Court settles worker's comp dispute linked to Vance company

Dec. 24—HENDERSON — North Carolina's Supreme Court has ruled that the alleged fiancé of a local man who died in a 2018 workplace accident has no right to a share of the payout of his worker's compensation insurance.

Chief Justice Paul Newby's opinion for the 5-2 majority said it's been settled law in North Carolina since 1953 that in the absence of "a legally recognized relationship," the mere fact that a couple is living together doesn't establish that one is a legal dependent entitled to a worker's compensation payout.

And while the wording of the relevant portion of North Carolina's worker's comp statute is open to interpretation, Newby said the fact that state legislators have allowed nearly 70 years to go without rewriting the law to negate the 1953 ruling means they effectively have "decided this issue."

The court's Dec. 16 decision capped litigation that's been going on for most of the time since Keith Tucker West Jr., then 43, died in Tennessee while he was working for Vance County-based Hoyle's Tire & Axle.

The company supplies parts for the undercarriages of manufactured and modular homes.

West was delivering a load of axles for Hoyle's to Clayton Homes in Maynardville, Tennessee, in February 2018 when part of the load fell and crushed him to death.

A Knoxville television station, WBIR, reported three months later that Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development inspectors found that the accident happened as West was loosening the straps that held down the load.

He was anticipating that a forklift operator would remove them from the trailer. But the load had shifted while he was on the highway, and when he loosened the straps, "a bundle of idler axles fell from the top tier of the trailer and struck" him, the TV station said, quoting a state investigative report.

Tennessee officials fined Hoyle's Tire & Axle $2,000 in connection with the incident, and the company paid the fine, WBIR reported.

Meanwhile, the company and its insurer had "admitted" owing death benefits, Newby said, and soon several applications for them were pending.

West's domestic life was complicated. He was married at the time of his death, but he and his wife of more than 14 years "had been living separate and apart for some time," according to one filing in the case. She sought a worker's comp payout.

He had three children with at least two women, none of them his wife. Two of the children, a son and a daughter, also filed for payouts. The third didn't put in a claim.

Starting in March 2017 — about a month after his release from state prison, where he'd served more than a year behind bars in connection with a felony conviction from Vance County for possessing stolen goods — West moved into the Smithfield home of Shannon Stocks.

Stocks also filed for a share of the worker's comp payout, claiming that she and West were engaged.

But West's daughter disputed that, telling the state Supreme Court the two "broke up the week before his death." She alleged that he had "packed his bags" by the time he left for Tennessee and was planning to move in with another girlfriend he'd also been seeing.

State law commands employers, insurers and the N.C. Industrial Commission to presume that a dead worker's widow, widower and children are his or her dependents when it's time to decide on worker's comp payouts.

In "all other cases" of claimed dependency, eligibility "shall be determined in accordance with the facts as the facts may be at the time of the accident," provided the dependency existed for a period of three months or more prior to the accident," the law says.

But the 1953 Supreme Court case held that the term "all other cases" doesn't include "a woman living in cohabitation with a man, to whom she is not married," in part because there would be no divorce proceedings or any right to alimony in the event of a breakup.

Lawyers for Stocks asked the current justices to overrule that decision on that grounds the earlier ruling "is not predicated upon our modern society" given that laws against cohabitation are unconstitutional. They also said the 1953 court exceeded its authority by narrowing the practical application of the worker's comp law passed by the N.C. General Assembly.

Attorneys on the other side argued that allowing cohabitation claims in worker's comp cases would make it harder to get payouts quickly to a dead worker's legally recognized kin.

The justices who dissented from the decision, Robin Hudson and Anita Earls, said the 1953 wrote its own policy preferences into state law instead of following the plain wording of a worker's comp law that required a full-on fact-finding process.

"The plain language of the act manifestly allows for claimants who were partially dependent on support from the earnings of the deceased employee at the time of the accident, based upon evidence of the facts at the time of the employee's death," Hudson said in a dissenting opinion Earls joined.

The Supreme Court for the moment still has a 4-3 partisan split. Its Republicans — Justices Newby, Phil Berger Jr. and Tamara Barringer — all ruled against Stocks. So did two of the Democrats, Justices Sam Ervin IV and Michael Morgan.

Contact Ray Gronberg at rgronberg@hendersondispatch.com or by phone at 252-436-2850.