The Boeing whistleblower who supposedly committed suicide in South Carolina while giving a deposition in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company allegedly told his friend: “if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”

A family friend of 62-year-old John Barnett, identified as Jennifer, told ABC 4 she knows “that he did not commit suicide.”

“There’s no way. He loved life too much. He loved his family too much. He loved his brothers too much to put them through what they’re going through right now,” she said.

WATCH:

Barnett was found dead in his truck at a hotel on March 9th from an alleged “self-inflicted” gunshot wound.

“According to the BBC, John Barnett, a former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm’s production standards, has been found dead in Charleston County, South Carolina. Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years until his retirement in 2017,” Rawsalerts wrote.

“In the days before his death, he had been providing evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company. The 62-year-old died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 9, and police are investigating the incident.”

The Post Millennial reports:

She said that Barnett had talked about this exact scenario playing out after he began speaking up publicly about Boeing-related safety concerns following his 2017 retirement from the company. He worked for over 30 years as a quality manager for Boeing.

“He wasn’t concerned about [his own] safety because I asked him,” Jennifer said. “I said, ‘Aren’t you scared?’ And he said, ‘No, I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.’”

This conversation, Jennifer said, included Barnett talking about his upcoming deposition in Charleston.

Jennifer, who reportedly last saw Barnett in late February at her father’s funeral, said she thinks someone “didn’t like what he had to say” and wanted to “shut him up.”

“That’s why they made it look like a suicide,” she commented.

Barnett’s attorneys voiced their doubts he committed suicide.

“We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life,” attorneys Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, who represent Barnett, said in a statement earlier this week.

“No one can believe it,” they added.

They said the Charleston police need to investigate Barnett’s death fully, accurately, and leave no detail unturned.

From the New York Post:

Barnett, 62, was due in court for further testimony in a bombshell lawsuit against the company when he was found dead, with the Charleston County coroner ruling the cause as a “self-inflicted” wound.

Barnett was a quality control engineer who worked for the company for more than three decades before he retired in 2017 — and two years later told the BBC that Boeing cut corners by rushing to get its 787 Dreamliner jets off the production line and into service.

Turkewitz and Knowles said he was also “in very good spirits” as he prepared to give a deposition against the company on Monday.

“John was in the midst of a deposition in his whistleblower case, which finally was nearing the end,” the lawyers said. “He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on.”

Charleston police are investigating the circumstances of Barnett’s death.

A statement from the police department said officers had been called to perform a welfare check on Saturday morning and “discovered a male inside a vehicle suffering from a gunshot wound to the head.”

 

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