PENN TWP — Jacob Casher's work day for a Beaver 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, of Clearfield County, 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 and whether the trench had proper collapse-prevention measures in place.

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 at the bottom of the hole.

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

“The other (employees) told him something like, 'Let's go. We'll get it tomorrow,'” Ripper said. “But by then, they said he was already in the hole.”

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, formed among fire departments in Middlesex and Penn townships and Saxonburg, specializes in trench rescue.

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

The rescuers quickly put their training to work.

They inserted 4-foot-by-4-foot wooden boards to shore up the walls and wedged hydraulic jacks between the boards, which applied pressure to keep the dirt in place and prevent a secondary collapse.

Once the dirt was stabilized, rescue workers were able to dig around the victim and eventually pulled him out.

The time consuming, tedious and labor intensive trench rescue effort took hours. Hanovick praised the work.

“The trench rescue team did a terrific job shoring everything up,” he said.

An autopsy was conducted Monday evening to determine Casher's cause of death but the coroner's office still had released its findings this morning.

Telephone calls to Rooter Man and the Nugent Group of Hermitage, Mercer County, Shelbourne's parent company, were not returned Monday.