A little more than a year ago, Zachery Boland was standing on the podium in his cap and gown at Granite City High School receiving his diploma. Last week, the young man was killed in a tragic forklift accident that didn’t need to happen.
Last month, Boland, 19, got a job as a forklift operator at Saddle Creek Logistics, a company located in a little out-of-the-way industrial park in Pontoon Beach, just outside of St. Louis on the Illinois Side of the river.
Loved to Drive a Forklift
According to family members, Zachery loved using his job as a forklift operator. He would use his forklift to pick up and haul appliances, loading them into and out of semi-tractor trailers on the graveyard shift. Always a hard worker, he held two jobs, working as a day laborer for Five-O Construction as well as taking grave shifts at the warehouse.
But Zachery’s brief life came to a tragic end last Wednesday during a routine shift in the middle of the night — while most people were still sleeping.
About 1:24 a.m. that morning he was finishing up a job, loading appliances into the back of a semi when the driver of the truck somehow got the idea that the load-in was all finished, according to news reports. He put his rig into gear and started to pull out — with Zachery’s forklift straddling the distance between the dock and the truck bed.
The forklift fell and Zachery’s head struck the door plate of the loading dock. Emergency workers were called to the scene and tried to save his life, but he was pronounced dead at the scene at 2:08 a.m.
A Brief Life Remembered
Friends and family gathered to remember Zachery last Saturday at the Irwin Chapel, in his hometown of Granite City.
They remembered a man who just a few years ago had been an enthusiastic athlete, playing on his school’s soccer, baseball and hockey teams. He loved the University of Missouri’s men’s basketball team and was the self-declared “number one fan” of the St. Louis Blues NHL hockey team.
Recognizing how much Zachery loved sports, his family encouraged those who gathered to remember his memory to wear the jerseys of their favorite sports teams. And they asked that any donations in his memory be made to the high school club hockey team he played for just last year.
He is survived by his parents, Michael and Cynthia Boland, of Mitchell, Illinois, and his three brothers — Josh, Brad, and Eric — and his sister, Amanda.
The accident is being investigated by Pontoon Beach Police and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But so far, no charged have been filed.