Around 4 a.m. on May 15, in the 1-year-old South Texas town of Starbase, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old man from nearby Donna, rode a scissor lift around 50 feet up toward the ceiling of the “Starfactory,” where Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes parts for its Starship rockets. Bautista and other workers with Delta Fabrication and Machine Inc., a contractor out of Daingerfield, needed to replace metal beams supporting the structure of the factory with new ones.
Bautista strapped himself to a white beam that weighed nearly 8,000 pounds and was about 5 stories off the ground. The beam, Bautista’s supervisor would later tell Cameron County sheriff’s officers, had “not been adjusted correctly.” The supervisor, named as Brent Lee Harvey in the sheriff’s office case report, said that he had contacted a foreman, Omar Alvarado, and instructed his team to “properly adjust and secure the beam to the structure.”
According to the report, Bautista was attaching himself to another beam when the one he was already secured to started falling. Alvarado told a sheriff’s investigator that he was on the phone when the beam fell and took Bautista with it. Alvarado further told the investigator that Bautista may have thought the beam was secure because it had anchor bolts already installed on it. Bautista would hit the beam on the way down before falling to the concrete factory floor.
Harvey said, per the report, that “he did not know why Jose Luis would have attached himself to the improperly secured beam.” Harvey also said that the bolts on the beam were temporary.
Within minutes of Bautista falling, a man described with the acronym “EHS”—likely an environmental health and safety specialist—started doing CPR, and security guards arrived to help load Bautista into one of Starbase’s ambulances, the report states. Doctors would pronounce him dead at a Brownsville hospital the same day. Three days later, after an autopsy, Cameron County would declare his cause of death “multiple blunt force trauma due to a fall.”
