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BROWN v. QUIK TRIP CORPORATION9/26/2001
Appellant Toby Brown appeals the district court's decision affirming the Workers' Compensation Commissioner's finding that the appellant did not meet his burden to prove legal causation for the mental/mental injury he allegedly sustained as an employee of appellee Quik Trip Corporation. In its proposed decision the deputy industrial commissioner concluded that Brown had sustained an injury, finding Brown had demonstrated both medical and legal causation in establishing this injury. In its May 28, 1999, ruling, the commissioner disagreed that the appellant had made any showing of legal causation. It therefore reversed the deputy's decision, effectively denying the appellant recovery for his claimed mental/mental injury. The district court affirmed the commissioner. We reverse and remand to the commissioner.
Appellant claims on appeal that the commissioner and the district court erred in 1) finding he had not presented the necessary evidence to support a finding of legal causation; 2) requiring the testimony of similarly situated workers as necessary proof in a finding of legal causation; 3) failing to distinguish the proof requirements of non-traumatic and traumatic injuries. Appellant Brown further claims that failure to distinguish proof requirements for non-traumatic injuries from those for traumatic injuries is unconstitutional.
Toby Brown, a business college graduate and a former Marine and coast-to-coast truck driver, took a job working at a Quik Trip gas and convenience store in January of 1990. On January 18, 1994, at about one o'clock in the morning, a fight at the front counter of the Cedar Rapids store Brown was tending escalated, and a female customer was shot in the thigh. Brown observed the shooting, and he had to clean up a significant amount of blood afterward. As a witness to the crime, Brown became involved in identifying the perpetrators at the police station, and he also testified about the incident in court.
Less than a week after this January 18 shooting, Brown was again working an overnight shift at a Quik Trip store in Cedar Rapids. Again at about one o'clock in the morning Brown was robbed at what he believed to be gunpoint. After approaching Brown from behind and sticking an object in his back, the robber forcibly moved Brown to the cash registers, demanding that he hand him all of the money the registers contained. The robber forced Brown to crouch down while he left the store, but immediately re-entered the store, threatening to "blow [Brown's] . . . head off," scaring him into assuming a spread-eagle position on the floor. Brown did not finish his shift that night and took a one-week break from work shortly thereafter.
In February of 1995, upon a recommendation from one of Quik Trip's Iowa corporate heads, Brown began seeing a counselor to help himself cope with shakiness, stomach upset, an aching chest, and nervousness. In April of that year he saw Dr. Wayne Alberts for treatment of sores that had begun developing in his mouth. In August of 1995 Brown began consulting Dr. Alan Whitters, a psychiatrist referred to him by Dr. Alberts.
Dr. Whitters stated Brown suffers from delayed posttraumatic stress disorder, and that it is attributable to the 1994 incidents at Quik Trip. Dr. Whitters has further asserted that the robbery had a cumulative traumatic effect on Brown. Apparently the additional trauma of the robbery had so aggravated the trauma of the shooting that the actual trauma Brown suffered as a result of these contemporaneous incidents was beyond merely a summation of the two independently traumatic events.
In concluding that "the [robbery] incident on January 24, 1994, was a major and substantial cause o
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