The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday reversed $575,668 in wrongful-death damages awarded to the family of a Louisiana welder who fatally overdosed months after a workplace accident.
The worker’s ingestion of “street” fentanyl mixed with xylazine constituted an unforeseeable, superseding cause breaking the chain of causation from his on-the-job injuries, the appeals court ruled.
As documented in Bommarito v. Belle Chasse Marine Transportation LLC, Bosit Bommarito III, a welder for Belle Chasse Land Transportation, was injured while helping construct walkways on a Mississippi River launch site. According to the record, Mr. Bommarito was acting as a rigger during a lift involving a crane mounted on a barge. The hooks used for the lift, designed in-house and attached to the barge’s crane rigging, lacked required safety latches. When the load was lifted too high, one hook slipped loose and struck Mr. Bommarito in the face, causing him to fall up to 12 feet.
He suffered a fractured eye socket, a concussion and cervical disc injury requiring emergency surgery and he was later diagnosed with a torn labrum and additional orbital trauma that would require more procedures. Over four months he was prescribed various opioids, including oxycodone, fentanyl and tramadol. His mother, a nurse, testified that after his last prescription ran out, he was “still experiencing an unacceptable level of pain” while awaiting follow-up medical appointments.
The next day, she found Mr. Bommarito unresponsive. A pathologist determined he died from an overdose of illicit fentanyl mixed with xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer not approved for human use. Testing showed more than six times the lethal level of fentanyl in his system.
The district court found Belle Chasse liable for vessel negligence under the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, concluding that the defective hook was an appurtenance of the barge, which caused the injury, and that Mr. Bommarito’s subsequent death was a foreseeable result of his work-related pain and medical treatment.
The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit disagreed, in part. While upholding part of the lower court’s ruling, the panel held that the overdose severed the causal chain.
The court emphasized there was no evidence Mr. Bommarito had ever used illegal drugs before the ingestion and that the “street fentanyl-xylazine cocktail” represented an “independent, intervening act” not reasonably foreseeable by his employer. Although ruling that the workplace injury contributed to his pain, the court concluded that illegally obtained fentanyl was a superseding cause as a matter of law.
The ruling preserves liability findings for the underlying workplace accident but requires the district court to recalculate damages, excluding those tied to the fatal overdose.