A Mississippi chicken slaughterhouse put a child into a ‘preventable, dangerous situation’, the Labor Department has concluded – after the death of a 16-year-old sucked into a chicken deboning plant.
Duvan Perez had been cleaning equipment at the Hattiesburg plant of Mar-Jac Poultry on July 14, 2023, when he was pulled into the rotating shaft of a machine and sustained fatal injuries.
Perez, originally from Guatemala, had been hired to work at the slaughterhouse by a recruitment firm – despite it being illegal for under 18s to work at a meat processing plant.
His death caused widespread outrage, and on Wednesday the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) – a division of the Department of Labor – issued their report, finding a litany of errors and recommending $212,646 in penalties.
They also highlighted two previous deaths at the company’s facilities since 2020, and accused the company of complacency and recklessness.
Duvan Perez, 16, was killed while at work in the Hattiesburg chicken processing plant owned by Mar-Jac Poultry. On Tuesday, OSHA issued a damning report into the company’s procedures
The Hattiesburg plant is owned by Gainesville, Georgia-based Mar-Jac Poultry
‘Following the fatal incident in May 2021, Mar-Jac Poultry should have enforced strict safety standards in its facility,’ said OSHA Regional Administrator Kurt Petermeyer.
‘Only about two years later, nothing has changed, and the company continues to treat employee safety as an afterthought, putting its workers at risk.
‘No worker should be placed in a preventable, dangerous situation, let alone a child.’
Petermeyer’s team found that supervisors at the plant failed to ensure that employees followed the correct procedures to turn off the machine, and prevent it from unintentionally starting while being cleaned.
They found that Perez’s death was extremely similar to that of 48-year-old Bobby Butler, who died at the plant in May 2021.
‘Mar-Jac Poultry is aware of how dangerous the machinery they use can be when safety standards are not in place to prevent serious injury and death,’ said Petermeyer.
‘The company’s inaction has directly led to this terrible tragedy, which has left so many to mourn this child’s preventable death.’
A third man, 33-year-old Joel Velasco Toto, was killed at the slaughterhouse in December 2020.
OSHA, in their latest report, found 17 safety violations, including 14 classified as serious.
Neither Mar-Jac nor their vice president of operations, Joel Williams, have responded to the OSHA findings, but in July, after the teenager’s death, the Georgia-based company said that Perez had provided fake ID to say he was if legal age to work in the slaughterhouse.
Joel Williams, the vice president of Mar-Jac Poultry, headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia
The 70-year-old company, headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia, with facilities in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, said they worked to ensure safety standards for their employees.
Mar-Jac said they ‘would never knowingly put any employee, and certainly a minor, in harm’s way’ and that they ‘deeply regret that an underage individual was hired without (their) knowledge.’
Larry Stine, an attorney for Mar-Jac, previously told NBC News that Mar-Jac’s internal investigation found no errors on the company’s part.
‘Mar-Jac thoroughly investigated the accident and has not found any errors committed by its safety or human resources employees,’ said Stine.
‘It has learned many lessons from the accident and has taken aggressive steps to prevent the occurrence of another accident or hiring underage workers.’
Mar-Jac now has 15 days to either pay the fine and comply, or contest the findings.
In the case of Butler, Mar-Jac contested OSHA’s findings. In the 2020 case of Toto, the company settled informally.
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