Missouri: Widow Recovers Death Benefits for Unexplained One-Vehicle Accident

A Missouri appellate court affirmed an award of workers’ compensation death benefits to an employee’s widow, finding substantial evidence supported the widow’s contention that her husband commonly traveled away from the employer’s primary office in order to call on customers and the employee was apparently involved in such work-related travel at the time of his fatal, one-vehicle accident. The appellate court added that it was within the province of the Labor and Industrial Relations Commission to reject the employer’s affirmative defense of an idiopathic condition as the cause of the accident. While there was testimony by an eye witness that the deceased employee swerved left, crossed a highway and hit an embankment for no apparent reason, the widow introduced medical evidence that the employee had no specific preexisting condition that might have caused him to black out or otherwise lapse into unconsciousness.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Campbell v. Trees Unlimited, Inc., 2016 Mo. App. LEXIS 942 (Sept. 22, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 7.04.

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