A federal judge has given the widow of a Tulsa Cintas Corp. worker a week to show why certain evidence filed in her 2007 wrongful death lawsuit should be unsealed for public viewing — a ruling that breathed new life into her case against the nation’s largest uniform supplier.
U.S. Magistrate Judge T. Lane Wilson decided that Amalia Diaz Torres’ legal team had until Tuesday to provide Cintas with a list of evidence they do not believe is subject to the protective order issued earlier in the case.
He gave Cintas until Nov. 20 to respond, and scheduled a Jan. 5 hearing in Tulsa federal court on whether to unseal the documents.
Torres has claimed that the Cincinnati-based company is abusing the court’s protective order by marking up to 90 percent of the case evidence as “confidential,” forcing key documents and depositions to be blacked out — allegations the company has denied.
Torres sued Cintas in 2007, claiming the company’s plant managers knew about — and even encouraged — the dangerous working practices that led to the death of her husband, Eleazar Torres-Gomez.
Rick Garcia, a McAllen, Texas-based lawyer for Torres, did not comment on the ruling Wednesday, and his legal team typically doesn’t talk about the case outside of court, citing the protective order.
Cintas spokeswoman Heather Maley did not immediately comment and said she was discussing the matter with the company’s legal team.
Cintas, which supplies and launders uniforms for restaurant and hotel employees and other workers, employs more than 34,000 people. It posted sales of nearly $4 billion in fiscal 2008.
On March 6, 2007, Torres-Gomez, a seven-year Cintas employee, climbed onto a slow-moving conveyor to clear a jam of wet laundry, instead of shutting off the machinery as he was supposed to do.
He jumped up and down on the clump and fell into the 300-degree dryer. Twenty minutes later, another employee heard his burned body banging around in the dryer and made the grisly discovery.
Torres’ suit claims her husband and his co-workers were encouraged by Cintas managers to climb onto the conveyors to dislodge clumps of uniforms to keep up with production.
Last year, an Associated Press investigation found that in the year and a half after the accident in Tulsa, at least eight Cintas plants in six states had been cited by OSHA and state authorities for hazards similar to those that led to Torres-Gomez’s death.
In December, the company agreed to pay almost $3 million in penalties to resolve federal occupational safety violations in six cases, including the Tulsa death.
Source: AP, Tulsa, OK, November 4, 2009
