Ron Hayes of Fairhope, Alabama was the manager of a hospital x-ray lab—until he got a phone call that changed his life.

Hayes’ 19-year-old son Patrick was in Florida, working for $5-an-hour at an enormous chicken-processing plant. On a trip home, he told his dad about skin burns he’d gotten from cleaning out a chemical bin; Hayes cautioned the young man to just walk away if he was ordered to do more things that were dangerous. But when Pat was ordered to level out crests of corn in a silo, he didn’t walk away. A phone call informed the family that he had died in that silo. How? Why? Ron Hayes didn’t get answers from the company nor from The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) which oversees observance of workplace safety rules. He gave up his career and began working fulltime to find out what had gone wrong, and to help other families deal with the difficulties that surround such accidents.

Hayes has met with great resistance from the poultry processor and from OSHA. When he requested information about the company’s safety record, OSHA took four months to get it to him; the documents arrived two weeks after Patrick’s case was officially closed. Hayes asked a friend to request the same information in his cocker spaniel's name!—just to see how the agency responded; the dog got the 426-page document in one day.

Hayes has interviewed dozens of people in his quest to find out what happened to his Patrick. The company had an abysmal safety record and in fact had sent Patrick into the silo while a machine was drawing corn down out of the silo. The boy was pulled under so much corn it took five hours for rescuers to dig his body out.

OSHA’s rebuke to the company amounted to a slap on the wrist, despite an original OSHA report that said they had willfully disregarded employee safety.

Hayes has mounted his own safety campaign, printing up flyers on the dangers of leveling grain in silos and distributing them to both commercial and family-owned farms. He’s collected hundreds of documents that show a pattern of disregard for human life in the industry, especially of young lives.

Relentless in his cause, Hayes has received a formal apology from OSHA, and has shaken loose Senate agreement to advocate for families trying to deal with the Agency. The US Inspector General is looking into bringing criminal charges against the company for the negligent death of Patrick Hayes.

Seventeen Americans die on the job every day; Ron Hayes and his wife Dot have organized FIGHT—Families in Grief Holding Together—to assist their families and to prevent future deaths. Their motto: “Mourn for the dead and fight for the living.”