The Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigated on Monday the accident that killed a TrueNorth Steel employee on April 27 at the Rapid City steel fabricator business.

Adam Klynsma, 26, died Friday morning when a 12-foot steel beam weighing 1,600 pounds fell on him, Capt. Marty Graves with the Pennington County Coroner's office said. Emergency personnel were called to the business at 3272 Lien St. at about 8:30 a.m. Friday and Klynsma was pronounced dead at the scene. The workplace fatality was reported to the regional OSHA office in Bismarck, N.D., at 2:30 p.m. Friday. An OSHA investigator was in Rapid City Monday, according to Eric Brooks, assistant director of the Bismarck office.

TrueNorth's safety director did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon. According to the company website, the firm was founded in 1945 as Fargo Tank and makes a diverse portfolio of steel products.

His mother said Klynsma, a graduate of Western Dakota Technical Institute's welding program, had worked at TrueNorth for a few years.

"I'm still in shock," Linda Klynsma of her son's death.

She said Adam's metal working and sewing skills that allowed him to create elaborate costumes for his favorite gaming hobbies were talents that were apparent early in life. "As a young child, he loved to create, to do, to tear apart, to fix things," she said.

"At Halloween time, he would create his own costumes," she said, recalling the year he made an exact replica of the Star Wars character R2-D2 out of cardboard. "He was probably too big to be going trick-or-treating, but he so enjoyed making those costumes."

He got his sewing skills, as well as his creativity, from his mom. "He gets a lot of that from me. I make elaborate quilts," she said. "He was so creative that he'd make a costume without a pattern, just from a picture."

Adam Klynsma will be buried Wednesday in one of those costumes, she said.

"We're just going to miss him a lot," she said.