In the article, Barnett spoke on the Boeing factory in South Carolina, saying “They hired a lot of people from the South Carolina state that really had no experience with building airplanes, and building commercial airplanes, and understanding what procedures were, and the criticality of them.” Speaking on a plane which he had discovered to contain the dangerous metal debris, Barnett stated “I physically showed (Barnett’s boss) the airplane. I took pictures, sent him pictures … I said, I won’t sign off on it. I won’t accept it. So, I was removed from it … It was delivered without being cleaned.”
Barnett had been filing whistleblower complaints against Boeing since 2017, the same year in which he retired. Since then, his health had declined significantly due to the stress this situation had caused. According to his family, he had begun to suffer from post-tramatic stress disorder and anxiety attacks, though in spite of this, Barnett stated that Boeing remained his top priority.
Though seemingly suspected to be suicide, his death is still under investigation. However, not everyone necessarily believes he took his own life. In an article for NPR, his lawyers, Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, stated “He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on … We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it.”
A close family friend of Barnett’s, identified only as Jennifer, believes Barnett did not take his own life. In a conversation about Barnett’s upcoming case against Boeing, Jennifer had asked him if he was scared for his safety, to which Barnett had replied “No, I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”
On March 25, just over two weeks after Barnett’s passing, three Boeing executives announced their departure from the company. This includes CEO Dave Calhoun, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes Stan Deal and chair of the company’s board of directors, Larry Kellnar. This also follows an incident this January where a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 mid-flight, leading to roughly 78% of the Max 9 models worldwide being grounded. The 737 Max was also grounded worldwide for two years from 2019 to 2021 after the malfunctioning of the plane’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) led to the failure of two separate airliners, leading to the death of 346 people total and costing the company $2.5 billion in criminal charges after it was discovered that Boeing had lied to the FAA about said system’s reliability.