ALBANY, N.Y. (Legal Newsline) - An entirely unprovoked assault at work is covered by workers’ compensation, New York’s highest court ruled, rejecting arguments by a medical resident that his shooting wasn’t a workplace-related injury.
Justin Timperio was a first-year resident at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital in 2017 when Henry Bello, a former employee, snuck into the hospital wearing a white doctor’s coat and opened fire with an AR-15, killing one doctor and wounding five others including Timpero. Bello killed himself on the scene.
Timperio sued the hospital and the store that sold Bello the gun. BLH moved to dismiss the suit as a workplace injury covered by New York’s Workers’ Compensation Law. A federal court ruled the claim was unrelated to work because there was no suggestion the shooting stemmed from “work-related differences.” Bello and Timperio had never met and never worked at the hospital at the same time.
The federal court stayed its ruling pending a decision by the Workers Compensation Board, which ruled the shooting was work-related. Timperio appealed to New York’s Appellate Division, which reversed, ruling there while there is a presumption injuries in the workplace are work-related, the lack of evidence Bello and Timperio were in any kind of dispute was sufficient to rebut that presumption.
New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, reversed again in a May 16 decision by Judge Caitlin Halligan. The appeals court got it backward by seeking evidence of a relationship between Bello and Timperio when for many years New York law has held assaults in the workplace, regardless of who commits them, are work-related, the court ruled.
One of the earliest cases involved a milkman who was randomly stabbed by an insane man who “stabbed anyone near him,” the court noted.
“Once it has been established that an employee was assaulted `in the course of’ employment, the presumption—unless rebutted—obviates the need for an affirmative showing that the assault arose `out of’ the employment,” the court ruled.