Survivor faces benefits battle Insurer fights claim by van crash victim

BANGOR – An insurance company is fighting the payment of workers’ compensation benefits to the lone survivor of the van accident that killed 14 foreign workers Sept. 12 in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

The dispute will be aired at a mediation hearing with the state’s Workers’ Compensation Board in early December. It is one of numerous issues arising from the accident that are likely to be debated by lawyers in Maine and Florida in the coming weeks.

Liberty Mutual is acknowledging that the survivor, Edilberto Morales-Luis, was involved in a work-related accident, according to his attorney, John Sedgewick of Lewiston.

But the insurer is questioning whether Morales-Luis became disabled – either physically or emotionally – by the accident, which took the lives of his uncle, three cousins and 10 others who had come to northern Maine to thin trees for Seven Islands Land Management Co.

“Liberty Mutual is demanding proof that he’s disabled,” said Sedgewick on Tuesday, noting that it could be difficult to get Morales-Luis to a doctor in Guatemala because there aren’t many physicians in that country.

The amount of benefits Morales-Luis would be paid would be based on an average weekly wage formula used by the Workers’ Compensation Board. It’s estimated it would amount to about $250 a week.

Liberty Mutual spokesman John Cusolito said it is the company’s policy not to comment on claims because they are confidential.

Morales-Luis was one of 15 Guatemalans and Hondurans traveling in a passenger van that was being driven at a high rate of speed on a logging road. At a press conference the day after the accident, Morales-Luis said he heard a tire blow out as the van approached a one-lane bridge. The vehicle fishtailed, then flipped into the Allagash River, landing on its roof in 15 feet of water.

The lone survivor said he escaped through a broken back window, reached the surface of the water, then sank again before he could get ashore. He climbed onto the bridge, looked down and saw blood bubbling up through the water from the spot where the van went down.

On Tuesday, Sedgewick said that when Morales-Luis was in the water, he felt the arms of other passengers on him as they tried to get out of the sinking van.

Drew Ketterer, an attorney for Evergreen Forestry Services, the company that contracted with the foreign workers, said Tuesday that after the accident, Morales-Luis refused medical treatment. At his employers’ insistence, he said, the survivor went to a local hospital, where he was X-rayed, and doctors found “no broken bones.”

He said Evergreen does not have any control over what claims its insurance company decides to pay or contest.

In the days after the accident, Morales-Luis helped state and foreign officials identify the remains of his friends and their belongings.

Since the accident, Morales-Luis has received about $600 in back pay from Evergreen Forestry Services, and he has been reimbursed for more than $1,400 he lost in the water when the van sank, Ketterer said.

Morales-Luis has said he has not yet received the $6,850 collected for him in the Migrant Relief Fund set up in Caribou after the accident.

Morales-Luis returned home to Guatemala more than a week after the accident. His work visa would have allowed him to stay with his employer through Nov. 2. In Guatemala, he has been complaining about a sore shoulder, headaches and nightmares.

About a week after the accident, Liberty Mutual agreed to pay “lost-time” benefits to the dependents of the 14 men who died. That amounts to between $250 and $300 a week for 500 weeks, along with burial expenses totaling $7,000 each.

Sedgewick, who said he is working pro bono with a Florida law firm, wants Liberty Mutual to do more than just pay Morales-Luis workers’ compensation benefits.

The attorneys involved want the insurance company and Evergreen Forestry Services to show how they calculated the average weekly wages for each of the victims. That average was used to determine lost-time benefits.

Sedgewick said he believes the victims’ families could be entitled to more money than they currently are being paid if that wage formula is shown to be inaccurate.

“I’m going to argue to try to boost the benefits,” he said.

They also want Liberty Mutual to set up “some responsible, legally authorized channel” to get benefits paid to the victims’ families instead of the money being sent through the governments of Honduras and Guatemala.

The lawyers also want the state and the insurance company to recognize a Catholic priest in Florida as the personal representative for each of the families so they have an advocate fighting for them in Maine, and so the representative can get the money to the families.

In Portland, lawyer Stephen Schwartz is working with the same Florida law firm on behalf of 12 of the 14 victims to open a probate court case for their families to administer the estates.

Schwartz said the cases were opened last week “for the purpose of investigating any civil actions that may be appropriate,” including possible wrongful death lawsuits.

A lawyer at the Florida law firm did not return a telephone call for comment, and the priest could not be reached Tuesday.