John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017.

In the days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.

Boeing said it was saddened to hear of Mr Barnett’s passing. The Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to the BBC on Monday.

It said the 62-year-old had died from a “self-inflicted” wound on 9 March and police were investigating.

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346 points

He was staying at a hotel out-of-state while giving evidence against Boeing.
He was found dead in his car in the hotel parking lot from a ‘self-inflicted wound’.

There’s really no other way to look at it logically than he was murdered by Boeing. Nothing else adds up.

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191 points

He wasn’t even done giving the deposition that he literally volunteered to give…

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-267 points

literall–

Downvote.

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93 points

I don’t know what you were trying to achieve beyond publicly announcing you’re a petty, boring person.

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67 points

You could’ve just done so and moved on, my guy. It’s not a profound statement.

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58 points

Did he not literally volunteer?

I mean, I get it, I’m sick of “literally” meaning “figuratively”, and I’d die on that hill with you, but this is the dumbest possible time to make that stand. In this case “literally” just means “literally”.

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35 points
*

Literally has been used as an intensifier for over 200 years. The Oxford English Dictionary includes a definition of literally meaning “figuratively”. Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain all used it that way in their writing.

So until you write something as well respected and enduring as Sanditon, The Great Gatsby, Tom Sawyer, or Ulysses and collect your mother fucking Nobel prize in literature, please choke on a literal dick you confidently incorrect fuckwit.

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16 points

i’m literally sorry that you literally don’t know standard english my guy, i literally don’t know what to literally say to you 😭

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11 points

Found the boeing employee

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9 points

🤓

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8 points
Removed by mod
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2 points

“Literally” CAN be used as an hyperbole. It’s just a more emphatic way to say “very”

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0 points

Please don’t reddit up the place, I like it here

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86 points

I mean, I think the logical thing to do is wait until the evidence comes out and we know for sure. It’s entirely possible he was under a lot of stress from all this and did kill himself. Now, I don’t deny that it’s a HUGE. FUCKING. CONICIDENCE. but those do happen from time to time. Its also a hell of a story, good-guy whistleblower murdered by greedy multinational aerospace company and defense contractor…during an election year…if you wrote the script nobody would buy it.

Let’s be suspicious, but not jump to conclusions.

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6 points
*

Jesus, do you think maybe they’re trying to run out the clock too? Who wants to bet that a certain CEO is angling for a political position within a certain potential administration? Perhaps head of the FAA?

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7 points

This is the kind of go get em attitude a certain potential administration might be impressed by.

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75 points

Look, I’m not gonna say Boeing did it. Though if they did, I’d bet money they drove.

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45 points

An investor could’ve threatened his family? (So not directly Boeing)

If he got a bunch of hate online, or had crippling anxiety about the testimony he still had to give? I mean you could even speculate he thought he would be killed someday, so he took it into his own hands.

(Please note the above is all BS!)

I would argue the jury is still out and that we may never know.

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45 points

Direct involvement might be a question still. But general involvement is absolute. If Boeing wasn’t so shitty he almost assuredly would still be alive.

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18 points

I suppose even if nobody ever said a word to him you could make that argument. No poor business practices = no testimony = no car in a hotel parking lot.

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3 points

An investor could’ve threatened his family? (So not directly Boeing)

Or somebody involved in corporate corruption and embezzling in Boeing. That would be worse for Boeing as a whole than him remaining alive, but possibly better for that somebody who may not be identified.

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8 points

They don’t gain much. The FAA is breathing down their neck already.

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18 points

The FAA has allowed this mess to continue for far too long because Boeing is an industry titan. Too big to fail. Well, maybe not anymore.

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16 points

Watch politician holdings of Boeing stock.

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5 points
*

Too big to fail is a terrible concept that was invented.

If a company gets too big to the point that it’s failure is going to drag down the company. That company should be broken up to allow them to to fail. Anything else is either reward the company for making bad decisions or allow companies to become stagnant because if anything happens, the government will bail them out.

Edit: Spelling and grammar are important.

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4 points

What do you mean? They fail all the time. Fail to secure doors. Fail to have working oxygen masks. Fail to warn pilots about a system that points the nose of the plane down constantly…

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11 points
Removed by mod
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2 points

We worry about being able to feed our families enough.

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6 points

Not sure how much jurisdiction or investigation the FFA does for murders that occur on the ground though.

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3 points

At the point of a deposition, his complaints are already documented and can be verified by regulators.

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-5 points

It makes no sense for them to kill him, that draws wayyyy too much attention. More likely if they were involved, they blackmailed him and that caused him to kill himself, or another party that also wanted to keep him quiet killed him and they didn’t care if it looked like Boeing did it.

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-6 points

Does suicide ever add up? It being a hit doesn’t add up either. A hotel parking lot is a rather public place to try to force someone to kill themselves.

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