Bates v. Dedicated Management Group, LLC

67 So. 3d 855, 2011 Miss. App. LEXIS 463, 2011 WL 3276352
CourtCourt of Appeals of Mississippi
DecidedAugust 2, 2011
DocketNo. 2010-WC-00792-COA
StatusPublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 67 So. 3d 855 (Bates v. Dedicated Management Group, LLC) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Mississippi primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Bates v. Dedicated Management Group, LLC, 67 So. 3d 855, 2011 Miss. App. LEXIS 463, 2011 WL 3276352 (Mich. Ct. App. 2011).

Opinion

MYERS, J.,

for the Court:

¶ 1. Terrience Bates appeals from the Lincoln County Circuit Court’s judgment affirming the decision of Mississippi Workers’ Compensation Commission (Commission) to deny the compensability of Bates’s alleged work-related injury. The Commission reversed the administrative judge’s (AJ) ruling that Bates had sustained a work-related injury to his lower back sometime during August 2005, while working for his employer Dedicated Management Group, LLC (DMG). Because the record evidence sufficiently supports the Commission’s decision, we affirm the circuit court’s judgment.

FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS

¶ 2. Bates, who has one and a half years of college education, began working for DMG in April 2005. His job primarily entailed unloading cargo laden pallets from tractor trailers with the use of a pallet jack.

¶ 3. In March 2006, Bates filed a petition to controvert, in which he claimed he injured his back while working for DMG on August 26, 2005. Specifically, Bates claimed he “slipped a disk while trying to maneuver a jack with no power steering.” DMG and its insurance carrier, Employers Insurance of Wausau, disputed compensa-bility. According to DMG, Bates never reported his injury, and his medical records did not corroborate a work injury.

[857]*857¶ 4. In May 2008, a hearing on the merits was held before an AJ. Bates and Michael Butler, a former employee of DMG, testified at the hearing in support of Bates’s claim. James Randall Hughes, DMG’s general manager, testified as an adverse witness having been called to do so by Bates.

¶ 5. According to Bates, sometime in June or July 2005, he was assigned a faulty pallet jack to perform his duties as an “unloader” for DMG. Prior to that time, he had the use of a satisfactory pallet jack, but management made him surrender it to a “shuttle operator.”1 Bates described the faulty pallet jack as an older model that was more difficult to operate than the other pallet jacks because it did not have power steering and proper brakes. Bates said maneuvering the faulty pallet jack required him to use more body force, which necessitated improper use of his hips.

¶ 6. When asked by his counsel to describe what he was doing when he was injured, Bates said he remembered feeling a sharp pain in his back as he bent over to cut cardboard away from one of the pallets.2 Bates could not remember the exact date this occurred, but he was sure it happened sometime in August 2005. Bates recalled telling a few of his coworkers about the pain immediately afterwards, and he said he continued working at the warehouse throughout the night despite the pain. Bates testified that he did not inform a supervisor about the pain until the next evening, after he had already started his shift and had realized he was unable to work because of the pain. Bates recalled that the supervisor’s name was “Eric,” and Eric had told him to go get his back checked out at the hospital. Bates said he also may have informed “Randy,” who, according to the record, is Hughes.

¶ 7. Butler testified at the hearing that before he was terminated from DMG, he had worked as a shuttle operator at the same warehouse as Bates. Butler did not witness Bates injure himself, but he attested that Bates had used a faulty pallet jack. According to Butler’s testimony, one night in August 2005, at Butler’s behest, management made Bates exchange his good pallet jack for an “old faulty jack” that Butler had been using. Butler described the faulty pallet jack as an obsolete model that “hardly had any brakes ... [and] was hard to turn.” Butler said that after the exchange, he saw Bates a couples of times later that evening struggling with the faulty pallet jack.

¶ 8. Hughes testified that Bates showed up to work on August 22, 2005, with a doctor’s release from King’s Daughters Medical Center in Brookhaven, Mississippi, which stated that Bates was injured and could not work. According to Hughes, the release did not state that Bates had been injured at work. The record does not contain a copy of this medical release, but it does indicate that King’s Daughters Medical Center provided Bates a one-day work release on August 22. Hughes said that Bates showed up later that week with another doctor’s release, which excused him from work for a longer period. The record contains a copy of this medical release, which excused Bates from work until August 29, 2005, due to injury; it does not [858]*858mention Bates’s injury or how Bates was injured. Hughes said he honored both medical releases. According to Hughes, Bates did not show up to work on August 29, or any point thereafter, and DMG terminated Bates’s employment with the company on October 10, 2005. According to Hughes’s testimony and DMG’s pay records, August 19, 2005, was the last date on which Bates had actually worked at the warehouse.

¶ 9. Hughes testified that Bates never informed him that he had injured himself at work. Hughes also testified that DMG had no supervisor by the name of Eric working at the warehouse during Bates’s employment. Hughes said that even though he knew that Bates had been medically excused from work, he did not know that Bates was claiming a work-related injury until DMG’s home office later contacted him and asked him about it. Hughes said at that point, he asked “Rod,” one of the warehouse supervisors, about Bates’s alleged injury. According to Hughes, Rod had no knowledge about it.

¶ 10. Hughes further testified that he had no knowledge that Bates had been using faulty equipment at the warehouse. According to Hughes, none of the pallet jacks used at the warehouse have power steering, and he stated that he has worked in the warehouse industry for over twelve years and has never known any pallet jack to be equipped with such a feature. Hughes added that each warehouse employee is given an operator’s test, certified by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which covers faulty equipment. Hughes said the employees are instructed to turn such equipment over to maintenance for repair.

¶ 11. In addition to the above-mentioned testimonies, Bates’s deposition, taken in March 2007, was submitted into evidence, along with Bates’s various medical records from King’s Daughters Medical Center. Included therewith was a written report from Dr. Ashraf Ragab, who had examined Bates in September 2006 and diagnosed Bates as suffering from a “right lateral recess stenosis due to a herniated disc at L5-S1.” Dr. Ragab stated in his report that Bates’s back condition and herniated disc were causally related to the nature of Bates’s work.

¶ 12. The AJ found that Bates proved by a preponderance of evidence that he had suffered a work-related injury to his back while working for DMG. The AJ noted that her decision was not easily reached because there were “considerable factual conflicts in [the] case.” She found, however, that the evidence, in its totality, supported the occurrence of a workrelated injury, despite the factual conflicts.

¶ 13. The Commission disagreed and reversed the AJ’s decision. According to the findings contained in its decision, the Commission gave little weight to Butler’s testimony because he did not witness Bates injure himself. The same can be said with regard to Dr. Ragab’s medical report, as the Commission determined that Dr. Ragab had based his assessment on Bates’s medical history, which the Commission found lacking credibility. As to Bates’s testimony, the Commission expressly found it unbelievable.

¶ 14.

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Bluebook (online)
67 So. 3d 855, 2011 Miss. App. LEXIS 463, 2011 WL 3276352, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/bates-v-dedicated-management-group-llc-missctapp-2011.