Fifth Circuit Revives Wrongful Death Suit Against Tyson Foods After Worker Died of COVID-19 at Texas Plant
Won by Armstrong Lee & Baker.
Armstrong Lee & Baker won reversal of a federal preemption dismissal, reviving negligence claims brought by the family of a Tyson Foods meatpacking worker who died of COVID-19 after a coworker with a known positive test continued coming to work.
What happened
David Williams Sr. worked at Tyson Foods' poultry processing facility in Carthage, Texas. In November 2020, a coworker, Riley Wingrove, tested positive for COVID-19 but kept reporting to the plant. Williams became symptomatic shortly after and died on December 12, 2020.
His widow, Lorie Williams, sued individually and as representative of his estate, along with two of the couple's sons. The suit named Tyson Foods and Wingrove, alleging the company's failure to enforce its own safety protocols caused Williams' death. Tyson moved to remove the case to federal court, arguing Wingrove, a Texas resident like the plaintiffs, was improperly joined to defeat diversity jurisdiction.
The U.S. District Court agreed that Wingrove owed no independent duty regarding disease transmission and dismissed him from the case, establishing diversity. It then dismissed the remaining claims against Tyson on the ground that the Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) preempted the family's state-law negligence theory.
Joshua Lee and Scott Armstrong of Armstrong Lee & Baker appealed. Before the Fifth Circuit, they argued that Congress passed the PPIA to regulate food safety and product contamination, not to displace state tort law governing how employers protect workers from an infectious disease spreading person-to-person inside a plant.
The Fifth Circuit agreed. In an opinion issued August 26, 2025, the panel held that 'the domain of the PPIA is food safety' and that COVID-19 workplace transmission falls entirely outside that scope. The court reversed the preemption dismissal and vacated the district court's denial of leave to amend the complaint, returning the case to the lower court for further proceedings. The Fifth Circuit affirmed only the dismissal of Wingrove as an individual defendant.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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