Texas company, supervisor indicted in fatal 2021 trench collapse : NPR

A Texas grand jury has indicted a construction manager and his employer in connection with a trench collapse three years ago that killed a 24-year-old Bastrop worker and seriously injured another one.

Carlos Alejandro Guerrero, a project superintendent with Austin-based D Guerra Construction LLC, was charged with criminally negligent homicide in connection with the death of Juan José Galvan Batalla, according to the Travis County prosecutor’s office. The company was also charged. Galvan Batalla was working in a trench to install a residential sewer line near Austin in October 2021 when he was completely buried by falling soil and debris, officials said. He died of his injuries a week later.

In a news conference Thursday announcing the indictments, Travis County District Attorney José P. Garza cited an NPR investigation earlier this year, which found that 250 people died over the last decade when trenches they were working in collapsed. NPR compiled a database of trench collapse deaths that happened between 2013 and 2023 and found that only 11 employers were criminally charged in instances where workers died. Most offenders got off with a fine, probation or little time in jail.

“All workers here in Travis County deserve to be safe at work so they can return to their families at the end of the day,” Garza said. “When employers engage in criminal conduct and expose their employees to hazardous working conditions, this office will hold them accountable.”

Trench collapses often occur when employers cut corners, such as failing to install shoring equipment like hydraulic cylinders that hold back the dirt walls of a trench or boxes and timbers that prevent a potential collapse from harming workers.

An OSHA investigation found that two workers had escaped the unsafe trench just hours earlier, but were sent back into the 13-foot-deep hole to complete the job.

“Despite a partial trench collapse earlier in the day, D Guerra Construction LLC recklessly sent employees back into the excavation without protective measures to prevent another cave-in,” OSHA Area Director Casey Perkins said in a statement. “The loss of this worker’s life was preventable and the employer must be held responsible for ignoring excavation safety rules.”

Scot Courtney, an attorney representing Guerrero, called the incident “a tragedy” and an “accident.”

“Nobody did anything intentionally,” Courtney said. “A jury will ultimately have to decide whether my client is a criminal for doing his job.”

In November 2023, two years after the cave-in killed Galvan Batalla, OSHA inspectors cited the company again for having an unprotected trench. Agency inspectors said the company’s workers were installing a sewer pipe inside a ten-foot-deep excavation in Pflugerville, Texas, that was not protected from cave-in hazards.

In a statement to NPR, the company said that Galvan Batalla was a valued employee and that several of his family members continue to still work there. The company declined to comment on the indictment.