New York: Assistant Manager’s PTSD Claim Tied to Murder-for-Hire Scheme Found Compensable

A New York appellate court, affirming a decision of the state’s Workers’ Compensation Board, has held that the exacerbation of a supermarket assistant manager’s preexisting PTSD arose out of and in the course of his employment when, after he called a coworker at her home to discuss a work-related matter, the coworker’s husband, who thought that the manager and his wife must be having an affair, targeted the manager in an unsuccessful murder-for-hire scheme.  The husband also contacted the assistant manager’s supervisor regarding the suspected affair, resulting in an investigation and the subsequent decision by the assistant manager, to seek a transfer to another store.  The appellate court indicated that if there was any nexus, however slender, between the motivation for the assault and the employment, an award of workers' compensation benefits was appropriate. Here, the work-related phone call from claimant to his coworker's home was the basis for the subsequent harassment of claimant at his place of employment, the employer's internal investigation and claimant's request for a transfer—all of which exacerbated claimant's preexisting PTSD.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is a leading commentator and expert on the law of workers’ compensation.

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See Matter of Mosley v. Hannaford Bros. Co., 2014 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4908 (July 3, 2014) [2014 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4908 (July 3, 2014)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 8.02 [8.02]

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law.

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