A La Plata tow truck operator died Friday afternoon after the vehicle he was loading rolled forward and struck him, the Charles County Sheriff’s Office said.
Joseph Louis Skinner, 67, of La Plata, was fatally injured shortly after 4:19 p.m. in the 9300 block of WW Industrial Drive while operating a tow truck and attempting to load an SUV onto its rollback bed, according to the sheriff’s office. As Skinner worked to secure the vehicle, the rollback began moving forward on its own; as it shifted, the SUV rolled and struck him, causing fatal injuries. Bystanders attempted to help him before emergency crews arrived, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
PFC D. Walker of the sheriff’s office’s Traffic Operations Unit is investigating the incident. The unit typically handles serious and fatal crash investigations in Charles County, including reconstructing how a collision occurred and determining contributing factors.
Fatal incidents involving tow truck operators loading or securing vehicles are a well-documented hazard within the towing industry, which has one of the highest occupational fatality rates of any private industry in the country. A National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that tow truck workers faced an on-the-job fatality rate nearly 15 times higher than the average across all other private industries between 2011 and 2016, with 191 tow truck workers killed nationally over that six-year span.
While the majority of those deaths involved tow operators struck by passing traffic while working roadside, being struck or pinned by a customer’s vehicle during loading or securing has also been identified by researchers as a recurring cause of death in the industry, alongside inadequate safety training and insufficient use of high-visibility equipment. Non-fatal injury rates among tow truck operators run roughly double the average across all other industries, according to the same research.
Flatbed tow trucks, commonly known as rollbacks, are designed with a vehicle carrier bed that tilts and slides to allow a vehicle to be winched or driven onto the truck. Safety guidance for tow operators generally calls for wheels to be chocked and equipment inspected, including cables, locking pins and winches, before a vehicle is loaded, given the risk that a vehicle or the bed itself can shift unexpectedly during the process. Researchers who study towing-industry injuries have called for expanded initial and refresher training on loading and unloading procedures, along with consistent wheel-chocking and braking practices, as part of broader efforts to reduce fatalities in the field.
Workplace fatalities involving equipment failure or mechanical malfunction, like Friday’s incident, typically draw scrutiny from both law enforcement, which investigates whether any criminal or traffic violations were involved, and occupational safety regulators, who separately examine whether equipment defects or safety-procedure lapses contributed to a worker’s death. It was not immediately clear Monday whether state occupational safety officials had opened a parallel review of the incident.
The Charles County Sheriff’s Office has not released additional information about what may have caused Friday’s rollback to move on its own, and the investigation remains open. Anyone with information about the incident is asked to contact the Traffic Operations Unit through the sheriff’s office’s non-emergency line.
