John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017.
In the days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.
Boeing said it was saddened to hear of Mr Barnett’s passing. The Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to the BBC on Monday.
It said the 62-year-old had died from a “self-inflicted” wound on 9 March and police were investigating.
I agree but we both have the luxury of hindsight. I think it’s really difficult to always anticipate all failure scenarios in advance. I am saying that as someone who just discovered had a “bug” in his software discovered that caused a buffer overflow because I didn’t anticipate a buffer as small as 32 Kilobytes in a data link that was designed for 32 Megabits per second :)