Six days into a new night-shift job that paid $8 an hour with no health insurance, 25-year-old Monica Thayer of Norton, Ohio, faced a nightmare that nearly cost her life. On July 2, 2012, at JR Engineering in Barberton, her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail caught in a steel-tubing cutting machine while she cleared debris. The machinery yanked her face-first into the equipment and tore away a substantial portion of her scalp from just above the eyebrows back to her neck.
Thayer later described the sequence in interviews. She waited for a cycle to finish, flipped a switch, opened the door, and bent to clean metal chips after the machine appeared stopped.
“I felt something tug my ponytail,”
She recalled. Within seconds she was pulled in. Unable to reach the emergency stop, she screamed for help. A coworker hit the safety stop.
“My biggest fear was that I would be moments away from getting rescued, and then it would start-up and kill me,”
Thayer said.
“The only thing I thought of was I was going to bleed to death or the machine was going to start up and just snap my neck.”
Emergency responders needed about 20 minutes to free her. She was flown by helicopter to Akron General Medical Center. Surgeons spent roughly eight hours controlling massive bleeding and saving her life. Her family reported that doctors reattached approximately 75 percent of the scalp; the rest was too damaged. She later underwent multiple skin-graft surgeries using tissue from her thighs and hip. Thayer spent about 17 days in the hospital before release, her head still heavily bandaged.
She survived without brain or spinal-cord damage and kept full use of her limbs. Nerve damage reduced sensation in her head, though she reported a burning feeling at the graft sites. Her natural hair and eyebrows never grew back.
“You can buy wigs. You can’t buy a life,”
She said after leaving the hospital. She called the event a “freak accident” and did not primarily blame the company, though she urged better safety features on the machinery so no one else would face the same horror.
OSHA initiated a partial inspection the following day. On August 29, 2012, OSHA cited JR Engineering as being in violation of standard 29 CFR 1910.212(a)(1), which states improper machine guarding—lack of protection from the dangers such as rotating machinery and moving points. The fine proposed amounted to $7,000. JR Engineering contested the citation. There is evidence that by 2015, a formal settlement had been made with a fine amounting to $4,000. This is an instance of regulatory compliance, not a criminal case.
Case of Thayer highlights an unpalatable truth about the American manufacturing process: rotating machinery is unforgiving where there is lack of proper guardings and where emergency stops are not readily accessible, particularly for new employees. Interlock mechanisms, proper guardings, and proper review of hazards have their justification. One such entanglement could alter someone’s life forever. Employees deserve machinery that automatically stops when the door is opened and training that recognizes each cleaning procedure as hazardous. Monica Thayer survived to narrate her story. It is not guaranteed to others.
