Background
Sharon Jackson worked as a kitchen worker for Monroe County Council on Aging, spending her shifts on her feet washing dishes and sealing prepared meals onto trays and carts. On October 4, 2024, she arrived for work at 6:00 a.m. and began her meal-sealing duties. At some point during her shift, her right knee “locked up” and she experienced severe pain, requiring a coworker to retrieve a wheelchair so she could leave the building. She clocked out approximately one hour after arriving.
Jackson sought emergency care the same day, where she denied any specific injury and reported pre-existing lower-leg muscle cramping. Subsequent visits to a family practice also reflected denials of a known injury. On October 18, 2024, Jackson submitted a written statement describing the incident; that statement said she was “standing still sealing meals” when her knee locked up. An October 2024 MRI revealed a medial meniscal tear. At a later deposition, Jackson added that her knee injury resulted from twisting when she placed meals in a warming oven and then turned back to her workstation—a detail absent from her earlier written account.
The claim administrator denied the claim, finding no injury in the course of and resulting from employment. The Workers’ Compensation Board of Review affirmed. Jackson appealed to the Intermediate Court of Appeals of West Virginia.
The Court’s Holding
The ICA affirmed the Board. The central issue was whether Jackson’s knee injury arose from an employment-related risk rather than a personal or “neutral” risk. West Virginia’s Supreme Court of Appeals established a four-category risk framework in Hood v. Lincare Holdings, Inc., 249 W. Va. 108 (2023), which the ICA applied here. Under Hood, a neutral risk—one not distinctively associated with the employment environment—requires the claimant to show either that the injury resulted from an increased quantity of risk because of the employment, or that the risk was peculiar to the job.
The Board found, and the ICA agreed, that Jackson was simply standing still at her workstation when her knee locked up. Standing still is a commonplace, neutral activity that most people perform daily regardless of where they work. Jackson did not demonstrate that her kitchen job exposed her to greater quantities of that risk than the general population faces, nor that any condition of the workplace—such as a slippery floor, an awkward work surface, or repetitive knee-straining movement—was the specific cause. The Board drew factual support from Jackson’s own contemporaneous written statement (standing still while sealing) over her later deposition account (twisting at the oven).
Applying the “clearly wrong” standard of review for Board findings under West Virginia Code § 23-5-12a(b), the ICA deferred to the Board’s weighing of the evidence and found no basis for reversal.
Key Takeaways
- After Hood v. Lincare Holdings (2023), West Virginia workers’ compensation claimants cannot prevail solely by showing that an injury happened at work; if the injury-causing activity is a neutral risk—one equally common away from work—the claimant must also show increased employment-related risk or a workplace-specific hazard.
- Standing still in a kitchen does not, by itself, create an employment-specific increased risk under West Virginia workers’ comp law; absent evidence of a slippery surface, an ergonomic hazard, or a job-specific physical demand that contributed to the knee failure, the claim fails the Hood risk test.
- Contemporaneous written statements carry substantial evidentiary weight in workers’ comp proceedings; a claimant who describes the accident one way in an initial statement and a more favorable way at a later deposition faces skepticism from the Board, and that credibility call is entitled to deference on appeal.
- Initial emergency room presentations that fail to mention a work injury—and that attribute symptoms to a pre-existing condition—are significant evidence that a claim administrator and Board may properly rely on to deny compensability.
Why It Matters
Jackson v. Monroe County Council on Aging continues the ICA’s work of applying the Hood risk framework to the range of workplace injury claims that arise in West Virginia. The decision is a useful illustration of the neutral-risk category in its clearest form: a body part that gives out spontaneously while an employee is performing a routine, sedentary-type task does not automatically become a compensable injury just because it happens at work. Claimants whose injuries follow this pattern—no impact, no fall, no identifiable workplace hazard, just a sudden onset of pain during unremarkable activity—face a meaningful evidentiary burden under West Virginia law.
For West Virginia employers and workers’ compensation practitioners, the case reinforces the value of investigating the circumstances of unexplained musculoskeletal injuries thoroughly at the outset. Evidence that a claimant did not report a work injury at the initial medical visit, combined with a history of pre-existing symptoms, can be dispositive. Claimants’ counsel should ensure their clients provide detailed, accurate, and consistent accounts of exactly what physical movement or workplace condition precipitated the injury—and should make sure those accounts appear in the earliest medical records, not just at deposition.