‘It was super dark’: Company ignored safety risks at KC project before death, workers say

On the night 34-year-old Jose Sanchez died, he had been working a late night shift, removing asbestos from the former AT&T building in Kansas City with two of his cousins and six other workers.

The native Nicaraguan had pushed his relatives to join him in the heartland. Sanchez had spent the last year being shuttled to different states for several asbestos removal jobs through a temp agency. He had reconnected with the two relatives in the Kansas City area for the first time since they fled their home country’s political and economic turmoil in 2022.

“(Jose) just wanted us to be together,” the younger cousin said through a translator. “That’s why he never made any bad comments or complained (during the Kansas City job).”

The family member’s name is not being disclosed out of concerns for his safety due to his immigration status.

“It was the hardest job we’ve done,” the cousin said.

In affidavits from former employees obtained by The Star as well as interviews with Sanchez’s family, city officials and other workers familiar with the construction site at 500 E. Eighth St., serious concerns have been raised about the safety of the work site.

The 34-year-old’s death sparked public outcry from labor activists and Kansas City officials, including Mayor Quinton Lucas, who promised in an Aug. 10 rally to hold builders and contractors to account “in protecting workers’ rights.”

Sanchez’s employer, Kansas City environmental solutions firm New Horizons, which was managing the building’s asbestos abatement, is being investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The firm also contracts with other businesses to inspect construction site safety.

New Horizons president Stephanie Isaacson did not respond to The Star’s requests for comment over the course of a month.

In an affidavit from a former safety manager for New Horizons, it was stated that ceiling lights in the downtown building had been removed during the demolition process. By around 9 p.m. the crew of eight “was left in darkness,” the cousin said. Lamps dimly lit the more than 13-story project site’s elevator doors. An occasional headlamp or cellphone held in front of workers’ respiratory masks and wrinkled white hazmat suits were their main source of light.

On the night of July 17, Sanchez had left his relatives and other asbestos workers to retrieve a box for debris left over from the removal.

The cousin said he recalled Sanchez leaving around 8:30 p.m. from the shower area, where they rinsed their suits of asbestos and hazardous waste.

Then, he heard someone scream.

‘Get someone killed’

Hours later, in the early morning hours of July 18, Sanchez was discovered dead at the bottom of the elevator’s shaft.

A former safety manager, who was one of four people hired to run the company’s safety program and train employees in a 10-hour OSHA safety course, told The Star he resigned from the company in 2022. He said he knew he had to leave after feeling the company was not prioritizing the safety of employees on their construction sites. He declined to be publicly identified for fear of retaliation.

Before leaving, he said, he told New Horizons field manager Scott Stewart that their program “was going to get someone killed.”

Also under investigation by OSHA are several other companies, including The Bernstein Companies, a Washington D.C. based developer. Those companies reportedly received a 10-year property tax break from the city and historic preservation tax credits from the state to finance the $82 million renovation of the nearly 50-year-old property into condominiums, according to a Kansas City redevelopment contract.

No one from The Bernstein Companies has responded to The Star’s requests for comment.

Dan Moye, executive director of the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, which granted the tax abatement, referred questions regarding labor protections for workers operating on sites receiving city tax breaks to Kansas City’s Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity (CREO) department.

Jamie Guillen, who was announced as the new director of CREO in July after the former director was asked to resign by city officials in April, said their employees aim to conduct interviews of laborers on city construction projects, including those receiving tax breaks and other incentives. But they are not able to check on workers’ safety “as their main duty is to conduct wage interviews.”

“Worksite safety is always the responsibility of the contractor, as they are responsible for the job site,” said Melissa Kozakiewicz, a spokeswoman and assistant manager for the city.

OSHA has until Jan. 12, 2024 to complete the investigation, according to Scott Allen, a spokesman for the U.S Department of Labor.

A Kansas City police investigation is also underway in the death of Sanchez. As of late September, police said they are continuing the investigation as an accidental death.

Who was Jose Sanchez?

In Nicaragua, Sanchez was the owner of a peanut processing business, said his cousin.

The pair grew up across the road from one another and stayed close, even as Sanchez fled the country.

“I saw Jose as a big brother,” he said.

He remembered Sanchez as the family member who played his music loudly and eccentrically, cutting between genres and styles. He also loved their large, Nicaraguan family’s regular parties, where they would gather together and speak about their aspirations.

In 2022, Sanchez left the country. At the time, he had witnessed local police incarcerate residents accused of having opposing political beliefs and grew fearful that if he stayed, he would no longer be able to provide for his family, the cousin said.

He immigrated to the United States, where he started working in Indiana kitchens and sent his paychecks home to his wife and two teenagers, a son and daughter.

Then he found a job in asbestos removal.

“He was able to send money home. He was the main provider… That was all that mattered,” the cousin said.

When the cousin and his brother, who had both moved to Atlanta, had done a few asbestos removal jobs, Sanchez encouraged them to come with him to the Kansas City area to work on asbestos removal.

With this particular Kansas City redevelopment contract, developers had said the abatement would be “challenging” and potentially a multi-million dollar task, as most of the site’s surfaces were “covered in spray-foam asbestos.”

The cousin said they had personal protective equipment and while they had not heard of any safety courses or meetings for them to attend, they felt confident in their ability to operate on the site due to their experience in asbestos removal, he said.

But neither of them knew they would be working the night shift, he said.

“We were working nights and in the dark then, of course we were very concerned about our safety,” he said. “They provided some lights, but it still wasn’t enough.”

Sanchez’s cousin also said the crew had learned of another worker being injured by falling off a scaffold, which was not unique at a construction site. Then, in another incident, the cousin’s brother got trapped in the building’s manual elevator.

“He panicked,” the cousin said. “He just started hitting every button until a supervisor got him out.”

From then on, the cousin said, a supervisor was told to remain on site to operate the building’s two elevators.

‘That’s too expensive’

A photograph obtained by The Star from an asbestos worker on the job in July showed a worker surrounded by debris in minimal lighting.

The former safety manager said he raised concerns about the lack of lighting to New Horizons staff.

“It was super dark. They had limited power in the building and I asked about that and they said ‘Oh we have lights where they’re working,’” he said.

He also said a small “Bobcat-type” machine had been running inside with the windows shut and negative air pressure machines, which were designed to assist in asbestos removal, were not running during his “three or four” visits to the construction site. He did not view the area where asbestos workers were operating since he was not licensed with that expertise.

The manager had been hired by New Horizons in 2020 after spending about 20 years working on construction sites around the metro area. He told the Star he was tasked with inspecting the construction sites of companies who contracted with New Horizons to examine job site safety.

In his last month on the job, he said New Horizons requested the safety manager inspect their job sites.

“Every time I told them to solve a safety problem, I’d tell them what I thought we needed to do and they’d say that’s too expensive,” he said.

It’s common to hear that “in the safety world,” he said, but that excuse doesn’t mitigate the potential for danger.

In one instance, the manager said he visited a local New Horizons job site and told the operating field manager that “improvising” techniques of removing glass windows was unsafe and they had to rent new equipment. Again, he was told it would be too expensive.

“I was so mad at him, you know what’s expensive, killing someone’s expensive,” he said.

Unlike other construction sites, the safety manager said, he was also not allowed to take photographs or document any safety concerns he had on New Horizons sites for “insurance purposes.”

“I thought it was all strange,” he said.

When the safety manager was asked to teach an OSHA 10 hour safety course, he said, he was only given 30 minutes monthly to teach employees, many of whom were older and did not speak English.

He said workers who spoke English and Spanish would try to translate. Some online Spanish resources were provided, he said, but he did not know to what extent.

“It wasn’t the typical construction workers that I’m used to running into,” he said of workers hired by the temp agency, having previously worked with majority union labor sites.

Tarak Devkota, an attorney retained by Sanchez’s family, said the 34-year-old may have been one of any number of workers doing work “that may be inappropriate in the eyes of OSHA or state law.”

He said his firm will not be filing a lawsuit until all other administrative actions are exhausted, but he is exploring the possibility of a worker’s compensation claim.

Despite the construction site receiving city tax breaks and other tax credits, laborers were not ensured a prevailing wage, a minimum hourly salary enforced by the state on city-subsidized projects.

Moye said a city ordinance doesn’t require projects receiving historic preservation credits to pay workers the county-determined wage since “no money was exchanged between the city and the developers.”

“It is taxpayer funded in that there is still property tax breaks on it... If you’re defining taxpayer funded as there’s taxpayer equity in the project, then the answer is no,” Moye said.

According to Sanchez’s younger cousin, New Horizons paid him a $26 hourly wage, with an unknown cut of his compensation going to the temp agency. The prevailing wage for an asbestos worker in Jackson County for 2023 is about $63.

‘Call the police’

When Sanchez left his cousin at 8:30 p.m. on July 17 to retrieve a box for debris, his cousin said, he was concerned that he was only relying on the light from his cell phone and a headlamp to descend the building.

Sometime during the following hour, the cousin said, he and the other workers heard the faint sound of a scream.

At 9:30 p.m. they grew worried about Sanchez. They discovered his car still parked in the parking lot, and began to search.

At 10 p.m., the cousin contacted supervisors about Sanchez’s disappearance and requested to contact police. The supervisor told him no, he said, and the crew continued searching. At 12:30 a.m. they asked again and heard the same answer.

Then, the cousin noticed some red-and-white striped fabric with spots of blue hanging near a first floor elevator control panel. The “American flag bandana” was “similar to the one Jose regularly wore,” according to an affidavit signed by the cousin, which was obtained by The Star.

He peered into the shaft and recognized there was something lying six floors below at the basement level.

They called the supervisor again, who drove over and rushed with the crew members to the basement, prying open the elevator doors with a bar.

“Oh my god (sic), call the police,” he recalled someone saying.

Officers were called at 1:30 a.m. and EMS arrived at the scene four minutes later, according to city records.

There, they discovered Sanchez, lying face-first in a pool of blood.

In the days that followed, police opened an investigation into Sanchez’s death and his cousin was allegedly told to not come back to work.

“I wanted to see [Jose]. But I couldn’t. I was calling New Horizons, they never answered, so we just had to leave,” he said.

In late September, Sanchez was finally put to rest in Nicaragua after an over two-month struggle to repatriate his body, according to multiple labor activists working with the family.

And now his cousins are left to move on without him.

“We came back to Indiana and we’re trying to find work again but it’s hard,” his cousin said.

“After everything... Our family is devastated.”