Dependable Representation When a Fatal Construction Accident Takes Your Loved One
Losing someone you care about in a construction accident brings about devastating grief, which is compounded by urgent financial pressure. While workers' compensation can provide immediate death benefits, your family deserves far more.
Attorney John J. Sheehan helps clients pursue comprehensive justice through both workers' compensation benefits and third-party wrongful death lawsuits — the only way to achieve true financial security for the future.
Types of Construction Accident Deaths We Handle
- Falls from heights: Scaffolding collapses, unprotected roof edges, ladder failures, and elevator shaft accidents at multi-story construction sites.
- Electrocutions: Contact with live power lines, defective electrical equipment, improper grounding, and temporary power system failures.
- Struck-by deaths: Falling tools or materials from upper floors, crane accidents, backing construction vehicles, and collapsing walls.
- Caught-in/between accidents: Trench cave-ins, equipment entanglement, moving machinery, and structural collapses.
- Confined space deaths: Asphyxiation, toxic exposure, and oxygen-deficiency incidents in tanks, manholes, and excavations.
Construction accidents killed 22 workers in Massachusetts during a recent reporting period, representing roughly 35% of all workplace fatalities in the state.
Behind each statistic is a family facing lost income, mounting bills, and an uncertain future. Attorney Sheehan has spent 30-plus years working to ensure that these families receive every dollar of support Massachusetts law allows.
Understanding Your Legal Rights After a Fatal Construction Accident
Massachusetts law provides two distinct pathways to compensation, which can often be pursued concurrently.
Workers' Compensation Death Benefits
Your loved one's employer must provide immediate death benefits through workers' compensation insurance regardless of fault. These benefits include funeral expenses up to the statutory limit and weekly payments to surviving dependents at two-thirds of the deceased worker's average weekly wages.
Importantly, undocumented workers' families have identical rights; immigration status is completely irrelevant. The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents settled this issue definitively in 2003, and no inquiry about documentation status can legally occur during the claims process.
However, workers' compensation provides only economic support. It doesn’t factor in the surviving spouse’s emotional trauma, the children's loss of parental guidance, or the devastating impact on the family's daily life. As such, these benefits may represent only a fraction of what your family may actually deserve.
Wrongful Death Claims
If a party other than your loved one's direct employer played a role in the fatal accident, Massachusetts’s wrongful death law allows your family to sue for complete damages.
Third-party defendants may include general contractors, property owners, equipment manufacturers, other subcontractors, architects, engineers, and utility companies whose negligence contributed to the death.
Here’s an overview of the comprehensive damages available through a wrongful death claim:
- Complete lost lifetime earnings: Every dollar your loved one would have earned over their remaining work life, including raises, overtime, and benefits.
- Loss of financial support: The money your family depended on for housing, food, education, and daily living.
- Loss of household services: Childcare, home maintenance, financial management, and other services your loved one provided.
- Pain and suffering before death: Compensation for any conscious pain your loved one endured before dying.
- Loss of companionship: The devastating emotional loss suffered by the surviving spouses and children.
- Loss of parental guidance: Children's loss of love, advice, protection, and guidance throughout their lives.
Wrongful death settlements in construction cases can range from $2 million to $9 million or more, depending on the deceased worker's age, earnings, and family circumstances, as well as the defendant's degree of fault. Combined with workers' compensation death benefits, a wrongful death settlement can make a meaningful difference in securing a family’s future.
Who Is Responsible for Construction Site Deaths
Our team carefully investigates every party whose negligence may have contributed to a fatal accident, including the following.
Boston's construction boom involves complex projects with multiple contractors often working simultaneously. General contractors are responsible for overall site safety, coordinating between subcontractors, establishing safety protocols, and responding to OSHA violations. When they prioritize schedules and budgets over worker safety, they bear liability for any resulting deaths.
Common forms of negligence include:
- Inadequate fall-protection systems
- Failure to enforce safety rules across multiple trades
- Improper scaffolding specifications
- Rushing work to meet deadlines
- Ignoring OSHA citations
- Conducting cursory site inspections
Building owners and developers have a duty to promote construction site safety even when hiring contractors to perform work. Massachusetts’s premises liability laws hold property owners accountable when they overlook dangerous conditions, fail to ensure contractor safety, or create hazards that cause fatal accidents.
Common forms of negligence include:
- Ignoring structural defects
- Failing to disclose underground utilities
- Demanding unrealistic schedules that compromise safety
- Refusing to fund proper safety equipment
- Maintaining control over site conditions while delegating responsibility
Defective construction equipment causes numerous workplace deaths every year. Massachusetts imposes strict liability on manufacturers whose faulty products injure or kill workers. Your family doesn't need to prove that the manufacturer was careless, only that the equipment was defective when it left the factory.
Common forms of negligence include:
- Inadequate machine guards on power tools
- Scaffolding component failures
- Crane structural weaknesses
- Defective fall-arrest systems
- Electrical tool malfunctions
- Missing or inadequate safety warnings
Construction sites frequently see multiple specialty contractors working in close proximity. When one subcontractor's negligent actions create hazards that kill workers employed by different companies, the negligent subcontractor may bear liability.
Common forms of negligence include:
- Electrical contractors who improperly install temporary power systems
- Demolition contractors who weaken structures without adequate support
- Excavation contractors who undermine foundations
- Equipment operators who hurt workers from other trades
Companies that rent construction equipment and scaffolding are expected to provide safe, properly maintained pieces with adequate instructions and warnings. When rented equipment fails and workers lose their lives, the rental companies could face negligence claims.
Common forms of negligence include:
- Renting out equipment with known defects
- Failing to inspect equipment between rentals
- Providing inadequate safety instructions
- Providing equipment unsuitable for the intended purposes
- Failing to maintain equipment according to the manufacturer's specifications
Act Now to Protect Your Future
Schedule a free consultation with a qualified Boston construction death attorney today.
Construction Safety Failures That Result in Worker Deaths
The experienced team at the Law Office of John J. Sheehan has investigated many fatal safety violations across Greater Boston. Here are some of the issues we see most often.
OSHA's "Focus Four" Construction Hazards
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recognizes four categories of hazards that are responsible for some 58% of construction deaths nationwide. Massachusetts statistics mirror this disturbing pattern, with the same four categories being to blame for the majority of local construction fatalities.
1. Falls
Falls from heights account for roughly 40% of all construction deaths.
Despite decades of incremental fall-protection standards, Massachusetts construction sites continue seeing the deaths of workers who fall from scaffolding, ladders, roofs, and structural steel. Small construction companies with fewer than 20 employees account for 75% of fatal falls nationwide despite representing only 39% of construction employment.
Attorney Sheehan has represented families whose loved ones fell from structures as low as 11–15 feet, proving that "low-level" work can be just as dangerous as work done from heights. Contractors who fail to ensure fall protection because "it's only two stories" or "we'll just be quick" demonstrate the reckless disregard that can provide the basis for a wrongful death claim.
2. Struck-By Incidents
Unsuspecting workers frequently lose their lives due to falling tools or construction materials dropped from upper floors, collapsing walls, crane failures, and reversing construction vehicles. Many such deaths are entirely preventable through proper material storage, designated tool zones, spotter systems, and vehicle back-up alarms.
In 2019, for example, a Boston construction worker died after a 3,500-pound ballast fell from a forklift and crushed his chest while he was helping erect a lighting tower. The contractor had failed to secure the load properly and had allowed workers in the hazard zone during lifting operations.
3. Electrocutions
Electric shocks kill construction workers at rates several times higher than workers in other industries.
Contact with overhead power lines during excavation, crane operation, or ladder placement remains a leading cause of construction deaths. Defective electrical tools, improper installation of temporary power, and failure to verify power shutdowns harm workers who trusted their employers to provide a safe environment.
In Massachusetts, winter conditions amplify workplace electrocution risks. Snow and ice increase electrical conductivity, and some workers may wear wet clothing that conducts electricity more readily.
4. Caught-In/Between Accidents
Construction workers can easily become trapped by moving equipment, cave-ins, and structural collapses. Trench excavations are particularly deadly. The Boston Waterproofing case from 2023 exemplifies how contractors repeatedly violate basic trench safety rules, ordering untrained day laborers into unprotected excavations.
The Arlington and Warwick trench collapses involved nearly identical patterns of negligence: Contractors recruited day laborers, ignored their safety concerns, provided no cave-in protection, and made no rescue attempts when the excavations collapsed.
In both instances, workers were critically injured. One contractor even struck a trapped employee to prevent him from calling for help.
Multi-Contractor Coordination Failures
Many of Boston's construction projects are massive undertakings involving dozens of subcontractors working simultaneously. When general contractors fail to properly coordinate work between electrical, plumbing, HVAC, structural, and finishing trades, workers become vulnerable to preventable accidents.
Inadequate Training and Supervision
Construction companies that hire workers without proper training, assign tasks beyond individual experience levels, and fail to provide adequate supervision open the door to fatal accidents. Language barriers can heighten these dangers when Spanish-speaking workers receive safety instructions in English or through poor translation.
Latino construction workers represent approximately one third of the national construction workforce but suffer 41.6% higher workplace fatality rates. This disparity reflects systematic failures to provide Spanish-language safety training, adequate supervision, and cultural understanding of how immigrant workers may hesitate to report safety violations.
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