That detail is worth sitting with before anything else. On Saturday, Aug. 1, the 57-year-old UAW Local 1248 member fell roughly 25 feet from a second-story loading bay door at Stellantis’s Mopar National Parts Distribution Center in Center Line, Michigan, while clearing out decommissioned office equipment. He struck a dumpster positioned on the ground below and died instantly.
Brasher is the third Stellantis-connected worker to die in a Detroit-area workplace accident in about two years. Every one of those deaths happened inside a building the company was actively trying to empty, idle, or convert to something else. That is not a coincidence worth glossing over. It is the actual story.
What Happened at Center Line
According to Paul Myszenski, Center Line’s director of public safety, Brasher was clearing old furniture and equipment out of a second-floor office space through an open roll-up door as part of a renovation project. He was wearing a fall-protection harness. It was not clipped to a tether. Michigan’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, MIOSHA, stated in its own posting that “the victim fell approximately 25 feet into the bin” below, and opened a formal investigation. Stellantis says it is cooperating with authorities and extended condolences to Brasher’s family, friends, and coworkers. UAW President Shawn Fain and Vice President Rich Boyer said the union will demand a full accounting from the company.
None of that is in dispute. The more interesting question is why a harness that existed didn’t do its job, and why that keeps happening at facilities like this one.
The Detail Most Coverage Will Skip Past
Fall protection is not some obscure regulatory footnote. It has been the single most frequently cited violation category in American workplaces for well over a decade, ahead of machine guarding, ahead of lockout/tagout, ahead of every other standard OSHA enforces nationally. The problem is almost never that a company doesn’t own harnesses. It’s that a harness only works if clipping in becomes an unbreakable habit, on every elevated task, including the ones that feel routine, like tossing old office chairs through a loading door on a Saturday morning during a renovation nobody is treating like a construction site.
That’s the uncomfortable truth hiding inside this story. Fall-protection failures are rarely a hardware problem. They’re a supervision and culture problem, and they show up disproportionately during exactly the kind of work Brasher was doing: not permitted construction with a general contractor and a dedicated safety officer on-site, but internal cleanout and renovation work handled by a company’s own hourly workforce.
A Building Nobody Wanted Anymore
Here’s what elevates Center Line beyond a single tragic accident. The office space where Brasher died once housed Mopar’s administrative staff. Stellantis relocated that work to Auburn Hills years ago, leaving the space vacant. The company doesn’t even own the underlying property anymore. Stellantis sold the Center Line facility more than a year ago and now operates it under a sale-leaseback arrangement, a financing structure where a company converts real estate into cash by selling it to a landlord and then paying rent to keep operating there.
Sale-leasebacks are a legitimate financial tool. They also quietly split who’s responsible for a building’s physical condition. The landlord owns the structure. Stellantis operates inside it. And a vacant, half-decommissioned wing, like the old admin offices Brasher was clearing out, tends to fall into a gray zone where neither party has much incentive to invest in permanent safety infrastructure for space nobody expects to use much longer.
Stellantis is also actively consolidating this exact kind of work elsewhere. The automaker is building a new Metro Detroit Megahub parts distribution center in Van Buren Township specifically to absorb operations from sites like Center Line. The building Brasher was cleaning out wasn’t being upgraded. It was being emptied on the way to being phased out entirely.
Three Deaths, One Pattern
Brasher’s death is the third Stellantis-connected workplace fatality in the Detroit area since August 2024. Antonio Gaston, 53, died at the Toledo Assembly Complex, where Jeep Gladiators and Wranglers are built. Ronald Adams, 63, died in April 2025 making repairs at the automaker’s Dundee Engine Plant, which was idled and undergoing renovation at the time. For scale, Brasher’s death is at least the 24th workplace fatality of any kind recorded in Michigan this year, according to MIOSHA’s own tally; the state logged 46 for all of 2025.
Three deaths. Three buildings that were being renovated, repaired, or emptied out rather than run at full production. That’s a pattern worth naming directly: the most dangerous work at a modern automaker increasingly isn’t happening on the assembly line, where safety engineering, machine guarding, and OSHA compliance get the most institutional attention. It’s happening in the buildings on the way out, the ones getting mothballed, sold, or converted, staffed by the same hourly workforce that used to build cars or ship parts there, not a specialized demolition contractor whose entire business depends on fall-protection discipline.
Why This Extends Beyond One Company
This isn’t unique to Stellantis. As automakers consolidate plants and distribution networks while their EV investments swing wildly, half-emptied buildings are becoming more common industry-wide, not less. Stellantis alone posted a $26.3 billion loss last year before it swung back to profit under its FaSTLAne 2030 plan, a turnaround built partly on shedding underperforming brands and consolidating operations. Consolidation sounds abstract in an earnings presentation. On the ground, it means more buildings sitting half-full, more cleanout and renovation work assigned to whoever’s available, and more moments where a harness that isn’t clipped in stops being a violation and starts being an outcome nobody prevented.
It’s the same cost pressure that, seven months earlier, led a 28-year Stellantis employee to learn his layoff had gone from temporary to indefinite over an automated phone call. Cost discipline and consolidation aren’t inherently villains. But they change how buildings get maintained, and they change how the people sent into those buildings get treated, too.
What Readers Should Remember
MIOSHA’s investigation will eventually spell out the exact citation Stellantis faces at Center Line. That finding matters for the legal record. It’s almost beside the point for understanding what actually happened here.
Brasher didn’t die building parts. He died removing the evidence that parts were once built there. Stellantis has now lost three workers in two years doing exactly that kind of work, inside exactly that kind of building.
An assembly line gets safety engineers, redundant guarding, and decades of institutional muscle memory. The buildings an automaker leaves behind get whoever is available, and a harness that’s only as good as the habit of clipping it in. That gap is where this story actually lives, and it isn’t closing anytime soon, not while more of the industry’s older buildings get sold, leased back, and hollowed out on their way to somewhere else.