Former pipe layer Thomas Richer fought back tears Tuesday as he told a Vancouver court about the last horrifying moments of 28-year-old Jeff Caron's life.
At about 11 a.m. on Oct. 11, 2012, Caron was at the bottom of a trench nearly four metres deep and three metres wide in a laneway behind Edinburgh Street, according Richer.
Because he was cutting a length of pipe, Richer said Caron was wearing ear plugs when their foreman, David Green, yelled at him and Richer to get out of the trench because a concrete retaining wall beside it was collapsing.
"Next, all hell broke loose," Richer said. "Something hit me; I bounced off of something; I landed on my back," Richer said.
From that position, he said he saw the wall land on Caron's back, crushing his chest onto a compacting machine called a jumping jack.
"I scrambled up out of the trench. Mr. Green was running down the laneway, and I asked him, 'Where the f*** are you going, Dave?' Mr. Green said he didn't know."
The crew's heavy equipment operator lifted the wall off Caron with an excavator, according to Richer.
"Jeff fell back into the trench," he said "I wanted to go down there and see if the young guy was alive…I just wanted the kid to be alive. There was no pulse off of him, and I couldn't touch his chest; there was basically nothing there of his chest."
Both men eventually ended up in the same room at Vancouver General Hospital, according to Richer.
"His body was there, but he wasn't," Richer said.
Besides three fractured ribs and injuries to his neck and lower back that have left him with chronic pain, Richer said watching his young co-worker die has injured him psychologically.
"It's probably one of the first things I see when I wake up and one of the last things I see when I go to bed," he said.
Richer said he struggled with depression and tried to take his own life in the months after the accident.
'Mr. Green had the right to stop the job'
Richer's testimony continued Tuesday at the trial of his former employer, J. Cote and Son Excavating Ltd. and foreman David Green.
J. Cote has been charged with criminal negligence causing death and criminal negligence causing injury.
Green faces the additional charge of manslaughter.
Both pleaded not guilty at the beginning of their trial in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver Monday.
On Tuesday, Crown prosecutor Emmanuelle Rouleau took Richer through photographs of the retaining wall and trench before and after the collapse.
Richer noted what he described as a "cold joint" running vertically down the retaining wall.
Cold joints form between two batches of concrete when the second batch is poured after the first one has already started to set.
Returning to the trench after a coffee break on the day of the incident, Richer said he thought the joint in the wall had separated by about an inch or inch-and-a-half.
He said he raised the concern with Green, but Green said the wall hadn't moved and told the crew to keep going.
Green reassured him the wall was secured with rebar and that he would tell Richer and Caron if it moved, Richer told the court.
Looking at photos of the aftermath, Richer noted no rebar was visible, and the section of wall that collapsed into the trench had split off at the joint.
At the beginning of the North Burnaby storm- and sewer-pipe replacement project, Richer said he had initially refused to go into the trench because he believed it was too dangerous because of the depth, lack of supports and sandy soil.
But Green told him he had a document from an engineer that said the men could be in the trench, according to Richer.
Richer read the document, he said, and noted it said the engineer should be called if ground conditions changed.
Richer said he eventually agreed to work inside the trench because he was afraid of losing his job since he had been hired as a pipe layer.
But he said he raised safety concerns about the trench with Green every day.
When asked who at the site would decide work should stop if there was a safety issue, Richer said "Mr. Green had the right to stop the job."
The trial is expected to continue Wednesday with Richer's cross-examination by lawyers representing J. Cote and Green.
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