Brett Day, a longtime dining hall staff member, died on Aug. 15, six and a half months after he was severely injured by an industrial dishwasher while working in the college’s dining hall. Day was 54 years old and had worked at Swarthmore for 34 years.
Immediately after the February incident, Day was hospitalized and comatose at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. After returning home three months later in May, he experienced trouble breathing that kept him in and out of the hospital throughout the summer. He underwent throat surgery in July.
The injury occurred while Day was fixing an item that had gotten stuck in the machine. A coworker had turned it off, but scalding hot water soon poured out anyway, leaving him covered in second and third degree burns.
Three of the machine’s six safety switches were later determined to have failed at the time of the incident, according to the Day family’s attorney, who is investigating the equipment.
On the morning of Aug. 15, Day again experienced severe trouble breathing. He died at home shortly after.
“I lost my best friend. I lost my husband,” said Day’s widow, Kathleen “Katie” Day.
During a Sept. 12 funeral service, those who knew him spoke of Mr. Day’s persistently generous character and immense contributions to the community.
In conversations with The Phoenix, Ms. Day and others close to the matter spoke about the tragedy that she said “could’ve been prevented.”
The Incident
On Feb. 3, Ms. Day dropped her husband off at the college. She worked early mornings as a crossing guard for a nearby elementary school, he worked the afternoon shift at the dining hall, and the two of them shared a car.
At work, Mr. Day and another staff member were attending to an item that got stuck in the washer during its sanitizing stage, the hottest and final one. According to Ms. Day, who heard the story from her husband, the co-worker turned off the dishwasher to stop the flow of water so that Mr. Day could retrieve the bowl safely.
Andy Hirsch, Vice President for Communications and Marketing, confirmed that water was not running when Brett and the co-worker first opened the machine. While Mr. Day was working inside the machine, a gush of scalding water and steam sprayed onto him, according to Ms. Day and her attorney.
The water, which staff said can reach up to 210 degrees, left Mr. Day with second and third degree burns on his chest and arms, the left side of his face, and the lower part of his abdomen. Some of the water entered his throat and hit his lungs as he opened his mouth in shock, Ms. Day said.
In the dining hall, a maintenance worker was having lunch, when she said he heard her husband’s “blood-curdling” scream from the dishroom. He ran to help.
While Mr. Day lay on the floor and awaited paramedics, Ms. Day said staff were told to return to work. “The coworkers that were there and witnessed this should have been sent home.”
Hirsch wrote that he didn’t know of such a directive. He said that the college’s immediate focus was getting medical attention and communicating with his family, followed by “supporting the staff who experienced what was a pretty traumatic event.”
Because Crozer-Chester hospital closed in 2025, Mr. Day was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, the nearest trauma center. He was hospitalized at Jefferson and Magee Rehabilitation for three months.
For the first six weeks, he was in a coma. Because his body was still going into shock several days after the incident, doctors had to paralyze him to administer medicine and care. Even after the coma ended, he remained on a ventilator for longer than doctors expected.
After he came back home in May, and could breathe on his own, Ms. Day said “things were picking up for Brett.”
But in early June, he started having trouble breathing again. He spent most of the month travelling between Riddle Hospital in Media and his home, and ended up requiring a tracheostomy: the doctors made a hole in his neck to his windpipe to help him breathe. On July 27, he underwent throat surgery to remedy the scar tissue buildup and vocal cord damage from the burns, but they couldn’t save his left vocal cord.
After the surgery, Ms. Day said he was still having trouble breathing. A few weeks later, he died at home. An official cause of death has not been determined.
‘The Machine Does Not Work the Way It Should’
Since the construction of the Dining and Community Commons in 2022, Mr. Day told his wife that the dishwasher didn’t work properly.
“Brett said from the get-go that the dish machine does not work the way it should,” Ms. Day said. “Brett started [this work] at a young age. He knew the rights and wrongs of the machine.”
A current dining staff member who works on a different dishwasher of the same brand told The Phoenix that it breaks frequently.
Many of the dining hall appliances converted from gas heating to electric following the construction of the Dining and Community Commons in 2022. After which, Ms. Day said many maintenance workers at Swarthmore “would not touch the dishwasher,” preferring that the company handle the repairs instead.
Hirsch said the college’s maintenance procedures have not changed since the new dining hall was built. He also said that nothing about the machine or its prior performance had raised concerns.
George Badey IV, the lawyer representing the Day family, confirmed that a college investigation found that three of the machine’s six safety switches were not working at the time of the incident. A dishwasher maintenance company hired by the law firm for an inspection also confirmed the finding, Badey said.
“Had these safety mechanisms functioned as intended, this incident would have been prevented,” Badey wrote in a statement.
Hirsch said that the college discovered the faulty sensors only after the injury, and replaced them before returning the machine to service. Swarthmore shut down the machine that day and switched to paper products for several weeks before bringing it back online.
According to Badey, his firm is focused on investigating the equipment alone, not the college. Hirsch wrote that Swarthmore is providing the firm with all the information it can as the family explores their legal options.
“The College’s continued assistance reflects a shared desire to understand exactly how this happened,” Badey added.
About the possibility of legal action, Badey referenced the protections that Pennsylvania’s products liability law offers consumers and workers from poorly designed and manufactured products.
“Our investigation is ongoing and comprehensive. It is crucial that we turn over every stone, as the law will hold accountable any manufacturer, supplier, component part manufacturer, or individual that contributed to a faulty product design or negligent maintenance,” he wrote.
He did not comment on which companies were under investigation or provide any further detail.
According to Hirsch, the original Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigation into the injury is now closed and did not require any additional follow-up or site visit. OSHA’s local office did not respond to a request for comment.
Living in the Aftermath
While Brett was hospitalized, the college paid workers’ compensation to the Day family, in accordance with state law.
Following the incident, management told staff not to discuss it with one another, instructing them to give the family space. While Ms. Day said she appreciated that privacy throughout his recovery, she added that none of the dining managers have reached out to her in more recent weeks.
In late May, the couple visited the dining hall for the first time since the injury.
“The workers were joyed to see him,” Ms. Day said, especially the ones that had witnessed the incident. Back in the dining hall, Mr. Day couldn’t bring himself to go anywhere near the dishroom.
Life after the incident was “devastating” for him, Ms. Day said. He couldn’t look at himself in a full-length mirror. A skin graft covered the left side of his face, and scars reached downward to his arms and stomach.
She said there was nerve damage from his kneecap all the way down his left leg from the pressure of the water, forcing him to get a brace.
When he went to bed, he was scared to go to sleep because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to breathe through the night.
“When he passed away, I knew that he didn’t have to be scared anymore,” Ms. Day said.
“He was miserable. He was angry that this had happened to him,” she said. “But he was just devastated by the whole accident, and that this could have been done the right way. That nobody could have been hurt.”
Swarthmore President Val Smith announced Day’s death in a message to the campus community on Aug. 24. The message did not mention that Day died in the aftermath of the injuries he sustained this past February on campus.
During the visitation and service at O’Leary Funeral Home in Springfield, members of the Swarthmore community, including long-time dining staff, spoke to Mr. Day’s generous character. Many colleagues, students, and senior administrators attended, and Mr. Day’s five daughters spoke of their fond memories visiting their dad at the college.
A dining staff member told The Phoenix that it feels like “the light has been sucked out” at work since Mr. Day’s passing.
Hirsch wrote that, by all accounts, Mr. Day contributed immensely to the community.
Ms. Day recounted her and her husband’s long history working together at Swarthmore, becoming good friends when they both started in 1992. She worked at Kohlberg Coffee Bar and then at the grill in the dining hall before leaving several years ago due to health problems. The two got married in 2018.
“When he asked me to marry him, I said, ‘You know, I’m real sick with all this. You don’t have to marry me,’” Ms. Day remembered. “And he said, ‘I want to take care of you and enjoy whatever time we have together.’”
She said that Mr. Day enjoyed working at Swarthmore and getting to know the students. He always wanted to “know where they were from and to let them know that ‘hey, you need anything, if I could help you, just reach out and call me.’”
Ms. Day said she’d been told the ongoing legal process might last about two years.
“I have to live very patiently,” she added.
