A father was electrocuted and killed by faulty equipment at Tesla’s Giga factory just outside Austin, a shocking lawsuit alleges.
The complaint alleges that Victor Gomez Sr., 46, died on Aug. 1 while “inspecting electrical panels,” including one that his family’s attorneys allege had been improperly “energized.”
Contact with “an already energized panel” caused the electrician to be “instantly electrocuted” and “rendered unconscious,” the attorneys wrote in their filing.
The father of seven was pronounced dead on arrival at Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas at Austin that same day, shortly after the tragic incident.
While it is not the first time a worker has died at the factory, Gomez’s electrocution comes after DailyMail.com revealed how a Tesla engineer was attacked by a robot during a brutal and bloody malfunction at the Giga Texas factory, in another safety lapse at the construction site.
Within 48 hours, the fatal incident had become a federal case, with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) confirming it planned to launch an investigation into the causes of death of electrician Victor Gomez Sr. (pictured)
In part because of Giga Texas’s sprawling size—more than 10 million square feet of floor space, or nearly 100 football fields in total—the company decided to put parts of the plant into operation while the rest was still under construction. Some claim this policy increased the number of injuries
‘Gomez was tasked with inspecting the electrical panels before they were energized on the day of this tragic incident,’ according to the filewhich was filed in Travis County Superior Court on Tuesday.
Lawyers for the Gomez family also called on the court to order Tesla to preserve “all internal and external surveillance” from the date of the fatal accident.
The Gomez family’s attorneys noted in their complaint that they “hired an electrical engineering expert and […] tried to contact the defendants’ attorney [i.e. Tesla and their contractors]via emails and phone calls, to inspect the property in question before any evidence is repaired or altered in any way.’
“There is a high likelihood that defendants will alter, salvage, sell, or destroy relevant evidence,” the family’s attorneys said in their request for a restraining order against Tesla and its contractors.
Emergency workers told the local ABC affiliate KVUE different stories about the August 1 incident they were sent to help with.
Austin-Travis County EMS personnel reported they were called to the scene to provide emergency medical care to an adult in cardiac arrest.
The Travis County Sheriff’s Office, meanwhile, told local news that they responded to the scene after calls about a ‘deceased person.’
Yet within 48 hours, the fatal incident had become a federal case, after the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) confirmed it planned to open an investigation into the cause of Gomez’s death.
OSHA said it would not release further details until the investigation was complete.
In 2022, the nonprofit Workers Defense Project filed its own OSHA complaint on behalf of workers at Tesla’s sprawling Giga Texas factoryin which he alleged that the company’s contractors and subcontractors had given some of their employees false safety certificates.
“Employees report that when they needed training, they simply received PDF files or images of certificates via text message or WhatsApp within days,” attorney Hannah Alexander told local NBC affiliate KXAN at that time.
Drone footage that surfaced in April (above) shows entire fleets of unfinished Cybertrucks stalled due to concerns about parts. Early whistleblower Cristina Balan told DailyMail.com that Tesla engineers, like her once was, are struggling to get leadership to take safety seriously.
“It is impossible that employees even received the required training.”
Gomez’s tragic death is, in fact, just the latest bleak detail in a larger trend that Tesla himself describes in his own reports of workplace injuries, which he himself reported for government regulators: Tesla’s factory in Gigante, Texas, is outpacing the rest of the auto industry in both the number of total accidents and the number of accidents serious enough to require workers to take time off work.
Nearly one in 21 workers at Tesla’s Giga factory in Texas was injured on the job in 2022, according to a Tesla study. The informationcompared to a median percentage of one in five in the sector. 38 employees.
Two Tesla contractors who worked at the company’s Texas factory are also named as defendants in the lawsuit: Colorado River Project, LLC and Belcan Services Group, LTD.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Tesla for comment after the company disbanded its US media relations team in October 2020.
This article will be updated if the company responds.
A former OSHA inspector Richard Gleasonwho has also lectured on workplace safety issues at the University of Washington, said the regulatory agency will likely look to Tesla executives as it investigates who is to blame for the deaths.
“It’s not about employees,” Gleason said. “It’s about who in management had the authority, the power, to check — to make sure it was properly de-energized before they worked on it.”
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