PENN TWP — Jacob Casher’s work day for a Clearfield County sewage system maintenance company was finished Monday afternoon when he jumped into a deep trench to retrieve a shovel left behind.

Moments later, the nearly 12-foot walls of soil gave way and buried Casher at a work site behind the Shelbourne Personal Care home on Dinnerbell Road.

His co-workers immediately leaped in and dug away at the dirt, frantically trying to save their colleague and friend.

It would be too late by the time they reached him. Casher, who just celebrated his 21st birthday earlier this month, was dead.

“I think he died shortly after the cave in,“ said Butler County Chief Deputy Coroner John Hanovick, who pronounced the young man dead about 6 p.m. when trench rescue specialists recovered the body — four hours after the accident.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating to determine what happened.

Casher was part of a four-man crew with a Hookstown-based company — A Rooter Man — that was relocating sewer lines at the personal care home complex, said Penn Township Patrolman Jack Ripper.

The employees were done digging the trench and were getting ready to leave the site shortly before 2 p.m. when Casher apparently spotted a shovel that the crew inadvertently forgot.

He decided to go back in and get it, despite his co-workers’ suggestion to let it be.

Suddenly, the dirt collapsed in on Casher.

“(The workers) jumped in and tried to get him uncovered,” said Ripper, who was the first emergency responder at the scene.

“I got there and they were still in the hole trying to get him out,” the officer said. “I told them to get out, for their own safety.”

The other workers had managed to clear away enough soil to expose Casher’s head and chest but could not get him out of the heavy, wet soil.

Members of the Southern Butler County Technical Rescue Team soon descended upon the site. The team specializes in trench rescue.

Later, similar rescue teams from Beaver and Mercer counties arrived.

They inserted 4-foot-by-4-foot wooden boards to shore up the walls and wedged hydraulic jacks between the boards.

Then rescue workers were able to eventually pulled him out.