December 8, 2015
A towing company manager suffered a heart attack and died while attempting to extricate a truck from a culvert well below the surface of a highway. His widow was denied workers’ compensation death benefits. How did a court rule on her appeal?
Eddie Ray Thomas Jr., 45, was the manager of Eddie’s Service Center which was owned by his father. Thomas hoped one day to inherit the family business.
On Jan. 20, 2010, the day before his death, the EPA notified him that there were problems with the gas tanks at the business and they would have to be removed.
Thomas worried that the cost associated with tank removal would put the service center out of business.
The EPA returned the following day to begin the process of removing the tanks.
Thomas’s wife said she’d never seen her husband as upset as he was on that day. She said when he got home from work, he paced, wouldn’t eat, and appeared pale and sweaty.
Later that evening, he calmed down and started to watch TV when he got a phone call from Kentucky State Police to tow a wrecked truck. Thomas drove to the scene.
The wrecked truck was in a ravine. The top of the truck was at least four feet below the road level.
Thomas took chains from the tow truck, climbed down the embankment, hooked the chains on the truck, crawled back up the embankment and went to the controls to try to lift the wrecked truck.
He wasn’t able to get the truck high enough to lift it over a concrete partition. Three more times Thomas went down the embankment, repositioned the chains and climbed back out. None of his efforts over the course of 40 minutes were successful. Thomas called his father to bring in a larger tow truck that had a taller boom.
After waiting about five minutes, Thomas went back to his truck to call his father and check on his status. When he exited the truck, he collapsed onto the ground. Thomas was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.
His widow sought death benefits because “the physical exertion on that day combined with the mental stress of the removal of the gas tanks at the gas station the day before resulted in a heart attack.”
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