Boeing whistleblower dead mid-deposition: 'I pray Boeing pays'

Editorial Article

On March 9, 2024, Boeing whistleblower John Barnett died by gunshot during the third day of his deposition in a lawsuit against the aircraft manufacturer. The circumstances surrounding his death—allegedly a self-inflicted wound with a note reading "I pray Boeing pays"—raised immediate questions about the pressures faced by those who challenge one of America's largest defense contractors.

Barnett had spent years documenting what he believed were serious safety defects in Boeing's 787 Dreamliner production. His most alarming claim: approximately 25% of the aircraft's emergency oxygen masks could potentially fail to deploy properly. This wasn't speculation or hearsay. Barnett had worked as a quality control auditor at Boeing's South Carolina facility and had firsthand knowledge of manufacturing processes and documented safety issues.

When Barnett went public with his concerns, Boeing's response followed a familiar corporate playbook. The company downplayed the allegations, suggesting that isolated quality control issues were being addressed through normal channels. Boeing representatives indicated that safety systems had redundancies and that the claimed oxygen mask failure rate was overblown or taken out of context. Internal investigations, the company suggested, had not substantiated his most serious allegations.

But here's what the documented record shows: Barnett wasn't making things up. Years of FAA communications, internal Boeing documents, and congressional testimony corroborated his core claims about manufacturing quality problems. The Federal Aviation Administration had indeed raised concerns about production defects at the facility where Barnett worked. on Boeing's safety culture referenced the very issues Barnett had flagged. His deposition was specifically being taken because multiple lawsuits recognized his testimony as material evidence of Boeing's knowledge of potential safety defects.