DA files felonies in workplace fatality
The owners of a beekeeping business are facing felony charges over the death of an employee at a work site.
The owners of a Northern California beekeeping business are facing felony charges over the death of an employee at a work site in Novato.
Mark Dennis Tauzer and son Trevor Hansen Tauzer are scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday on counts alleging they “caused” the employee’s death, according to a complaint by the Marin County District Attorney’s Office.
The prosecution filed the case as a labor code violation. The potential penalties include a one-year jail sentence or a prison sentence of up to three years, although most state custody sentences get cut in half with good behavior.
The charge also carries potential fines of up to $250,000 for each defendant or $1.5 million for the business.
The Tauzers’ company, Tauzer Apiaries Inc., is based in Woodland, Yolo County. The deadly incident happened on March 30, 2018, at a site in Bel Marin Keys, according to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
The worker, Carlos Del Toro, was moving bee boxes with a Bobcat that had a forklift attachment, the state investigation found. As he exited the cab, he hit the foot pedal and was crushed between the Bobcat cage and the forklift mast.
No one saw the incident, but coworkers found Del Toro pinned in the equipment, said Roger Fielding, the Marin County chief deputy coroner. Medics took Del Toro to MarinHealth Medical Center, where he remained on a ventilator for about a week until physicians pronounced brain death, Fielding said.
Del Toro, 21, was a resident of Esparto, a village in Yolo County.
The coroner’s office ruled the death as accidental.
Inspectors cited Tauzer Apiaries for four alleged safety violations, three it categorized as “serious” and the fourth as “willful.” The latter code section prohibits altering or adding parts to an industrial vehicle from the condition in which it was received from the manufacturer.
The state fined the company $94,500. It is contesting the fines, and the appeal is still pending, said Lucas Brown, a spokesperson for the California Department of Industrial Relations. He released no details about the alleged equipment modification.
The department referred the case to the Marin County District Attorney’s Office in September 2020 for potential criminal charges. The prosecution filed its case on March 19.
The Tauzers did not respond to requests for comment. Geoffrey Rotwein, the defense attorney for Mark Tauzer, said the prosecution waited until five days before the statute of limitations expired to file a case.
“The charge against the Tauzers is completely without merit, and the Tauzers will be proven innocent,” Rotwein said.
While hundreds of workplace deaths occur each year in California, criminal prosecutions are uncommon. Of 577 death investigations opened by the Department of Industrial Relations last year, 14 were referred to local district attorneys for possible charges, according to the agency’s annual report.
County prosecutors filed charges in six cases last year and rejected two cases, although the report does not say whether the deaths happened in the 2020 calendar year. Nineteen accumulated cases, including the Tauzer Apiaries investigation, were still under review by prosecutors by the end of 2020.