Virginia Commission Awards Wage and Medical Benefits to Roofer Hurt Setting Barn Trusses

On June 9, 2014, Edwin Palma was working on a barn under construction in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Palma, who came to the United States from Guatemala, was employed and paid by Escobar Roofing Company, which had sent a crew to the job run by Stone Hill Construction Inc., a builder of agricultural structures. That day Stone Hill's foreman assigned him to set roof trusses, carpentry work he had never done before.

While he was moving a truss along the roof, he lost his balance and fell to the ground. He was airlifted to the University of Virginia Medical Center with injuries to his head, both arms, his back and his left leg, along with spinal cord and brain injuries. He remained in a coma for several weeks.

Palma left the hospital in August 2014 in a wheelchair. He went through rehabilitation at a facility in Florida from October 2014 to May 2015 and continued therapy at U.Va. into 2016.

Because he was hurt on the job, his claim went to the Virginia Workers' Compensation Commission rather than to a jury. Geoff McDonald represented him before the Commission, with Frank H. Hupfl of Richmond also named as counsel in the published case report. The parties agreed that his injuries were compensable, along with his average weekly wage and the period of disability. What they fought over was who his employer was. Escobar Roofing and its carrier, Liberty Mutual, and Stone Hill and its carrier, BrickStreet Mutual Insurance Company, each denied an employment relationship at the time of the fall.

Deputy Commissioner Frederick Bruner heard evidence in August 2015 and ruled in December 2015 that Palma was a borrowed employee of Stone Hill. Stone Hill's foreman had decided Palma would install trusses, Stone Hill supplied most of the tools and set the working conditions, and nobody from Escobar Roofing was on the site directing the work or providing safety equipment. That made Stone Hill and BrickStreet responsible for his medical and wage-loss benefits.

The award is a package of benefits rather than a single check. It includes weekly wage-loss payments of $373.34 running from the date of the fall and continuing, and medical benefits for the injuries from the accident. His medical charges at the University of Virginia Medical Center alone came to about $1 million. Virginia Lawyers Weekly reported the combined value of the award at $1.4 million.

Stone Hill asked the full Commission to review the ruling, arguing that its foreman could not have controlled Palma's work because the two spoke only through a translator. On April 28, 2016, Commissioners Roger Williams, Wesley Marshall and R. Ferrell Newman rejected that argument, finding the translator was not a supervisor and that Stone Hill's foreman ran both his own workers and the crew borrowed from Escobar Roofing. The Commission affirmed the award with interest.