Three men were working a drainage trench at a soon-to-open supermarket on the 7900 block of North El Dorado Street in Stockton on Friday evening, August 7. One left around 5:30 p.m. The other two stayed to finish.
Nobody found them until Saturday morning, when a coworker came back and saw their vehicle still parked on site with their cellphones inside. Stockton Fire was called at 5:15 a.m. on a report of two people trapped by a cave-in. The trench was about 10 feet deep before it collapsed.
The San Joaquin County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the men as Raul Cristostomo De La Cruz, 34, of Stockton and Raul Zepda, 49, of Lodi. Both were fathers.
The detail that isn’t about shoring
Cal/OSHA is investigating, with Stockton Police and city code enforcement assisting. City spokesperson Tony Mannor confirmed the project was not a City of Stockton job. What shoring, shielding or sloping was in place, if any, hasn’t been made public. California requires a protective system in any trench five feet or deeper unless the excavation is entirely in stable rock, so that question has an obvious answer waiting at the end of it.
But the shoring is not the only failure here. Two men were buried for roughly 12 hours and nobody on the job knew. That is a supervision and headcount problem, and it is the one every reader of this can fix on their own site this week without buying anything.
A written end-of-shift headcount, signed, is a zero-cost control. On this job it would not have prevented the collapse. It would have changed the rescue window from twelve hours to minutes.
Schedule pressure, again
Jose Alfredo Flores, a coworker, told ABC10 what the crew was doing. “The drainage was the last job. That’s what my friend had told me. They were doing the last job before opening the store. And they went in to hurry up and try to finish the job.”
Last job before opening. Two men staying late. That combination shows up in trench fatality reports so consistently that it functions as a leading indicator.
What Cal/OSHA is likely to do
Expect a multi-employer citation naming both the excavation subcontractor and the controlling contractor. Cal/OSHA has been aggressive on trenching this year, running a stand-down in June, and proposed $282,420 against three Los Angeles County roofing contractors for a single fall earlier this month. Cal/OSHA chief Debra Lee put it bluntly during the June effort: “Trenching is one of the most dangerous jobs in construction and employers are legally required to protect their workers.”
A Cal/OSHA report cited by Stocktonia documented 207 trench-related injuries in California over a five-year window, plus fatalities. The employer has not been publicly named; California has six months from the incident to issue citations, so early February 2027 is the outside date.
Excavation risk scales with the job. Heavy civil work like the Brandon Road Interbasin Project carries formal excavation and confined-space programs because the regulator and the owner both demand them. A 10-foot drainage trench at a grocery store fitout has the same physics and, too often, none of the program.
This is a difficult story. If you or someone on your crew is struggling, reaching out to a trusted person or a professional is worth doing, and there are industry-specific resources available.