North Carolina: Undocumented Worker’s Fatal Heart Attack While Fleeing Immigration Service Raid on Employer Was Not Compensable

The death of a lumber mill employee, who came to the United States from Mexico, who had used falsified documentation to obtain employment, and who suffered a fatal heart attack as he and other undocumented workers ran from the employer’s premises in an effort to avoid what they thought was an imminent raid by officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, did not arise out of the employee’s employment, held the Court of Appeals of North Carolina.  Moreover, the appellate court agreed with the state’s Industrial Commission that competent evidence supported the state Industrial Commission’s finding that there was no increased risk to the employee of an immigration raid as part of his employment with the employer;  the employee’s death was caused by a risk which was neither “inherent or incidental to the employment” nor a risk to which the employee “would not have been equally exposed apart from the employment.”

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 Paredones v. Wrenn Bros., 2014 N.C. App. LEXIS 468 (May 6, 2014) [2014 N.C. App. LEXIS 468 (May 6, 2014)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 4.02, 66.03 [4.02, 66.03]

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

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