Family of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett speaks out following his death

In that case I’d say it’s far more likely he suffered tremendously from the position he found himself in and wanted to end his life to stop his suffering.

But my money is on Boeing having leaned on him to such a degree that he saw no way out.

Why is that wild? Witness dies in the middle of testifying against X - seems perfectly reasonable to wonder about whether X had anything to do with it. Given Boeing's seeming lack of regard for human safety in recent years (which was also the subject of the testimony if I understand correctly), I don't see any reason to think Boeing would consider murder out of bounds.

It's wild to comprehend what you supposed when one entity is an actual person and another is a corporation

Large corrupt corporations are only slightly better than organized crime.

What does organized crime do with inconvenient witnesses?

After reading about the amateurs at eBay, I'm perfectly willing to entertain the idea that a large corporation who deals in military contracts might just take things one step further. Sure, I fully admit that I'm letting movie plots run wild in my head here, but I'm not ruling out the possibility. What, you think Rudolf Diesel just fell off that boat, too?

But it is all just conspiratorial at this point. Whether Diesel was pushed or fell, we'll never know and unfortunately won't for John Barnett, either.

It's wild that people find such an idea unthinkable.

The dude was suing Boeing for their retaliatory actions against him in an effort to shut him up about the safety violations he was in the middle of testifying about.

Just in 2022 there was a case of murder-for-hire of a whistleblower at a contract tree-cutting service in Georgia [0].

It's not common, and we shouldn't presume guilt, but it's very far from unprecedented.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Eliud_Montoya

Not that wild. It's not like Boeing would convene a board meeting and take a vote, "should we hire a contract killer to eliminate this threat?"

When a company hires a killer to kill somebody, it is almost always[1] one person, or perhaps in rare cases a couple people, within the company who do it to protect themselves and what they have, or what hope to get, or sometimes, sure, for revenge or because they're nuts. Just like when natural people hire people to kill people.

That's why I liked the movie Michael Clayton. It was the only realistic[2] movie about that scenario.

Alternatively, sure — your scenario is also quite plausible. Who knows? Not us. But neither scenario, nor the other "Boeing or some subset thereof leaned on him so hard without actually doing murder, and maybe even without actually doing anything criminal, that he thought his life was effectively ruined and so killed himself" seems "wild" to me. All plausible.

[1]: source: it's obvious

[2]: regarding the actual mechanics of "how 'a company hires killers to kill somebody' works" — not necessarily the rest; it's still a Hollywood movie