Family drops lawsuit over industrial accident that killed worker in Hampton

The family of a man killed in a workplace accident in Hampton four years ago has dropped a federal lawsuit against the maker and designer of the industrial equipment he was trying to repair.

Aleksandr L. “Sasha” Berelovich, 54, of Newport News, a maintenance mechanic for Craft Machine Works, was crushed to death as he attempted to fix the door of a large industrial oven on the company’s premises at Copeland Industrial Park.

The lawsuit, originally filed in Hampton but moved to U.S. District Court in April 2016, contended that the equipment’s designers — Flinn and Dreffein Engineering — made an unsafe furnace system that caused Berelovich to get killed.

According to the lawsuit, a Craft Machine Works co-worker saw Berevlovich in “imminent danger” but was “helpless to provide any assistance because the mechanism to stop the machine was not within reach.” Though the co-worker ran to the “kill switch,” the complaint said, Berelovich was crushed before the worker made it. They also contended there should have been protective barriers to prevent Berelovich from being crushed.

As the case went forward, lawyers had a difficult time determining who installed the kill switch in the hard-to-reach location, said the plaintiff’s lawyer, Robert Haddad.

“We couldn’t figure out who put it there, or why it was put there,” he said. “The machine was so old and had been transferred so many different times.”

There was a good chance, he said, that it was put there by Craft Machine Works itself rather than the furnace’s designer or manufacturer. “That’s an absolute defense to the (equipment manufacturer) if the machine is modified, and if the kill switch was put somewhere else for the convenience of the employer when they installed this thing.”

But the people at Craft who originally purchased and installed the equipment decades ago were no longer around.

Aside from Flinn and Dreffein Engineering, the lawsuit also listed several other defendants: F&D Furnace, which later bought the engineering firm, and three other companies that now have ownership interest in the firm: FCE LLC, of Pennsylvania, and two Italian companies.

If Craft Machine Works itself put the kill switch in its hard-to-reach location, Haddad said, “this becomes a workers comp case.” That is, under state workers compensation law, the families of workers killed in industrial accidents on the job cannot generally sue the direct employer for resulting damages. “And she already got her workers comp benefits out of this,” Haddad said of Berelovich’s wife, Natalie.

When Haddad told her the chances of winning the case had fallen sharply, she decided it was no longer worth proceeding, he said. “She just was concerned about being involved in litigation over the next 12 to18 months in a case that the chance of success certainly didn’t justify the angst it was going to cause her reliving her husband’s death,” Haddad said. “She wouldn’t have been able to put it behind her and move forward, which is what she wanted to do.”

Berelovich, of Newport News, was an immigrant from Lithuania who had been working for Craft since 2004.

According to a Hampton police report into the accident, it was early in the day on March 27, 2013, when Berelovich was asked to fix the faulty oven door. A co-worker and witness told investigators that Berelovich turned down an offer to use lift equipment to gain access to it.

About 9 a.m., Berelovich signaled to another worker to push a button to remotely open it. The worker did that but soon saw that Berelovich “was in a dangerous area where the oven door counterweight would cause harm to him.” The co-worker said he “tried to stop the counterweight from descending on (Berelovich) but was too late,” and he was crushed by a 600-pound counterweight.

According to his Daily Press obituary, Berelovich was born in Ukraine, grew up in Lithuania and came to the United States in 1992.

Dujardin can be reached by phone at 757-247-4749.