Kentucky: Bus Driver’s Aggressive Interaction With Passenger Defeats Claim for Benefits Arising out of “Assault”

In a decision that conforms with the majority rule among American jurisdictions, the Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed a lower court finding that a municipal bus driver was appropriately denied workers’ compensation benefits in connection with injuries he sustained in a fight with a passenger since evidence tended to show that the driver had been the actual aggressor in the incident. The driver sought benefits for an injury to his face and teeth—as well as for post-traumatic stress disorder—following the incident in question. Videotape introduced at the hearing was sufficient for the ALJ to find that the driver was the aggressor, however, and the ALJ appropriately denied the claim under Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 342,610(3), which generally bars recovery if the employee “willfully intended to injure or kill himself, herself, or another.”.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis 

See Trevino v. Workers’ Compensation Bd. Transit Auth. of River City, 2019 Ky. LEXIS 122 (Mar. 14, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 8.01.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see