Bumblebee Tuna: With 0 percent human (they promise)

It was just past 5:30 a.m. when a supervisor approached tuna basket pusher Leonel Andrade and told him to go on break. Andrade hesitated, however, because his fellow fishmonger pal of almost a decade, Jose Melena, was missing.

At first, Andrade thought the 62-year-old Melena—who worked the same Monday through Thursday, 4 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. shift pushing tin cans to be sterilized for Bumble Bee Foods—was in the bathroom or had taken off early.

But he would be dead wrong.

Workers began fanning out to search for the missing basket pusher. Andrade checked the parking lot and saw that Melena’s car had not been moved. An intercom announcement was made, blaring “Jose Melena” to all staffers in the plant. No Melena.

After checking the oven room for his coworker Andrade finished loading the remaining carts of fish before sealing the front door shut and starting the super-heated, pressurized steam cooker. Melena was inside.

The Los Angeles District Attorney announced that Bumble Bee and its two workers broke the law.
Unconscionably, on that predawn October 11, 2012 doomsday, Melena was trapped “and couldn’t get out once the large containers were being pushed in by Andrade,” according to the coroner’s report. Melena apparently was inside the room trying to fix one of the dozen massive, 36-foot-long industrial ovens.

Andrade and the boiler operator let the oven cool down for a half-hour. Then they opened the oven door and found Melena lying lifeless on the concrete, next to his hard hat and disposable mask.

He essentially had been cooked in 270-degree heat for two hours alongside 12,000 pounds of albacore. The coroner documented Melena’s most agonizing death as a “direct thermal injury,” according to the autopsy.

Once Andrade saw his friend inside the heating tube of the oven next to all of the sterilized tin and cooked fish he “immediately fled the scene and was not interviewed by police,” according to the a Whittier Police officer’s report.

And now—after three years—two of Melena’s former tuna teammates from Bumble Bee’s plant in Santa Fe Springs, California, have been charged with violating worker safety rules. If proven guilty, Saul Florez and Angel Rodriguez could land in the big house for up to three years and fined $250,000 apiece.

But questions of culpability in Melena’s death aren’t the only issues surrounding that day. There’s also the matter of the tainted fish that also was cooked in that oven.

A spokesman for the California Department of Public Health confirmed that none of the fish made it onto store shelves. “The tuna was destroyed by the company,” he said.