In March 2024, John Barnett failed to show up for his third day in court, when he was in the middle of delivering a formal deposition in a legal action against Boeing.
Barnett had worked for Boeing for over 30 years as a quality manager at a North Charleston manufacturing plant, until he was forced into a early retirement, because he wouldn’t shut up about the alarming slips in quality and safety he saw happening on the plane production line. Following the malfunction and deadly crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets, less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019, people finally started to listen to Barnett. He joined other whistleblowers in a legal case against Boeing, and was featured in the 2022 Netflix documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.
When Barnett didn’t show up in court on March 9, 2024, and wasn’t picking up his phone, his lawyers called his hotel to check in on him. He was found, dead, in the hotel parking lot, in his pick-up truck, with a gunshot wound to his head. He was 62.
Downfall director Rory Kennedy told Decider that it was Barnett’s “suspicious” death that motivated her to make her to make a follow-up documentary, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, which began streaming on Netflix today.
“He had committed so much of his life to trying to protect the public, and help us be aware of what was happening inside the company,” Kennedy told Decider. “I had many hours of recordings of him that I had done over the years, and really felt like his story...
Pastor Jun Kwang-hoon, accused of spreading false claims about President Lee Jae-myung's educational background, appeared before police for questioning. According to reporting by The Seoul Economi...