On December 5, 2025, a crew replacing a storm drain on Valley Forge Road in Milford, Ohio was buried when an unshored trench roughly eight feet deep caved in. Jose Alberto Barajas Martinez, 28, was killed. Two others survived — one with eight fractures, one with two broken ribs, both with serious internal injuries. One of the survivors, Jaime Barajas, was the victim’s father.
OSHA’s Cincinnati Area Office opened an inspection the same day under the national trench emphasis program. On February 25, 2026 it issued four serious violations plus one willful against Whispering Creek LLC of New Carlisle, Ohio, with an initial penalty of $231,714: $66,200 serious and $165,514 willful.
What got cited
The standards are the ones every excavation contractor can recite: 1926.652(a)(1), protective systems required; 1926.651(c)(2), safe means of egress; 1926.651(j)(2), protection from loose material; plus 1926.20(b)(2) and 1926.21(b)(2) on program and training. There is nothing novel here. An eight-foot trench with no shoring, no box and no slope is the most thoroughly litigated hazard in construction.
Then the number moved
Through an informal settlement, the willful was withdrawn or reclassified and the total fell to $49,000 across four remaining violations. That’s a 79% reduction. The top line item dropped from $165,514 to $12,250. The case remains open in OSHA’s system.
Informal settlements are routine and they exist for good reasons — they resolve cases without years of Commission litigation, and OSHA trades penalty dollars for abatement certainty. But a willful classification is the agency’s finding that an employer knew and proceeded anyway. When that classification comes off the table in settlement, the deterrent signal to every other excavation contractor in the region comes off with it.
The part that’s still unresolved
On August 18, the Cincinnati Enquirer published an investigation drawing on the OSHA case file and a Miami Township police report. According to that reporting, workers told investigators they warned the trench had gotten too deep and were directed in anyway minutes before the collapse, and owner David Baumgardner was on site and knew the depth and layout. The police report listed reckless homicide and negligent assault as possible charges. Baumgardner told the paper he expected felony charges.
As of August 14, 2026, none had been filed. The Clermont County Prosecutor’s Office was still reviewing.
The worker statements, Baumgardner’s presence and knowledge, and the possible charges are all sourced to the Enquirer’s reporting and should be read as such. The penalty figures, violation counts, cited standards and case status come directly from OSHA’s enforcement record and are not in dispute.
Roughly two dozen workers die in trench collapses in the United States in a typical year, and the hazard has a settled engineering answer that costs a few hundred dollars a day to implement. The gap between that and a $49,000 outcome after a fatality is the whole problem. Excavation at the other end of the risk-management spectrum looks like the B.F. Sisk Dam program, where instrumentation and monitoring are a named consultant scope.