Nobody has ever been crushed by an industrial robot that was doing exactly what its safety systems were designed to let it do. Every documented case starts the same way: someone decides that, just this once, the safety system can wait. That is what a wrongful-death lawsuit alleges happened last spring inside Stellantis’s Dundee Engine Plant, an hour southwest of Detroit, when a robotic arm pinned mechanic Ronald Adams against a conveyor. The headlines are calling it a killer-robot story. It isn’t. It’s a story about what gets skipped when a factory is racing to retool.
Adams was 63, an Air Force veteran, a grandfather, and a two-decade employee of the Dundee plant. According to the suit filed by his widow, Shamenia Stewart-Adams, in Wayne County Circuit Court, he was part of a crew retooling the plant to build a new four-cylinder engine when he was sent to work on a large industrial parts washer fed by a robotic arm. Two coworkers stepped away on a break. When one came back, Adams was pinned between the arm and the conveyor, his shoulder crushed. He died at the hospital; a medical examiner attributed his death to crushing injuries and traumatic asphyxia.
The detail worth sitting with is what allegedly let the arm move in the first place. The lawsuit says the washer’s safety interlock had been bypassed with a special key, defeating the work-safe mode that should have stopped the robot from operating while a person reached into it. Adams’s own attorney has said there is no evidence Adams himself turned that key. Michigan’s OSHA-approved safety agency, MIOSHA, opened a fatality investigation at the Dundee plant on April 7, 2025. Sixteen months later, that case is still listed as open.
That bypass key, not the robot, is the real subject of this story, and almost nobody outside a factory floor knows it exists. Every industrial robot sold in the United States is governed by a safety framework built around one idea: when a person’s body might enter a robot’s work envelope, the robot has to know it and slow down or stop. Compliance officers are trained to look for a specific configuration called manual mode, which caps robot speed at under ten inches per second so a technician can work nearby without being killed if something goes wrong. Nowhere in that framework is there a sanctioned way to strip that limit out entirely so a robot keeps running at full production speed while someone works beside it. That is functionally what a bypass key does. It doesn’t break the robot. It tells the robot that everything is fine when it isn’t.
A robot cannot decide to skip a safety step. A person has to hand it the key that lets it.
This also isn’t a new problem. Two days before Adams died, a coworker had reported that the same robotic system was moving unexpectedly while supposedly in a diagnostic dry-run mode, according to the lawsuit. Fives Cinetic, the company that built and installed the washer, is also named as a defendant, and has countered in court filings that the accident wouldn’t have happened if Stellantis’s own people had followed proper safe-work procedures. That fight over blame isn’t just lawyers doing what lawyers do. OSHA’s robot-safety guidance explicitly splits responsibility three ways, among the equipment manufacturer, the integrator who installs it, and the employer who runs it day to day. A bypass key sitting in a toolbox doesn’t care which of the three was supposed to be watching. It only cares whether someone turns it.
Sixteen months before Adams died, the same corporate parent already had a preview of what an unguarded pinch point could do. In August 2024, 53-year-old Antonio Gaston was crushed after reaching across a conveyor at Stellantis’s Toledo plant. Federal OSHA’s investigation found the company hadn’t adequately guarded pinch points on the parts conveyor that caught him, exposing fourteen other workers to the same hazard. The rule Stellantis was cited under, 29 CFR 1910.212, is about as basic as machine-guarding law gets. It’s the general standard requiring any hazardous machine part to be guarded, full stop. Stellantis was initially fined just over $16,000. After contesting the citation, it settled for $11,291.70, roughly what a loaded options package costs on one truck. For a company that lost billions of dollars in the same stretch, that isn’t a deterrent. It’s a rounding error nobody has to explain to the board.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Stellantis is in the middle of the most compressed factory overhaul in its recent history: retooling Dundee for a new small engine, bringing the Jeep Cherokee back to Belvidere on a platform that isn’t even fully proven in production yet, and doing it all while working through a loss in the tens of billions of dollars and holding supplier town halls to reassure its parts base that the company can still pay its bills. It’s also the same company whose current CEO used to run quality control, and who is now presiding over a 1.27-million-truck recall because of a seatbelt anchor bolt nobody tightened correctly. Every one of these programs lives and dies by a launch date, and launch dates are exactly when the pressure to keep a changeover moving outweighs the pressure to do it by the book. A company can absorb an $11,000 OSHA fine without noticing. It has a much harder time absorbing a missed launch date for an engine program or a nameplate dealers have been begging to get back.
Adams was the second of three Stellantis-connected fatalities among UAW-represented workers in the Detroit area within two years. Gaston died in Toledo in 2024. James Brasher fell from a loading dock during renovation work at the company’s Center Line parts facility this August. Three plants, three different mechanisms of death, and one common thread: every one of them happened around construction, renovation, or retooling, the unglamorous in-between phase when a plant is neither fully shut down nor fully running, and when normal safeguards are hardest to keep in place.
Stellantis says employee safety remains at the forefront of every decision it makes. Maybe so. But the decision that actually mattered at Dundee wasn’t made in a boardroom. It was made by whoever decided a deadline was worth turning that key. The robot did exactly what it was built to do. The unsettling part is what a factory under pressure will build around it to make that possible.