A construction site superintendent who covered up a safety violation that led to the 2009 death of a worker in Washington County will spend six months on home detention, a federal judge ruled today.
Robert Christopher Kennedy, 60, of Rapid City, S.D., pleaded guilty today to willfully violating an Occupational Safety and Health Act regulation that led to the death of Carl Beck, 29, of Butler. Beck was helping install a roof on a motel on Meadowlands Boulevard in North Strabane when he fell 42 feet.
Kennedy waived his right to a pre-sentence investigation and U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster sentenced him to three years of probation with the first six months to be spent on home confinement.
Beck worked for C.A. Franc Construction. Christopher Franc, 46, of Valencia pleaded guilty in February 2010 to a willful OSHA violation leading to a death and Lancaster sentenced him in June to three years of probation, including six months of home confinement, and ordered him to pay Beck`s funeral expenses.
OSHA fined Franc $539,000 for the violation.
Franc says that in a conversation immediately after Beck`s death on a Saturday, Kennedy told him to put fall protection on the roof so that it would look like it was there before Beck`s fall, prosecutors say. When OSHA investigators interviewed Kennedy the following Monday, he used pictures of the newly installed safety measures to mislead the investigators into believe the fall protections were in place before Beck`s death, prosecutors say.