A court of appeals judge has upheld a Virginia Workers’ Compensation Commission ruling that denied a Perdue Farms employee benefits for injuries that arose from a fall.
Judge Daniel E. Ortiz wrote the opinion for the Court of Appeals of Virginia in Manuel Meza Gutierrez v. Perdue Farms Inc. et. al., saying credible evidence supports the commission’s finding that Meza Gutierrez failed to meet his burden to prove the fall arose out of his employment.
In the case, Meza Gutierrez claimed he sustained wrist and head injuries when he slipped and fell at work. Meza Gutierrez worked for Perdue Farms’ poultry processing plant as a laborer in the tank room, where part of his duties included rolling carts of offal outside to the “scoop” of heavy mobile equipment called a “sky track.”
On January 20, 2021, Meza Gutierrez rolled a cart from inside the building to a scoop outside. After emptying two carts, according to surveillance video footage, Meza Gutierrez “walked toward a nearby shed and fell on the pavement, sustaining injuries to his head and left wrist. Meza Gutierrez lay motionless on the ground for about two minutes after (his co-worker, Antonio) Del Cid backed up and pulled away in the sky track. Eventually, Meza Gutierrez slowly sat up and crawled on his hands and knees to a nearby building,” court documents said.
Del Cid reported that Meza Gutierrez told him he had gotten dizzy and fell down. Other employees at the plant said they did not see anything wet, slippery or inappropriate on the pavement that could have contributed to a fall. When Meza Gutierrez was evaluated shortly after the fall, he said he couldn’t remember what happened. Later, he said the area where he fell was wet and littered with meat debris and that he was walking to retrieve a shovel when he slipped and fell, a circumstance that suggested he needed the shovel to clean meat debris off the pavement.
The fall caused a subarachnoid hemorrhage resulting in headaches, dizziness, cognitive deficit and post-concussive syndrome, court documents show.
The sole issue before the deputy commissioner in this case was whether Meza Gutierrez’s fall arose out of his employment. The deputy commissioner said that, even though the site of Meza Gutierrez’s fall “may have, at times, contained slippery substances or even offal,” the evidence failed to prove that they were present at the time of his fall or that they caused his fall.
The commission affirmed this finding and Meza Gutierrez appealed, claiming offal and a wet area on the pavement caused his fall, therefore proving he suffered an injury arising out of his employment. However, the court said, the record supports the commission’s finding that the evidence failed to prove that Meza Gutierrez’s injuries arose out of his employment.
