Court Opinion

ID: 9731647
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:53:26.986588+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:09:28.440328
License: Public Domain

BROWN (G. A.), P. J.
I concur in the result.
To be compensable, Labor Code section 3600 requires that the injury must arise out of and be in the course of the employment. Since the shooting occurred on the job while the petitioner was working, it was indisputably in the course of employment. The sole issue is whether the injury arose out of her employment. “This requirement refers to a causal connection between the employment and the injury.” (California Comp. & Fire Co. v. Workmen’s Comp. App. Bd. (1968) 68 Cal.2d 157, 160 [65 Cal.Rptr. 155, 436 P.2d 67].) “In finding that the injury arose out of the employment, this court held that a sufficient causal connection between the injury and the employment is shown where the employment was a contributory cause of the injury, that where the injury occurs on the employer’s premises while the employee is in the course of his employment the injury also arises out of the employment unless the connection is so remote from the employment that it is not an incident thereof, and that an injury can arise out of the employment even though the employer had no connection with or control over the force which caused the injury.” (Id., at p. 160.)
In this case the petitioner had been employed by Market Basket since 1971. She and Joseph Murphy were married in 1974. They separated, and she filed for dissolution of the marriage in January 1976. The shooting occurred on March 11, 1976. Their marriage was stormy and tumultuous. Joseph Murphy drank and used narcotics and had beaten petitioner on a number of occasions. He had threatened to shoot her while she was working as well as at places other than at work. Murphy was particularly irked at petitioner’s working, his male ego apparently being offended by her steady employment for higher compensation than he was earning. It is clear, however, that he did not want her to work anywhere and that he was obsessed with the idea that she should not be employed. A number of times he threatened to kill petitioner on the job. On a number of these occasions he referred to killing her at the Market Basket. However, Murphy had no known basis for any animosity against Market Basket other than the fact that his wife (petitioner) worked there. Based upon *1004this evidence the trier of fact could reasonably have inferred that Market Basket was the place he had mentioned killing her because that was the only place she had worked during their marriage, and could have also concluded that his express purpose of killing her at work would not have been diminished wherever she was employed. Moreover, Murphy did not start harassing petitioner on the job until she left him and filed for dissolution, giving rise to the clear inferences that the job was the most convenient place where he could find her and that another principal source of his hostility was the fact she had left him and filed the dissolution proceeding.
The rule of Transactron, Inc. v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. (1977) 68 Cal.App.3d 233 [137 Cal.Rptr. 142], cited and relied upon by the workers’ compensation judge and the appeals board as well as the principal opinion, governs herein. The court therein stated: “The role of employment in the shooting is inconsequential when it merely provides a place where the assailant can find the victim. [Citation.] Where the nature of the employee’s duties places her in no particularly dangerous or isolated position, or where the risk of harm is not limited to the place of employment and where the attack occurs on the premises not because the victim was performing the duties of employment at the time of assault but because she merely was there, and where the nature of employment was not part of an assailant’s plan to isolate or trap the victim, the injury does not arise out of the employment. [Citations.]” (Id., at p. 239.)
Mr. Filia, petitioner’s supervisor in the meat cutting department of Market Basket, had become enmeshed in the controversy between petitioner and her husband. He had been a friend of Joe Murphy for five or six years. He saw him approximately three times a week, frequently at home. Murphy communicated to Filia repeated threats to take petitioner’s life if she did not stop working, and a number of times Filia talked to Murphy (apparently successfully) about not taking drastic action against petitioner. Filia testified that after Murphy came to the store on February 11, 1976, approximately a month before the shooting, armed with a weapon, he realized Murphy was going to shoot petitioner. On one occasion Filia was instrumental in having Murphy committed to a hospital for mental treatment. He did not feel that Murphy was mentally normal.
The benefits resultant to Market Basket attributable to this activity by petitioner’s supervisor are manifest as they tended to keep petitioner working without interference from Murphy and undoubtedly contributed *1005somewhat to her peace of mind, thus redounding to the benefit of the employer. As has been pointed out, Filia and the manager of the meat department, Gilly, were told by Murphy at Gilly’s home the night before the shooting of Murphy’s intent to shoot petitioner the next day at the store. Neither Gilly nor Filia told petitioner of the threat. Thus the employer’s representative (Filia), after having assumed a protective stance toward petitioner, failed to warn her of the specific threat of being shot the next day. This combination of circumstances to which the employer’s representative contributed placed petitioner in a special position of danger, resulting in a sufficient employment connection to cause the injury to have arisen out of the employment. (California Comp. & Fire Co. v. Workmen’s Comp. App. Bd., supra, 68 Cal.2d 157.) On this basis only the order should be reversed.
I cannot agree with any other generalized statements as a basis of compensability. Absent some special relationship and circumstances such as those present herein, an employer cannot be held to be lord protector of its employees against vicious personal assaults by third parties arising out of private and personal domestic or other controversies. The fact that the employment of one of the quarreling parties is a cause of the dispute and furnishes the motivation for the attack does not cause the controversy to be any the less private and personal. Nor can a private business be held to have a responsibility to police the private relationships of its employees at the peril of being held responsible for compensation benefits. In the face of such threats, certainly an employer cannot be said to have a duty to transfer an employee or place him on a leave of absence or, as some suggested, to discharge him.1 The employee, not the employer, has the obligation to look out for and resolve the problems and controversies arising out of the employee’s private relationships.
The petition of respondent Market Basket for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied January 24, 1979.

It takes no guesswork to know what the decision of a union grievance committee would be if the employer attempted to justify a discharge of an employee on the ground that someone was threatening to attack the employee on the job.