Court Opinion

ID: 9760083
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 00:40:13.448027+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:08.214912
License: Public Domain

On Appellant’s Motion for Rehearing
Appellant says that Margarito Perez was also an employee of appellee and that he and Mr. Crawford and his son, who were admitted employees, are sufficient to bring appellee under the Workmen’s Compensation Act.
We did not discuss the status of Margarito Perez as an employee of appellee in our original opinion. We should have done so even though while eleven pages of appellant’s brief is devoted to argument that the wife of appellee was an employee under the Act the following is the whole argument pertaining to Margarito Perez :
“There was direct and positive testimony that on occasions in the past while defendant was working plaintiff and his son Freddie Crawford, he also worked as employees in his mattress factory two persons, one of them named Margarito Perez and the other named Speedy or Alfie Wagner. (S.F. pp. 58-59.) This evidence alone was sufficient to have required the submission of the three employee issue.”
Referring to the statement of facts we find that appellant testified that he had worked for appellee for more than a year prior to his injury and “During that time that fellow Margarito Perez worked part time * *
“I was back there in the gin and I couldn’t see everything that Margarito Perez did. I was enclosed back there. What I saw him doing, when he came in there, I believe it was garbage day, the day to clean up the trash. He cleaned up the gin at that time and took out some baskets of trash out of the gin while I was there. That is how come me to see him, and I guess otherwise I wouldn’t have seen him, because my job was inside the gin.”
It was incumbent on appellant to show that appellee had three or more employees as defined by the Act on the date of his injury in order to show that appellee came within its provisions. Sec. 2, Art. 8306, V.A.C.S. See Evans v. Phipps, 152 Tex. 487, 259 S.W.2d 723.
The above testimony is, in our opinion, wholly insufficient to raise the issue that Perez was an employee of appellee at such time.
The motion is overruled.
Motion overruled.