'Just don't look': Amazon warehouse worker dies on the job in Oregon. Employees were told to keep working for an hour as the body stayed put

According to multiple employee accounts given to The Western Edge, the man was working as a "tote runner," a physically demanding role that involves hauling tall stacks of plastic bins through the warehouse on carts. He collapsed on the second level of the facility, with the first 911 call placed at approximately 1:55 p.m. In that call, obtained by Western Edge through a public records request, one employee described blood coming from the worker's head.

A co-worker trained in CPR asked to help the woman already performing chest compressions, but was told by a manager to turn around. For more than an hour, employees said, workers were instructed to continue picking items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to "just turn around and not look" and get back to work.

Amazon told Moneywise it closed operations "shortly after EMS arrived" and sent workers home with pay for the rest of the shift. The night shift was also cancelled. But multiple employees said people were still in the building until roughly 4 p.m., about two hours after the collapse. Supervisors at that point did not tell all employees someone had died on the warehouse floor, according to The Western Edge.

That evening, workers received a text from management: report to work as usual the next day. One worker told The Western Edge that a week later, they still had not been paid for the full shift.

Amazon's response

In a statement to Moneywise, Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said misinformation was circulating about the incident and offered a different account. The worker collapsed "from what we now understand as a pre-existing medical issue," Stephenson said. He said three CPR-certified team members, including two from Amazon's on-site safety team, performed CPR and deployed an automated defibrillator until EMS arrived. The area was cordoned off, he said, to allow the safety team and paramedics to work.

"Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees," Stephenson told Moneywise, adding that the company chose not to immediately evacuate other areas of the building in order to avoid "distracting from those efforts" of caring for the worker.

When operations resumed the following day, Stephenson said any employee who requested time off was given it, and on-site grief counselors were made available. Amazon said it has been in contact with the worker's family and is providing them with support.

Amazon told Moneywise that Oregon OSHA was contacted and determined the incident to be non-work related. Oregon OSHA has said that classification relates to reporting requirements, not to whether the workplace contributed to the death.

The company's statement does not address the specific claim, reported by multiple workers to The Western Edge, that a CPR-trained co-worker who was not part of the safety team asked to help and was turned away by a manager. Nor does it address employees' accounts that floor managers told workers to "just turn around and not look" and continue loading trucks, or that supervisors did not inform all workers someone had died before sending them home.

PDX9's troubled safety record

PDX9's dangerous conditions have drawn attention for years. A 2019 investigation by Reveal found the Troutdale facility had the worst injury rate out of 23 Amazon fulfillment centers analyzed using Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data. In 2018, 26% of the warehouse's workers sustained some type of injury on the job — more than six times the national warehouse industry average (3).

Employees on Reddit have also raised concerns that recently installed soundproof curtains reduced airflow in the building, making it especially hot. Some noticed the facility was cooler the day after the death. Amazon denied the claim in a statement to Moneywise, saying the building's average temperature has decreased since the curtains were installed in February.

The facility's record is not an outlier. A December 2024 Senate HELP Committee report, based on an 18-month investigation, found Amazon warehouses recorded 31% more injuries than the industry average in 2023. Over the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as those at competing warehouses (4). A May 2025 analysis by the Strategic Organizing Center, using newly released OSHA data, found that Amazon's total injury rate in 2024 was still more than 80% higher than the company's own target. Amazon had pledged to cut injuries in half by 2025. The serious injury rate remained nearly double that of non-Amazon warehouses: 5.9 per 100 workers at Amazon vs. 3.0 per 100 at competitors (5).

Amazon has contested these findings. Stephenson told Moneywise the company has achieved a 43% improvement in its recordable incident rate and a 70% improvement in its lost-time incident rate globally over the past six years, and has invested more than $2.5 billion in safety since 2019, with hundreds of millions more allocated in 2026. In its March 2026 safety report, Amazon said it conducted 10.4 million safety inspections globally in 2025, a 33% increase year over year (6).

Stephenson also called the SOC's "serious injury rate" metric one "not recognized or validated by any safety authority." The SOC's metric combines two standard OSHA-reported categories, lost-time injuries and restricted-duty injuries, into a single rate. OSHA tracks both and publishes the underlying data; the "serious injury" label is SOC's own.

The Senate HELP Committee has argued Amazon's own safety comparisons are similarly selective. The company benchmarks itself against only the largest warehouses, establishments with 1,000 or more employees, a category its own size dominates. In 2024, Amazon facilities accounted for 79% of total employment in that bracket, effectively comparing itself to its own data. The SOC's 2025 analysis concluded Amazon had "failed to deliver the safety improvements that it promised."

In December 2024, Amazon and OSHA reached a corporate-wide settlement, the largest of its kind, resolving ergonomic hazard citations at 10 facilities. Amazon agreed to pay $145,000, conduct company-wide ergonomic risk assessments and allow biannual meetings with OSHA along with authorized monitoring inspections (7). Separately, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York continues to investigate whether the company concealed its true injury rates (8).

Deaths at Amazon facilities have also drawn scrutiny. In 2022, three workers died at separate locations across New Jersey within a month, and a fourth died in Pennsylvania during the same period. OSHA concluded the New Jersey deaths were not Amazon's fault, prompting a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor that was settled in late 2025 and fully dismissed in February 2026 (9).

Robots on the rise, workers under pressure

Amazon has been accelerating warehouse automation. The company deployed its one millionth robot in mid-2025 across more than 300 fulfillment centers, a figure approaching its roughly 1.5 million human workforce (10). A Wall Street Journal analysis found the average number of human workers per Amazon facility, about 670, was at a 16-year low, even as packages shipped per employee surged (11).