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Slip and fall due to the employee?s wet shoes held an accident for the purposes of qualifying for accidental disability retirement benefits

Slip and fall due to the employee?s wet shoes held an accident for the purposes of qualifying for accidental disability retirement benefits
Matter of Leary v New York City Employees' Retirement Sys., 2009 NY Slip Op 01122, Decided on February 10, 2009, Appellate Division, Second Department

More often than not an application for accidental disability retirement benefits is rejected on the grounds that the event leading to the injury resulting in the filing of the application for such a benefit did not constitute an ?accident? within the meaning of the controlling statute.

Here, however, Dorothy Leary won her appeal challenging the denial of her application for accidental disability retirement benefits by the New York City Employees? Retirement System.
Both the Board of Trustees of the New York City Employees' Retirement System Supreme Court, Kings County, rejected her contention that she had suffered an accident within the meaning of the law as the result of her slipping and falling while going down the stairs while at work because of her wet shoes.

The Appellate Division reversed the lower court?s ruling, holding that Leary had, indeed, suffered an injury resulting from an accident that qualified her for accidental disability retirement benefits.

Leary, a part-time junior public health nurse, ?slipped, stumbled, and injured her left knee while descending a staircase inside Public School 173 in the Bronx, the school to which she was assigned.? Leary that she had slipped and stumbled on the stairs because her shoes were wet from the snowy and wet condition of the ground outside the school building.

Although the Medical Board determined that Leary was disabled from performing her duties as a junior public health nurse, it recommended that her application for accidental disability retirement benefits be denied on the ground that she failed to establish that her injuries were sustained as the result of an accident within the meaning of Retirement and Social Security Law §605.*

The Appellate Division, citing Matter of Lichtenstein v Board of Trustees of Police Pension Fund of Police Dept. Of N.Y., 57 NY2d 1010, commented that for the purposes of qualifying for an accidental disability retirement allowance the claimant must have suffered an injury as the result of "sudden, fortuitous mischance, unexpected, out of the ordinary, and injurious in impact.?

The Retirement System conceded that the cause of Leary?s injury was her slipping due to the wet condition of her shoes from the snow she brought in from outside the school building. This, said the Appellate Division, ?was not an act undertaken in the performance of the petitioner's ordinary employment duties but rather a sudden, fortuitous mischance, unexpected, out of the ordinary, and injurious in impact.?

In light of the unrefuted credible evidence presented by Leary as to the cause of her injury, the court held that the Board ?could not have rationally concluded that [Leary?s] injuries were sustained as a result of anything other than an accident within the meaning of the governing authorities.?

Thus, said the court, Supreme Court should have granted Leary?s petition and annulled the Board?s determination.

The full text of the decision is posted on the Internet at:
http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/3dseries/2009/2009_01122.htm

* The Board could not have considered Leary?s application for accidental disability retirement as one for ordinary disability retirement benefits because Leary did not have 10 years of member service credit at the time of her application for accidental disability retirement benefits was filed.

Full post as published by New York Public Personnel Law on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).