Two Workers Drown in a Boston Trench — and Their Employer Is Convicted of Manslaughter
BOSTON — Most OSHA cases end with a check. This one ended with a prison sentence. In December 2019, Atlantic Drain Service owner Kevin Otto was sentenced to two years behind bars after a jury convicted him and his company of manslaughter in the deaths of two workers who drowned in a collapsed trench — one of the rare times in American history a workplace safety death has been prosecuted as manslaughter.
The Incident
On October 21, 2016, Kelvin Mattocks, 53, and Robert Higgins, 47, were working roughly 12 feet down in a trench on Dartmouth Street in Boston’s South End. The trench had no cave-in protection. When the walls gave way, the collapse snapped the supply line to an adjacent fire hydrant, and water poured into the excavation, filling it within seconds. Both men drowned at the bottom of the trench while co-workers tried desperately to reach them.
The Investigation
OSHA cited Atlantic Drain Service Co. with 18 willful, repeat, serious and other-than-serious violations and proposed $1,475,813 in penalties. The company was no stranger to the hazard: OSHA had cited it for similar trenching violations in 2007 and in 2012. “The deaths of these two men could have and should have been prevented,” said Galen Blanton, OSHA’s New England regional administrator.
Suffolk County prosecutors went further. A grand jury indicted both the company and Otto personally on two counts of manslaughter each, along with charges of handing federal investigators forged safety training records with doctored dates and signatures. In October 2019 a jury convicted them, and Otto was sentenced to two years, three years of probation, and a permanent bar from employing anyone in excavation work.
Lessons to Take Home
Every trench five feet or deeper needs a protective system — a trench box, shoring or properly sloped walls — plus a ladder within reach and utilities located and supported before digging. Those rules exist because soil gives no warning, and because trenches sit next to water mains and hydrant lines that turn a cave-in into a drowning. It is the same physics that produced the $4.6 million Revoli Construction case years later.
But the lasting lesson of Atlantic Drain is accountability: when an employer knows the rules, has been cited twice before, and sends workers into an unprotected hole anyway, courts are increasingly willing to call the result what it is. Don’t let production pressure put your crew in that hole — brief them on the shortcuts that kill, secure the worksite properly, and make sure every worker knows they can invoke stop work authority the moment a trench looks wrong.
