When a CEO dies, thousands of news articles flood the media like monsoon rains over an arid field. But when a whistleblower dies, not even the most independent news outlets dare break the silence.

Why is that?

One after another, countless whistleblowers have died from mysterious circumstances or suicide.

Days before his death, former Boeing employee John Barnett testified against the aerospace giant for implementing sub-standard parts and defective oxygen systems on its planes, according to The Independent.

Then, on March 9, 2024, Barnett was found dead with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head, even though he had shown no previous indication of taking his own life.

According to Fox News, despite his attorneys’ demands for further investigation, the Charleston Police Department was quick to rule out Barnett’s death as a suicide.

Within months after Barnett’s death, another Boeing whistleblower was found dead from a bacterial infection. 

Former quality auditor Joshua Dean had raised concerns about Spirit AeroSystems, a major Boeing supplier that was forcing employees to ignore dangerous manufacturing defects, according to NPR.

The strange part is that Dean had never gotten sick or been to the hospital even once before then. His mother said that he was an active “health nut” who worked out and watched his diet.

Yet after blowing the whistle, he somehow contracted influenza B, pneumonia, and MRSA staph infection all at once. Odd, isn’t it?

What are the chances that two Boeing whistleblowers die within three months? While it is possible that these deaths could have been a coincidence, Boeing should still be held accountable to some extent.

According to the Labor Commissioner’s Office, whistleblowers are guaranteed protection from retaliation and harassment — but these abuses often occur regardless. 

Aviation is not the only industry where whistleblower protections are inadequate.   

In Oct. 2025, former artificial intelligence researcher Suchir Balaji came forward with allegations that OpenAI had violated copyright laws to train ChatGPT, according to The Guardian.

A month later, right when Balaji was going to take legal action against OpenAI, the 26-year-old researcher was found dead in his apartment with a gunshot wound. Backed by public media outlets like CBS, the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Balaji’s death out as a suicide with “no foul play.”

Other news outlets like CNN simply refused to speak out, but independent sources tell a different story.

According to The Guardian, Balaji’s parents refuse to believe he died by suicide, as he had never shown signs of mental illness, and no suicide note was found.

Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramaro, demands that an FBI investigation be launched as it would be in a case that did not concern whistleblowing.

According to the New York Post, Ramaro was not allowed to see her son’s body and found many inconsistencies in his autopsy.

Many will dismiss this case as a conspiracy theory. There is no definitive conclusion; the stigma and backlash of being a whistleblower could have very well led to Balaji’s suicide, or he could have been murdered by OpenAI. We might never know.

Therefore, the problem does not lie in the deaths of whistleblowers themselves, but rather in how these deaths are handled.

Police are quick to rule out deaths as suicide and do not run full investigations. Ramaro said that it took the medical examiner only 40 seconds to declare Balaji’s death as a suicide, according to The Guardian.

Meanwhile, when the CEO of UnitedHealthcare is shot, even the FBI joins the investigation.

According to The Guardian, the FBI assisted the New York Police Department with out-of-town leads and offered a $50,000 reward to whoever could find the suspect of CEO Brian Thompson’s murder.

When the suspect was found, the media made sure to humiliate him by writing articles about how he wet his pants or filmed sex tapes before arrest, instead of the resentment for the parasitic healthcare industry that drove him to kill in the first place.

As said by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who exposed various illegal U.S. mass surveillance programs in 2013, “When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”

Whistleblowers don’t just die. Blow the whistle, pay the price.