OSHA Charges Alabama Plastics Company With Willful Violations After Worker’s Death

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An Alabama company has been charged with willfully violating federal safety rules in the death of a worker who was pulled into a machine and fatally injured, authorities said Monday.

ABC Polymer Industries, which has a plant in the Birmingham suburb of Helena, and two officers of the company were accused of two misdemeanor counts in the 2017 death of Catalina Estillado, court records showed.

The company makes flat plastic sheets on an assembly line that pulls material through multiple sets of large, spinning rollers, according to a statement by prosecutors. ABC Polymer typically operated the machine without a required safety guard being engaged, the statement said, and Estillado was pulled into the spinning rollers and killed after being assigned to use a hand tool to cut away tangles.

The protections were required by the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration, prosecutors alleged, but the company failed to use them despite knowing workers had been injured multiple times before.

The misdemeanor offense is the only federal criminal charge involving such workplace safety violations, prosecutors said.

An attorney for ABC Polymer Industries on Monday did not immediately return an email to The Associated Press seeking comment on the charges, which could result in a fine of as much as $500,000. The company was cited in 2018 for almost $200,000 in penalties in connection with the case, after OSHA said the accident was preventable.

Ruling after a nonjury trial, an Alabama circuit court judge in June awarded $3 million to Estillado’s husband, Crescencio Pablo, who filed a wrongful death lawsuit after she was killed, alleging dangerous conditions at the plant. The company has said it will appeal the verdict to the Alabama Supreme Court.

Crescencio also filed a claim against the company alleging he was entitled to workers’ compensation on his wife’s behalf, but that matter was settled out of court, according to AL.com news site. It was not made clear why the wrongful death suit against the company was allowed to move forward if a workers’ compensation claim provided remedy.

Attorneys for the husband have said company officials ordered the safety barriers moved to maintain production.

“If every time there’s a wrap you have to shut down the whole machine, production stops and they lose money. And this may sound like a cliché, but this company put profits over safety,” Freddy Rubio, one of the attorneys, told AL.com. “They didn’t want to stop the machine.”