For Want of Pins, a Man Was Buried Alive
Michael Griffith fell through an unsecured catwalk gate into a limestone hopper and suffocated. His family won $2.84 million. The Iowa Supreme Court took it all away. Here is how the legal system built to protect workers became the machine that finished the job.
The Non-Financial Ledger
Michael Griffith was thirty-one years old. He had been working at the Garrison quarry for fewer than two weeks when he died. He started at Wendling when the company bought out his previous employer, Coots Materials Company, in May of 2019. He moved through quality control, then miner training, and then became a stockpiler. His first week at the Garrison site was his training week. Three days. On day one, someone showed him around. On day two, he drove while someone rode along. On day three, someone checked on him periodically. That was the full extent of his preparation for working directly above machinery that his own supervisors would later describe, under oath, as “insanely” dangerous.
He left behind Brea, his wife. He left behind L.M.G., his daughter. He left behind Brian, his father. These are not abstractions. Brea required ongoing treatment from both a physician’s assistant and a therapist after her husband’s death, to the degree that those providers were called as witnesses at trial. The legal record does not dwell on what Brea told her therapist. It does not need to. Her husband went to work on a Tuesday morning in January and never came home.
“I didn’t think it was possible.” That is what stockpiler Drew Bixler said when asked whether he believed anyone could fall into the hopper. His coworker Wilson said the same thing. A colleague called it a “freak accident.” The machine had been in use for decades. The complacency had calcified into assumption. Michael Griffith walked into that assumption on his tenth day at the site.
Michael’s father Brian also sued. He recovered a separate $200,000 verdict. His son fell into a limestone bin and suffocated. No dollar amount assigned by a jury and then stripped away by a court translates that into language a father can use. The Iowa Supreme Court’s opinion refers to the death benefits available under workers’ compensation as the family’s “exclusive remedy.” Exclusive. As if remedy is even the right word for what a check can do after your child is gone.
The court’s opinion notes that the hopper had not seen a serious injury since 1996, when a previous worker fell into the bin. After that accident, Wendling installed the forty-two-inch safety rails that surrounded the catwalk where Michael worked. Those rails were the direct result of a worker getting hurt. The question the court’s opinion does not ask is this: what does it tell you about a safety system when the only improvements it makes are the ones that come after someone is already dead?
Michael Griffith had ten days on the job. The people responsible for his safety had decades. One of them looked at his workspace through a car window in the dark and decided that counted as an inspection. The jury looked at that fact and awarded $2.84 million. The Iowa Supreme Court looked at the same fact and said the law required more. The law required that the supervisor actually, specifically, consciously know that those particular pins were gone from that particular gate on that particular morning. Anything less than that is just ordinary negligence. And ordinary negligence, under Iowa Code section 85.20, is fully protected.
Legal Receipts
These are direct statements from the court record. They have not been paraphrased. The court’s own language documents the conditions that killed Michael Griffith and the legal framework that absorbed the consequences.
“Griffith had no pulse and his coworkers and emergency responders were unable to revive him with CPR. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The medical examiner later ruled that Griffith died of asphyxiation, apparently having fallen through the catwalk gate into the bin, where the lime buried him.”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Background Facts and Proceedings, p. 6
“During his testimony, Kulper agreed that the inside of the lime surge hopper was ‘insanely’ dangerous. Galloway agreed that ‘working around that open hopper’ was inherently dangerous.”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Background Facts and Proceedings, p. 7
“On the morning of January 8, Galloway ‘just briefly’ visually inspected the newly repositioned hopper from ten to fifteen feet away by the glow of his headlights. He did not get out of his truck to climb onto the hopper to check the gate or its linchpins.”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Background Facts and Proceedings, p. 6
“Galloway, when asked if he would have prevented Griffith or any other worker from climbing the hopper had he known that an appropriate retaining pin was missing, stated, ‘[T]hat’s correct.'”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Background Facts and Proceedings, p. 7
Galloway said, on the record, under oath, that he would have stopped Michael Griffith from climbing onto the hopper had he known the pins were gone. The court said that is irrelevant, because he did not actually know. The only difference between a man who stops a worker from climbing a death trap and a man who does not is the knowledge that the trap exists. Galloway did not have that knowledge because he chose to look from his truck window. Iowa law calls that ordinary negligence and grants it immunity.
“Bixler testified that he had never seen the gate secured with wire and that he had never secured it with wire himself except when transporting the bin to a new site.”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Background Facts and Proceedings, p. 7
“No one could explain how the wire wound up on the gate in place of the pins.”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Background Facts and Proceedings, p. 7
“For want of linchpins, a life was lost. By all accounts, Griffith fell to his death through an open, unsecured gate. The missing pins would have secured the gate in a closed position. A proper inspection presumably would have discovered that the pins were missing and that the gate was inadequately secured. Griffith’s fatal accident was preventable.”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Analysis, p. 10-11
The court itself admits the accident was preventable. It then reverses the verdict anyway. The gap between those two facts is where Michael Griffith’s family now lives.
“On this trial record, the death benefits provided under Iowa’s workers’ compensation statute are the plaintiffs’ exclusive remedy for Griffith’s fatal on-the-job accident.”Iowa Supreme Court, No. 24–0097, Conclusion, p. 20
Societal Impact Mapping
Environmental Degradation
The Garrison quarry is one of thirty-three Wendling Quarries operations across Iowa and the Midwest. Surface limestone mining at this scale reshapes land, disrupts water tables, and generates fine particulate dust, the same dust that clogged the hopper Michael Griffith was sent to scrape. The lime particulate so fine it accumulates in machinery is the same particulate that workers breathe. The court record does not address air quality or long-term environmental monitoring. The MSHA citations issued after Michael’s death are not detailed in the opinion, which means the public has limited visibility into what those federal regulators actually found.
Public Health
Quarry workers are exposed to silica dust, a known carcinogen that causes silicosis, an irreversible and fatal lung disease. The lime particulate that caused Michael’s catwalk to be a daily requirement for scraping represents a daily proximity to materials that harm lungs over time. MSHA’s role is to prevent this. MSHA inspected the Garrison quarry once or twice per year and never cited the hopper before Michael’s death. After his death, multiple citations were issued. The inspection system caught nothing until a man was dead. That is a public health failure dressed in regulatory clothing.
Economic Inequality
Michael Griffith came to Wendling because the company bought out his previous employer. He had no negotiating power in that transition. He was a novice stockpiler on a ten-day tenure earning a wage at a surface mine, working alongside machinery his supervisors admitted was “insanely” dangerous. The jury awarded his family $2.84 million in recognition of what was taken. The Iowa Supreme Court determined that the workers’ compensation system, a system designed explicitly to cap employer liability in exchange for guaranteed benefits, provides sufficient remedy. The family does not get to determine what “sufficient” means. The law decides for them.
The ruling in Griffith v. Kulper lands in a broader economic context. Iowa Code section 85.20’s immunity for co-employees is part of the original workers’ compensation bargain struck over a century ago. The theory was that employers would surrender the right to fight every injury claim in court, and workers would surrender the right to sue for full tort damages. Both sides gave something up. What the century since has demonstrated is that the cap on liability stayed in place while the complexity and danger of industrial machinery expanded dramatically. The “grand bargain,” as the court itself calls it, was negotiated in a world that no longer exists, with risks that were not imagined at the time. The result is that a supervisor who inspects a machine from his car window in the dark is legally equivalent, under Iowa Code, to a supervisor who never showed up at all. Both walk away under workers’ comp protection. Only the dead worker’s family is left without options.
The Cost of a Life
The jury’s determination of what Michael Griffith’s life, labor, and presence was worth to his wife, daughter, father, and estate. This is the number twelve jurors, after eight days of testimony, decided represented justice. The Iowa Supreme Court reversed every dollar of it.
The missing component in this accounting is Wendling Quarries itself. Iowa Code section 85.20 shields the employer entirely. The company is not a defendant in this case. The lawsuit was directed at individual co-employees, Kulper and Galloway, because those are the only parties who can be sued for gross negligence under Iowa’s workers’ compensation framework. The corporation that owned the hopper, employed Michael Griffith for ten days with minimal training, and operated without a vibratory motor or safety netting faces exactly zero civil liability exposure for his death. That is not an accident of the law. That is the law working as designed.
What Now?
The defendants in this case were individual co-employees: Travis J. Galloway, Wendling’s crushing superintendent, and John L. Kulper, Wendling’s safety and environmental director. The employer, Wendling Quarries, and its president, Anthony Manatt, were either dismissed or never reached by this litigation. The civil system has now fully closed on this case. Remand is for dismissal with prejudice.
Regulatory Watchlist: Bodies With Authority Over This Industry
- MSHA: Mine Safety and Health Administration
- OSHA: Occupational Safety and Health Administration
- Iowa OSHA Division: Iowa Workforce Development
- Iowa Division of Workers’ Compensation
- Iowa Legislature: Iowa Code Chapter 85 Reform
- DOL: U.S. Department of Labor
- Iowa Governor’s Office: Workers’ Rights Task Force
What the Legislative Path Looks Like
Iowa Code section 85.20 requires an amendment to lower the “actual knowledge” threshold for co-employee gross negligence claims. The current standard, established in Walker v. Mlakar (1992) and reaffirmed in Mehmedovic v. Tyson Foods (2025), requires that a supervisor specifically and consciously know about the precise defect that killed the worker. A statutory amendment establishing that a willful failure to inspect known hazards satisfies the knowledge element would close the gap that let Galloway’s drive-by inspection escape liability. State legislative contacts for Iowa are available at the Iowa General Assembly website.
Mutual Aid and Grassroots Resistance
If you work in mining, quarrying, or any extractive industry in Iowa or the Midwest: document every inspection your supervisors do or do not perform. Use your phone. Keep records. MSHA allows workers to request inspections confidentially by calling 1-800-746-1553. You have federal whistleblower protections when you file a safety complaint with MSHA. Use them.
Contact Iowa Legal Aid (iowalegalaid.org) if you have experienced a workplace injury and been told workers’ compensation is your only option. That may be true under current law, but knowing your rights fully is the first step. Push your union, your coworkers, and your neighbors to contact Iowa state legislators and demand a hearing on section 85.20 reform. The Griffith family’s loss is the clearest possible evidence of what this law costs working people.
Brea Griffith’s attorneys, John C. Wagner and John Daufeldt of John C. Wagner Law Offices in Amana, Iowa, and Cory F. Gourley of Gourley, Rehkemper and Lindholm in West Des Moines, remain contacts for anyone seeking information on Iowa co-employee gross negligence law. Their names are on this record because they fought this case to the state’s highest court. That matters.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
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