CAPITAL REGION — At her apartment in South Glens Falls, Kristen Hickey talked about how she and her three young children are coping as the anniversary approaches of the death of her fiancé, Justus Booze, killed in a woodchipper on his first day as a temporary worker.

Meanwhile, the case against his employer — Tony Watson, the owner of Countryside Tree Care in Guilderland — continues to drag on. Watson was charged by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration with violations ranging from “serious” to “willful,” and fined a total of $141,000. Watson and OSHA have been unable to come to an agreement in the case through informal conferences, and Watson’s case is now set to go for trial before an an administrative law judge in October.

Booze had agreed to work for Countryside Tree Care for the day, last May 4, in exchange for $60.

By 1 p.m. he was dead, entangled in a chipper while working at a home on Placid Drive in Guilderland.

Hickey thinks a lot, she said, “about how things would be different if I didn’t say, ‘Yeah, you should go do the tree job.’”

“He was kind of hesitating,” she said, “but we needed the extra money.”

Just three weeks after Booze’s death, Hickey moved from Schenectady, where she and Booze and her children had shared an apartment, to Saratoga County, to be closer to family. Her children, who range in age from 8 to 12, now attend South Glens Falls schools.

She and her children have left flowers several times at the site of his death.

Once, she said, about a week after he died, she left a note for the family, saying that she was sorry that the incident happened at their home.

As she did a year ago, Hickey prefers to stay busy. “It’s bad when I sit around, because there’s a lot more thinking about what could have been.”

She became a certified nursing assistant over the past year, through Hudson Falls BOCES, and began working at Washington Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Argyle. The work is stable, she said, but can be physically exhausting and leave her with little energy on her days off.

She sometimes thinks about moving back. She feels more connected to Booze in the city where they lived together. “And I like that feeling,” she says. Rents are cheaper in Schenectady, she said, but she prefers the schools in South Glens Falls.

The couple was planning to marry at city hall two weeks later, and the kids considered Booze their stepfather.

“The other day, Mom was playing a song in the car, and she said it reminded her of him,” son Joshua, 10, said, when asked how he was coping. “I only heard about 10 words of it, and then I started crying,” he said.

The song, “Jealous of the Angels” by Donna Taggart, starts out: “I didn’t know today would be our last / Or that I’d have to say goodbye to you so fast. / I’m so numb I can’t feel any more / And I’m praying you just walk back through that door / And tell me that I was only dreaming.”

Hickey was shocked and horrified when she stumbled across a hate-filled website that laughed about Booze’s death, holding up the accident as proof of the racial superiority of Caucasians — Booze was African-American — and mocking the couple’s interracial relationship.

At first, she said, she was very hurt and angry about that and other negative comments, but she soon came to realize that she couldn’t “defeat ignorance.”

Many people have reached out in kindness, she said. One was Tonya Hall, a woman from Rotterdam who offered to incorporate items of Booze’s clothing into memory quilts for the family. Hall gave Hickey the four personalized quilts, one for each member of the family, last summer.

Most of all, said Hickey, her own family has been a source of support. They were “the ones who flew down the Northway and offered home-cooked meals for the kids and I, and stayed endless nights and watched me break down and just listened.” They are still listening, she said, to her “cry, laugh, and doubt everything.”

She believes in God, “and Justus believed in God,” she said. But she has “turned a bit confused with God after his death.

“Why would he punish me? And how could he allow this to happen?”

Workers’ memorial event

Justus Booze was among the 22 workers killed on the job over the last year in the greater Capital Region who were remembered at a ceremony held at New York State United Teachers in Latham on Friday. About 75 people were gathered for the ceremony, which included a reading of each name and cause of death as one volunteer came forward to lay a red rose on a white table for each fatality, including those of James G. Deragon, 47, who was crushed by a 26-ton cooling fan, and Robert Fahr, 55, who drowned while cleaning a swimming pool.

Each of the 22 was from the Capital District Area Labor Federation’s catchment area, said Maureen Cox, chairwoman of NENYCOSH.

The purpose of the event — held close to May 1, which is celebrated by labor activists around the world as International Workers’ Day — was to “remember those who are killed on the job and renew our efforts to fight for safe workplaces,” said Paul Webster, director of community outreach for NYSUT.

“From last year until now we’ve had 14 fatalities that we’ve investigated,” OSHA compliance officer Charles Harvey told the crowd. “That’s 14 too many,” he said.

He noted, “The majority of our complaints are related to falls, not wearing safety harnesses up on roofs, for instance.”

He said that a “good, complete safety suit costs about $825, while the cheapest OSHA fine is about $3,000.”

So, for $3,000, “You could outfit three people,” he said. OSHA would rather see the money put toward safety than collect a fine, Harvey said.

“We must demand that employers meet their responsibilities to protect workers, and hold them accountable if they put workers in danger,” said Cox.

OSHA trial for Countryside

An Occupational Safety and Health Administration trial is set for Tony Watson, owner of Countryside Tree, to begin on Oct. 24, said James Lally, Deputy Regional Director for Public Affairs of the United States Department of Labor. The trial will be in Albany, before an administrative law judge of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, Lally said.

The trial date means, Lally said, that Watson and OSHA cannot come to an agreement. Lally said he could not say if Watson disagrees with the citations themselves or hopes to lower the amount that he is fined, but he added that it is not uncommon for employers to request to go before an OSHA judge.

Since Booze’s death, Lally said, Watson has abated, or addressed, all of the violations with which he was charged.

The charges against Watson include that he failed to provide employment free from recognized hazards that were likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees by exposing them to the hazard of being caught in rotating or moving parts of a wood chipper.

The charges also say that Watson failed to ensure that only workers who had received safety training were allowed to operate the chippers, and that only safe practices and techniques were used for feeding the chipper.

Unsafe practices used at the sites where Booze and others worked on the day of his death included, but were not limited to, according to OSHA citations: operators leaning or reaching into the infeed hopper; operators pushing small pieces of wood and branches in by hand, and operators manipulating large trees limbs in front of the hopper with their backs to the machine.  

“Unfortunately, many employers consider OSHA fines part of the cost of doing business, and they pay them and move on,” said Cox.

That’s why, she said, NENYCOSH has begun to advocate, in cases of particularly egregious violations, for criminal prosecution.

“Maybe prosecution will begin to make employers take safety seriously,” she said.

Cox mentioned two cases in New York City: one in which Harco Construction was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for the death of a young worker crushed in an excavation pit; and the other in which Salvatore Schirripa and the construction company he owned were indicted for failure to comply with safety regulations, resulting in the death of 50-year-old Vidal Sanchez-Ramon, who had been smoothing concrete on a scaffold six stories up without a harness.

Cox said that her office has been “in conversation” with the Albany County District Attorney’s Office about Booze’s death and the possibility of bringing criminal charges against Watson.

Cecilia Walsh, spokeswoman for the DA’s office, said, “At this time, our office cannot confirm the status or existence of an ongoing investigation. No parties have been charged.”