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Oct 2, 2019

Mississippi Employer Fails to Rebut Presumption That Employee’s Unwitnessed Death was Work-Related

Yesterday (October 1, 2019), the Court of Appeals of Mississippi affirmed an award of death benefits to the surviving dependents of a hospital material-management technician who was found dead in her office from an apparent heart attack approximately six hours into her work day [Baptist Mem. Hospital-North Miss. v. Dependents of Slate, 2019 Miss. App. LEXIS 483 (Oct. 1, 2019)]. The Court held substantial evidence supported the findings of the state’s Workers’ Compensation Commission that the employer had failed to rebut the presumption that the worker’s death arose out of and in the course of the employment since the deceased employee was found dead at a place where her duties required her to be during normal working hours.

Background

At the time of her death in 2016, the decedent had worked at the hospital for some ten years. Her morning job duties consisted of filling requisitions and delivering supplies to the various hospital departments. Her afternoon duties consisted of processing patient charges and handling paper work. Her boss testified that the decedent’s job was “medium” or “high energy level.” She was required to lift and carry up to 50 pounds up to 35 percent of the day and push or pull 150-200 pounds for 67 to 100 percent of the day. Her husband testified that the decedent had experienced stress at work.

Her body was found at approximately 2:30 p.m. by co-workers who at first thought she might be sleeping. The death certificate listed the cause of death as acute myocardial infarction. The parties stipulated that no autopsy was conducted. The Administrative Judge found that the hospital failed to carry its burden of rebutting the found-dead presumption, and in turn awarded the decedent’s family death benefits. The Commission affirmed that decision. The hospital appealed, arguing two primary points: (a) that it did rebut the found-dead presumption, or (b) in the alternative, that the found-dead presumption must be abandoned.

Unexplained Deaths

The appellate court noted that it had been firmly established that when an employee was found dead at a place where her duties require her to be or where she might properly be in the performance of her duties during work hours in the absence of evidence that she was not engaged in her employer’s business, there is a presumption that the accident arose out of and in the course of her employment [citing Washington v. Greenville Mfg. & Mach. Works, 223 So. 2d 642, 645 (Miss. 1969)].

In order to rebut the presumption, an employer or carrier must show two things:

  1. It must first explain the cause of death of the employee, and further,
  2. The “work activities of the decedent must also be fully developed to show that such activities did not cause or contribute” to the death.

It is for the employer/insurer to rebut the presumption; the claimant need not support the presumption. The court stressed that here, there was no autopsy performed in this case, which might have explained the cause of death for purposes of the rebutting the presumption. The employer’s expert admitted that he had never treated or even met the decedent. An opinion from that physician that the death was not work-related was exactly the sort of “guesswork” that could not overcome the burden in found-dead cases.

The medical opinion assumed that nothing unusual had happened on the day of decedent’s death, but there was no evidence, one way or the other, as to whether that assumption was correct. In similar cases, the courts in Mississippi had found that the presumption should continue to apply.