Mississippi: Bringing Home the Bacon—Injuries Sustained in Collision With 400-lb. Wild Hog Found Compensable

Substantial evidence supported the Commission’s finding that injuries sustained by a Mississippi casino employee when her car struck a 400-lb. wild hog arose out of and in the course of her employment, held a Mississippi appellate court. The “collision” took place at 4:00 a.m., when the casino employee and her sister were returning home from an Alabama bingo parlor. The employee, an off-property director of player development for the Mississippi casino, had recently moved to Alabama and worked from her home. She contended that at the time of the accident, she was returning from conducting market research of a competing gaming facility—a duty within her job description. The employer admitted the employee had no fixed hours of work and often worked long hours. It contended, however, that the employee was not really carrying out a work task when the accident happened. They pointed to proof that the employee was with her sister at the bingo parlor, it was 4 a.m. when they left the facility, and her sister was driving when they wrecked. When coupled with the facts that the employee did not submit an itinerary, travel vouchers, or a marketing report, and did not immediately seek workers’ compensation benefits, the employer suggested the outing was personal, not business related. The employee countered that she was new to the area and had asked her sister, who had lived there for a long time, to drive, that she didn’t immediately file a workers’ compensation claim because she was unfamiliar with the process, and that she had not sought earlier reimbursement since she thought she was to do that on a quarterly basis. The employee’s boss admitted that the Alabama bingo halls were a “potential threat” to the employer’s business because a large part of the Mississippi casino’s traffic was from central Alabama. The appellate court acknowledged there was a conflict in the evidence, but indicated it was for the Commission to resolve. It had done so, in favor of the employee.

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. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See Choctaw Resort Development Enterprise v. Applequist, 2015 Miss. App. LEXIS 214 (Apr. 21, 2015) [2015 Miss. App. LEXIS 214 (Apr. 21, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 25.01 [25.01]

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

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