A tower technician died on December 4, 2025, when a gin pole failed while crew members lowered an abandoned FM pylon from atop a 347-foot self-supporting tower at 1825 Murray Ave in Atlantic City, New Jersey, fatally striking the employee. Six months later, OSHA issued five serious citations against the company responsible, Carlton Structural Services Corp., totaling $24,116 in penalties.
What the citations don’t mention is that the company’s owner, Todd Allen Carlton, was moving through the North Carolina court system on a string of felony drug charges throughout the same period — including an arrest just two days before the fatality.
What OSHA Found
The citations, issued June 2, 2026, describe a chain of failures rather than a single mistake. The crew was using a 68-foot Tower Equipment Co. PT21 gin pole, erected and secured to the AM Blu Knox tower structure, to remove the antenna. OSHA’s first citation, under the OSH Act’s General Duty Clause, found employees were exposed to struck-by and collapse hazards from an unsupported gin pole — the gin pole failed as the antenna was being lowered, fatally striking the employee.
The rigging holding that gin pole to the tower was already compromised before the job began. OSHA’s citations describe Liftall Tuflex Nylon slings — specifically EN60 and EN150 endless round slings — that had visible damage but were used anyway, in violation of daily pre-use inspection requirements under 29 CFR 1926.251(a)(6). A separate citation under 1926.251(e)(8)(iii) goes further, finding the synthetic web slings had snags, punctures, tears or cuts and should have been immediately pulled from service rather than used to hoist and secure the gin pole to the tower.
Training was cited as a separate failure. Under 29 CFR 1926.21(b)(2), OSHA found employees were not instructed in the recognition and avoidance of the unsafe conditions that led to the fatality. And the tower’s fixed ladder, which employees used to climb the structure, was cited under 29 CFR 1926.1053(b)(17) as severely rusted, with sections of missing rungs and side rails that should have kept it out of service until repaired.
All five citations were classified “Serious,” and each carries the standard OSHA warning that failure to submit abatement documentation adds an additional $1,000 penalty per item under 29 CFR 1903.19.
It is unknown whether OSHA investigated whether the company had a rigging plan on site.
What the Penalties Could Have Been
Each of the five citations against Carlton Structural was classified “Serious,” a category that carries a maximum penalty of $16,550 per violation in 2026. Had OSHA assessed the maximum on all five, the company would have faced roughly $82,750 in penalties. Instead, it was fined $24,116 — a discount of about 71 percent off the statutory ceiling.
That gap reflects OSHA’s standard practice of applying reduction factors after setting an initial gravity-based penalty for each violation: a size-based reduction of up to 60 percent for small employers (25 or fewer employees), a history-based reduction of up to 20 percent for employers with no serious, willful, repeat, or failure-to-abate violations in the prior five years, and a good-faith reduction of up to 25 percent for employers who can show documented safety programs and proactive hazard correction. These reductions are discretionary and cumulative, and OSHA doesn’t publish the exact percentage applied to any given citation in the public record.
A Death Without a Name
Update: July 23, 2026 – Documentation has been provided to Wireless Estimator that the deceased technician was Benji Parker. If anyone has any information as to Mr. Parker’s next of kin, please let them know about the Tower Family Foundation, which can provide them with assistance once an application is received.
More than seven months after the fatality, the tower technician who died has still never been publicly identified. Wireless Estimator routinely seeks information about deceased technicians so their coworkers can learn of planned services and the Tower Family Foundation can offer assistance to surviving families, but multiple outreach attempts to Carlton Structural Services requesting basic information about the deceased went unanswered. Regional and national media that reported on the death identified the victim only as a “worker” — a sad remembrance with no name attached. The only detail Wireless Estimator was able to confirm independently is that the unnamed technician was 44 years old.
According to available information at the time of the fatality, the New Jersey medical examiner was unable to locate a next of kin willing or able to claim the remains. Under New Jersey procedure, after a statutory holding period, the county arranges cremation at public expense, retains the ashes for a period, and ultimately inters them in a potter’s field if they remain unclaimed. It is unknown whether Carlton Structural Services obtained the ashes, and if so, how the company disposed of them.
A Company Dissolved, Operating Out of State
North Carolina Secretary of State records show Carlton Structural Services Corp. was administratively dissolved on September 26, 2025 — roughly ten weeks before the fatal gin pole failure in Atlantic City — for failing to file a required annual report. The company was formed December 13, 2017, according to state filings, with Todd Carlton listed as both the company’s registered agent and its principal, operating out of Lexington — the same address tied to Carlton’s mailing address in every criminal case detailed below. Under North Carolina law, a dissolved entity cannot legally sign contracts or conduct business until reinstated.
Carlton Structural Services also does not hold a business license in New Jersey, where the fatality occurred. New Jersey requires any out-of-state company operating in the state to obtain a Certificate of Authority, and failing to do so can carry fines of $200 to $1,000 for each year a company transacts business without one — separate from, and in addition to, the OSHA penalties tied directly to the fatality itself.
A Pattern That Runs Through the Same Months
Public North Carolina court records show that while Carlton Structural was operating the Atlantic City site, its owner was cycling through the Davidson County court system on felony drug charges with striking regularity.
The pattern goes back further than the fatality. On April 2, 2025, Carlton was arrested by the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office on a felony fentanyl possession charge and held for 43 days before bonding out. On October 13, 2025, Lexington Police arrested him again, this time for felony heroin possession and drug paraphernalia. Then, on December 2, 2025 — two days before the gin pole failure that killed his employee — Lexington Police arrested him a third time, on felony methamphetamine possession and paraphernalia charges.
The arrests didn’t stop after the fatality or after OSHA opened its investigation. On May 12, 2026, three weeks before OSHA finalized its citations, Lexington Police arrested Carlton a fourth time, again for felony fentanyl possession. That arrest triggered a bond surrender the following day on the pending October 2025 heroin case, with the bonding company formally surrendering him back into custody.
How It Was Resolved
The four cases converged into a single resolution. On April 16, 2026, Carlton pled guilty to a lesser charge in the oldest case — the April 2025 fentanyl arrest. On June 8, 2026, Superior Court Judge Lori Hamilton sentenced him to an active term of 8 to 19 months in the custody of the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, with the court explicitly recommending substance abuse treatment. The sentencing document notes a prior record level of 10 points and states the sentence runs consecutive to a separate 2022 case, indicating a criminal history predating even this run of arrests.
The other three cases — the October 2025 heroin charge, the December 2025 methamphetamine charge, and the May 2026 fentanyl charge — were each dismissed in June and July 2026 “per plea agreement,” consistent with having been folded into the same global resolution as the April 2025 case.
As of this writing, Carlton is being held in the Davidson County jail, consistent with his active sentence. A search of North Carolina Department of Adult Correction offender records lists his status as inactive for both incarceration and supervision, which appears to reflect a lag in the state’s intake processing rather than any change to the sentence itself.
