West Virginia: Employee’s Injuries After Mysterious Fall Are Not Compensable

The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia affirmed a decision of the state’s Workers’ Compensation Board of Review that rejected an employee’s application for benefits where the employee claimed he sustained head, ankle, and neck injuries when he slipped in a puddle of water in a men’s restroom at the employer’s premises. The Court observed that the employee testified that he assumed he slipped and fell since he later noticed that his back and leg were wet. The employee only recalled walking into the restroom, feeling weightless, hitting the floor and losing consciousness. The Court indicated the employee had a long history of suffering from headaches accompanied by dizziness and weakness in the limbs. It noted that three days prior to the fall, the employee had sought medical attention for dizziness, weakness, shortness of breath, blurry vision, and numbness and weakness in the extremities. Taking all this into consideration, it was appropriate for the Board of Review to find that the employee failed to prove his injuries arose out of and in the course of the employment.

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 Stemple v. Aegis Communications Group, 2015 W. Va. LEXIS 902 (Sept. 15, 2015) [2015 W. Va. LEXIS 902 (Sept. 15, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 7.04 [7.04]

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

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