Opinion ID: 1752811
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: the nature and extent of the deviation

Text: Bush left the seminar cocktail reception at approximately 6 p.m. Tuesday, October 5, 1971, and presumably headed directly toward Muskegon. (See fn 1 and accompanying text, supra.) It should have taken decedent an hour more or less to travel the 40 miles of expressway from Grand Rapids to Muskegon. The record is silent as to the whereabouts of Bush until he entered Tony's Club in Muskegon Heights at 8:15 p.m. However, for approximately the next seven hours, decedent was engaged in activity totally unrelated to his employment. Furthermore, he had left his employment-related locale almost 40 miles behind him and was within a few miles of home. When Bush left Alice's Restaurant shortly after 3 Wednesday morning, he was again headed in the direction of his home. We find that the WCAB's affirmance of the referee's finding that the evidence establishes that decedent was finally on his way home when he was killed, 1979 WCABO 1356, 1362, is supported by the record. [8] The question remains whether the employment nexus continued to exist after such a substantial deviation. The WCAB believed that the nexus was broken and that any business purpose originally existing had dissolved: The deviation (if it be called that) involved here was of such a grossly temporal and extravagantly personal nature as to totally overshadow and eliminate whatever business purpose may have remained to the trip.    [W]e do not think that this is really properly considered a deviation case when viewed in this light. The notion that the business mission involved here opened such floodgates as to give decedent the employment-related right to go off on his own for hours upon returning to his home base area in pursuit of bacchanalian pleasures, and in the early morning hours of the next day when he decides to start the last leg of his journey home then re-enter the course of his employment, is so outrageous and fundamentally unreasonable as to be thoroughly ludicrous. Decedent's conduct upon returning to Muskegon not only dwarfed whatever may have remained of the business purpose of the trip but effectively ended it and his workday. 1976 WCABO at 2962-2963. (Emphasis added.) We agree. This is not a situation in which decedent made a brief stop at the bar after his work mission to have one or two drinks before resuming his travel. Decedent had traveled almost 40 miles home before he spent the rest of the night drinking. His deviation lasted for seven to eight hours, while the seminar was only an hour long plus a two- to three-hour round trip. If Bush had gone directly home or back to his office after the seminar, he should have arrived back in Muskegon around 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. (or 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. if he had gone directly back following the cocktail hour sponsored by the bank) during daylight hours. As it was, he began the last leg of his journey home at 3 a.m. in the dark of night through a high crime area while intoxicated and in a belligerent mood. [9] To say that this did not substantially increase the likelihood of injury is to ignore reality. To find that such conduct did not dwarf the business portion of the trip or break the employment-injury nexus is to create a rule which could never be applied. We decline to do either and hold that, as a matter of law, decedent's extended night out on the town after he had almost reached home terminated the business purpose of the trip so that when Bush was killed Wednesday morning he was not covered by the act.