Commission must decide if intoxication led to accident

The intoxication of a carpenter who fell from the roof of a house he was working on may have contributed to his accident, the Alaska Supreme Court held Friday.

In Adams v. State, the court unanimously reversed and remanded an Alaska Workers Compensation Commission decision that held that the owner of the property did not employ the worker and ordered the commission to determine whether the worker’s intoxication played a role.

Virgil Adams worked as a carpenter. In August 2011, he fell from the roof of a house he was working on and damaged his spinal cord in the fall. He is now permanently and totally disabled.

He filed a claim with the Alaska Workers Compensation Board, and because the property owner he was working for had no workers compensation policy, the Workers Compensation Guaranty Fund.

At the time of the accident, Mr. Adams had been receiving his payment in cash from Michael Heath, whose Michael A. Heath Trust was listed as the property owner with a business license for O&M Enterprise also listed to the property. Mr. Adams did not report the income on tax returns.

He described the property he worked on as a “revolving frat house” where he believed at least some of the business activities on the premise were “illegal.” He performed construction-related activities, and workers helped themselves to a cooler of beer while they worked and were not advised against it by Mr. Heath.

On the day of the accident, Mr. Adams had consumed two beers and cocaine he said was given to him by Mr. Heath. After his fall, the paramedics who responded asked about alcohol because they planned to administer fentanyl to relieve the pain from the fall, and determined that he was not sufficiently intoxicated for the fentanyl to adversely interact with alcohol in his system.

Mr. Heath filed a notice of compensation fraud, arguing that Mr. Adams had never worked for his companies and claimed his intoxication led to his fall.

The board held that his injury was compensable, finding that the owner of the property was engaged in a real estate-related business and that Mr. Adam’s alleged intoxication did not proximately cause the accident. On March 2017, the board ordered Mr. Heath to pay a number of benefits to Mr. Adams.

The fund appealed the decision, arguing that the board erred in its decision in finding that Mr. Heath was an employer and that Mr. Adams’ injuries were not proximately caused by his intoxication.

The commission, which reversed the decision, holding that there was no evidence that Mr. Heath was in the real estate business and that he was not an employer as defined by the state’s workers compensation act. The commission declined to examine whether Mr. Adams was intoxicated at the time of his accident.

The Alaska Supreme Court reversed the commission’s decision, holding that the commission erred in holding that Mr. Heath was not an employer and wrongly failed to evaluate whether Mr. Adams’ intoxication contributed to his injury. The court held that substantial evidence in the record supported the board’s decision that Mr. Heath was an employer engaged in the business or industry of buying, managing and selling real estate, and that the work Mr. Adams engaged in on his properties was part of that business.

The court also held that the commission must consider whether Mr. Adams’ intoxication on the day of the incident contributed to his injuries, and remanded that back to the commission for review.