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Disconnect the charger & the battery. Then while the battery is still disconnected re-connect the charger and try powering on the laptop. Sometimes you may need to press the power button a couple times and maybe even hold it an extra second when the battery is disconnected although it should just power on automatically.

Try disconnecting the LVDS cable and use an external display in case the built-in display is bad. Be very careful reconnecting the LVDS cable as the connectors are very fragile and easily damaged. And only do this with the battery & power adapter disconnected.

Try disconnecting other non-essential items.

You should also look for signs of liquid damage and corrosion on the electronics and on the contacts of the Thunderbolt ports.

FYI, keep in mind some 15" models have a Battery Safety Recall.

TrippB3 wrote:

I had already tried boots with the SSD removed.

Indicates either a bad SSD (most likely) or a bad Logic Board.

Make sure the SSD contacts & connector don't show any corrosion. The only other thing you can attempt to do with the SSD is to use a Linux boot disk & utility to access the SSD's built-in hardware secure erase feature to reset the SSD to factory defaults. This will completely erase the SSD and sometimes it can also fix some odd issues with an SSD. If you are not familiar with Linux, then you can use Parted Magic to do it since it includes a customized simple to use utility to reset the SSD. The last free version of Parted Magic is available to download from the MajorGeek's link here. You can use the downloaded .iso file as a source for Etcher (Mac/Windows/Linux) in order to create a bootable Parted Magic USB drive.

Option Boot the USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". On the Parted Magic desktop there should be an icon for erasing drives. Within this app you want to select the "ATA Secure Erase" option as this is the only one that will utilize the SSD's built-in hardware secure erase feature for resetting the SSD to factory defaults. All of the other erase options will not help and will just cause excess wear on the SSD. You will be prompted to sleep & wake the laptop as well as provide a temporary password for the procedure. Keep the password simple like "abc" because if the procedure is interrupted or does not complete successfully you will need this password to unlock the SSD or the SSD will be a permanent brick.

Here is an article for the newer paid version of Parted Magic which shows the general procedure although the older version of the app will look different the process is basically the same:

https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/

If the user needs data recovered from the SSD, then don't perform the secure erase, but have them contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack. Both vendors provide free estimates and both are recommended by Apple.

If the laptop had macOS 10.13+ installed at some point in its life, then a third party SSD from OWC can be installed. If macOS 10.13+ has never been used on this laptop, then only an official Apple PCIe SSD made specifically for this model will work properly.