This was their first day on the job.
Pete Reveles and Oliberto Vasquez were very close friends. A West Valley cattle ranch hired them as day laborers to fix a wall in a feed barn.
Reveles, a 47-year-old father of two, worked as a handyman. Vasquez, 55, had recently started his own company.
Last February morning, they began digging the foundation for a wall. A stack of concrete blocks from a neighboring retaining wall toppled, crushing them. Paramedics arrived at the scene, but the guys had already died.
The events of that day left their families in despair and filled them with many questions.
“I was married to him for 23 years. “He’s my high school sweetheart,” his wife, Covina Reveles, told ABC15 in an interview last year.
She has since filed a wrongful death complaint against the Arlington Cattle Company and its owners.
The lawsuit asserts that the corporation could have prevented his death by providing its staff with workplace safety training. The lawsuit also claims that the ranch was negligent in “failing to maintain the premises in a safe and secure manner.”
In a court response, the ranch owners claimed that the man who hired the laborers did not have their consent to hire the two men. The owners claim they were unaware the two guys were working on the land that day. They deny negligence and have asked the judge to dismiss the complaint.
Attorneys for the Arlington Cattle Company did not respond to ABC15’s request for further comment.
The civil action was recently filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, and no hearings have been scheduled.
Last year, the state’s worker-safety department reprimanded the company for safety violations such as failing to instruct an employee on workplace dangers and allowing an employee to use a forklift without first receiving training. The Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health (ADOSH) penalized the corporation $5,358. The company promised to send at least one employee to an ADOSH safety course and forklift training.
ABC15 has extensively investigated this workplace death, including how the Industrial Commission of Arizona, the state agency that oversees ADOSH, has for years given tiny Arizona businesses automatic discounts on their safety fines.
These so-called “discounts on death” can cut corporation fines by up to 70%.
