when i was preparing for argument today i pulled out my briefs and i noticed i did not attach an appendix to it so i want to apologize to the panel for not having an appendix i want to play by the council for putting a proper appendix on his brain so everything is in your briefs there but it's attached to the napoli's brief the notice of appeal the decision of the arbitrator and the decision on review and again i have no excuse that it  happened but it is our position that we accept the facts as found by the commission we do not believe this is a manifest weight case let me give a very brief summary of the facts officer yet is twenty eight years old at the time three years with the montgomery police department he was responding to what appeared to be a routine domestic halt that was under control that suspect of ender was in custody in leaving the scene a neighbor becomes upset that a squad cars blocking his driveway that neighbor retreats to his house and comes out with a appears to be a gun at this point i'd like to just read a paragraph from the commission decision because again we don't dispute the facts as found by the commission the fisher testified that after seeing what appeared to be a handgun he drew his weapon and command of subject to drop the gun the subject did not comply and continued to walk toward petitioner and petitioners back up the officer titian or testified further as follows when he got up when he got approximately i want to say about fifteen feet away from where i had taken cover behind an s u v i saw that it had an orange hit petitioner stated that the orange tip indicated to him that the gun was not a real gun but it was possibly a b b gun or some type of toy gun are also stated he continued to command the subject to drop the gun and that he did not want to take any chances and continue to stay behind cover the question now is under the pathfinder decision from the illinois supreme court is that sufficient to have what we call a mental mental psychiatric disability case there is no physical injury to officer diaz so it is a mental mental type of claim not general motors  the theory of mental mental basically is you can handle the severe emotional shacked but it's must arrive from a situation what they call a greater dimensions in a day to day emotional strain and tension which quote unquote all employees must experience so recognizing the intuitive appeal of your argument i guess my specific question is do we look at this in the context in turkey in which employees must experience the police officer context or just general context because the argument could be amazingly the commission found of whether or not they want to stray is a question that this is something that a police officer normally is expected to encounter it is trained to deal with that really armed and dangerous the fall leaf cleanup in a drainage system comes out with a gun threatening that guy pick it up and leave to clearly be in that number that probably doesn't even a rise out of in the course of his employment because that is the random criminal act right ok and i can see that defensibility shack into a regular sanitation well i think i think it would be too but a police officer yes it is common for him to face criminals but that's part of his job and that's police officer to have to drop his service revolver and draw down on a suspect i mean that does not happen every day i would dare say probably the majority of police officers never own a holster their service weapon and gun and that is part of the shock of being a police officer he is a trained killer police officers are trained killers they're the only people in society i suppose with the military but they're not supposed to be involved in civilian society that we a city worker shot and killed a man with a b b gun ok there was an instance in rock heard this year a man had a gun a real gun but no bullets in it would not put his gone down multiple officers were called to the scene and they finally shot and killed the guy we call that suicide by cop that is not unfortunately an uncommon phenomena so this is not a situation where the way of getting no news ok i mean that's why we police officers in the state of oakland suicide by cop is is is but i'm suggesting that most officers never have to on holster their service revolver in their entire career but even if they do even if it's common for that officer being the law here is pathfinder and then it is interpreted by general motors an appellate decision but binder talks about the reaction of a person of normal sensibilit pathfinder from the supreme court really does kind of define what i would call a reasonable man standard that we don't say there's a unique standard based on that individual's accusation really what general motors stands for and what general motors has been cited in numerous cases that we all have in our grief is the idea that their verbal abuse is not going to be found to be compensable under any mental mental in general motors does not speak to someone pointing guns at anybody general motors is a verbal abuse case and general motors stands for the general proposition that the normal stress and strain of employment is never going to be found to be a mental mental decision and so is this the situation that happens with this i mean i have personally handled many duty disability pensions where officers have been disabled for the rest of their career arising out of typically there's an actual shooting but here you go your honor we don't have to worry about did this officer suffer post traumatic stress disorder from the sense that i mean again i accept all the facts and there's no dispute in the head of pick the department their was off i think for a couple months and even to kind of arbitration he was still taking so psychotropic medication back at work but still taking psychotropic medications so i think we haven't really put our finger on the issue here that it is not uncommon for what he was otherwise subjected to in the normal course of his employment so i think the commission did create a special standard for first responders and i don't think there is anything in the worker compensation act or in pathfinder that is going to create their own route of the commission to create a special standard that says if you're a first responder could be a fireman a paramedic a police officer you could never recover from anything that happens but you know there are situation there as well the nine eleven operator i mean she wasn't in the zone of danger or anything like that but it was some horrible situation she's taken a phone call and there's i think it might have been a rape or something horrible happening why she while she was listening and she had post traumatic stress disorder but i mean if we're going to say post traumatic stress disorder is compensable and clearly it is does it make a difference if the gun is fired i mean here officer diaz did not pull the trigger he could have well it could make a difference it's as to whether it's considered sudden and severe and immedia you know in general motors it was a situation of what an abusive workplace that occurred over months and then the person had a nervous breakdown ok so i don't think you can take the word immediate from general motors where they're dealing with really almost a repetitive trauma situation i think general motors stands for two propositions and appropriately so we are not going to allow the repaired of trauma psychiatric injury and you have to that you know i don't know that this is all that important but it's i don't understand how all of this police department or this responded can say well ishmael beah as he overreacted to the situation by suffering post traumatic stress disorder when the same police department treated the situation incredibly seriously i mean you know this is not the family sitting around christmas dinner and little johnny pulls out his brand new b b gun and accidentally points at a grandma and grandma startled for an instant oh you're going to not me but we all know  little b b gun ok this is a situation literally of life and death that was treated as a life and death situation and was the chief for a deputy chief testified that they deemed this offender armed and dangerous until it was eight hours later that they got him out of the house that he barricaded himself and they had to throw i think was tear gas you know they are they they emptied the homes in the immediate vicinity small army there they had it right which was  montgomery crawled in the village i'm sorry the city of aurora swat team and i think there were forty something that was thirty plus officers there so i mean this was treated and rightfully so as a very serious situation well in the police to perm also treated his post traumatic stress precipitating and events must be one which the employee would otherwise be subject to even normal course of his employment so we speak judge based upon the normal employee employment when in fact in bank it the supreme court said the work related them was on the injury occurred because work related list or because the employee went placed th claimant at risk of exposure exceeding that of the general public so do we just this based on the general public or do we judge his face the point a reasonable policeman i think if not i think it's a person or my sensibilities which as it would be the general problem so in other words to that extent general motors is inconsistent with the supreme court i don't think you have to read general motors that way i think if you are the core i said records decision petfinder it limited to the nearer group of cases in which an employee suffers a sudden severe emotional shock which is percipient stated by an uncommon event a of significantly greater proportion or dimension that is there to which the employer or otherwise be motors was not really talking about that individual and the environment in that factory they were talking in the morgue the general sense of general employment and the stress of the verbal i mean you know there's a reason we get paid to go to work it's not necessarily going to be fun there's going to be a certain amount of stress and strain involved and that's what you get paid for to show up at work when you go beyond that and you suffer post traumatic stress disorder i think then crow to the supreme court and this is not contradicted by general motors and it's a person of normal sensibilities and i don't think we take our first responders and make them some kind of knights in shining armor  the real facts in dispute but we just apply the law to the facts and the point that was made by the circuit court was that this was not a sudden severe emotional shock resulting in immediately apparent psychic injury took several days before he finally realized that his roll call that he was dizzy and and some of them were going to get hung up on how we define immediate but i think the threshold question we've been dancing around here is this would like you to answer do you need to consider the traumatic event and the effects within the context of the normal activity of the person who is finally claiming another words a fireman can he recover you know in the course of something that happens in a fire when he is in basic training is to deal with fire suppression and going to the scene of a fire the same thing with a police officer are they ever going to be able to recover because you know theoretically they're dealing with something that the average citizen doesn't deal with so do we look at it from the perspective of the person in the act of creation or is it something bigger in the general sense abilities of the average person what is the i think you have to look at the person and his job we all have our own jobs we all have our own duties let's put in one question that's what the commission did that's why they decided the case the way they did that's right i mean they let's take a state trooper what they do a lot of times is they have to go to x it seems you know and they see a lot of horrific the use of dead people maybe babies in several pieces or whatever so if  group trooper has a mental breakdown because of that and this standard he couldn't recover goody because it's what they do every day i i keep looking back to the general motors narrowed pathfinder rule which is it's got to be a sudden severe shock around yelled at the subordinate it was a shock to him you know some kind of jump hold on a problem go i mean right here there really isn't any dispute that this this gentleman had post traumatic stress disorder is there i mean there wasn't any contrary medical that's really thing like that you know but he he told us in his testimony that he saw there was an orange tip on the gun he was behind the s u v there was no gunfire there was no physical assault he knew right away that he wasn't there there was not a sudden shock that's how i interpret that if w he wasn't sure but he's behind an s u v the standoff goes on for hours it goes on until he's gone and doesn't complete until he's left i mean this is these facts are a little different than the sudden shock of being shot upon so yeah is it just i mean i have a question here is the trauma the fear of or the shock of being shot upon or let's be fine most of us don't have the opportunity or the desire to  some other people is that not also traumatic that you have a duty and that you're actually going to perhaps kill someone but i think that's part of this training i mean i think that's part of just as i had training to come up and argue and the general person doesn't i don't know exactly what mental injury i would suffer here but he has the training so so what we're saying is that if this me and actually separate post their stress disorder as a result of this incident there's never rise to the level of severe emotional strain pirouette that's what general motors says it's also how no no they said that they said that remember the respondent in general motors argued that but this case they cited board of education person bus or commission stands for the proposition that the use of obscene and racist language by a superior to a subordinate even in shouting tones does not constitute a severe emotional shock as a matter of law we disagree so sometimes it could the way it is the way i read it sometimes it could be in in a shouting match and become an emotional shop well that's a part of it people argue every exceeding they had of the general public so it's not based upon how a policeman would react to having a con pointed at him it's judged by how the general public would react by having a gun point  are not going to suffer any severe emotional problems because of guns pointed out others ah so the question becomes does his employment as a policeman place him i read to pathfinder in the way it's written is that there's an end there has to be two things first a sudden severe emotional shock resulting in immediately apparent psychic injury that's the first and then it is and it's precipitated by an uncommon event of decision we conclude the supreme court's decision is pay and pathfinder is limited to the narrow group of cases in which an employee suffers first and then a sudden severe emotional shock which which results in immediately apparent psychic injury and  is precipitated by an uncommon event a significantly greater proportion of the measure seen enough pathfinder never uses the words pathfinder merely says suffers a severe emotional shock that traceable to a definite time place and cause which causes psychological injury or harm or injury more harm suffers an accident within the meaning of the ad where is the sudden core in general motors going too far too much for the p f finer ever wants and certainly not want and so maybe we ought to rein in general really is that with the case law says because it may just turn and that issue because according to you that you played it out ok it wasn't immediate it was a couple days later it was like you went to the half that or exactly the next day but under the case law does he have to go immediately for treatment that really is the question is well i guess a yes i mean that's part of the general motors lens that we're looking through isn't the media and we're not looking through the general motors lines we're looking a police officer on the whole string is gun something bad has probably happened already and so you're just going to have an automatic injury in other words the accidents already occurred when he pulls his gun i think got to prove that he suffered some type of mental injury post traumatic stress disorder or whatever and there has to be proof of an actual right but assuming he has that then if you back up you already know that as if he's in that kind of a situation then why isn't he had the question or is it worse for the facts because the cases that i mean sometimes they say it's a matter of law and sometimes they apply manifests way i can't quite figure out which is supposed to be immediate sudden severe the commission didn't decide that issue they didn't say that i didn't prove a pathfinder element of sudden severe or immediate they held my police officer to a different standard because he was a police   lake superior i think they found later as forty fifty foot waves crashed about a part but the run that i know of is does anyone know where the road god goes when the waves turn minutes to hours and that's the whole thing when some stressful situation turns minutes to hours for this police officer seconds to minutes hours that's really what the stress is all about that's why there's this impact hang slows down whether you're on a lake freighter in the doom ship in a storm i mean that i don't know if those guys had a minute thirty seconds or whatever before when they knew they were going down but this officer in these couple of seconds somebody drops down but you're going out put your gun i pull my gun out  i guarantee you that this officer diaz can relive those seconds and tell you about him as though they were hours of his life and that's the unique emotional shock that this officer suffered i think it is uncommon for police