S -25-0515 Kristine Hastreiter, as widow and statutory beneficiary of Thomas Hastreiter, decedent (Appellant) v. Foltz Brothers, Inc., and Farm Bureau Property and Casualty Insurance Company, its workers’ compensation insurer (Appellee)
Appeal from the Workers’ Compensation Court, Judge Julie A. Martin
Attorneys: Raymond P. Atwood, Jr., and Jennifer L. Sturm (Atwood Law, P.C., L.L.O. for Appellant) and Joel D. Nelson and Tindra C. Norris (Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter, PC, LLO)
Workers’ Compensation: Causation
Proceedings Below: Thomas Hastreiter injured his hip at work and later died. The Workers’ Compensation Court awarded benefits for the hip injury, but it found that he died from a pre-existing cancer and that his death was not caused by his workplace injury. On its own motion, the Nebraska Supreme Court ordered this case to be transferred from the docket of the Nebraska Court of Appeals to its docket.
Issues: Appellant assigns the following errors: 1) The Workers’ Compensation Court erred as a matter of law in misapplying the legal standard for causation under Nebraska law by requiring a level of certainty beyond a reasonable degree of medical certainty contrary to Mosher v. Whole Foods Mkt., Inc., 317 Neb. 26, 8 N.W.3d 733 (2024), and Johansen v. Reed, 33 Neb. App. 592, 22 N.W.3d 221 (2025); 2) The Workers’ Compensation Court erred as a matter of law by concluding that the inevitability of Thomas Hastreiter’s death from cancer precluded a finding that the workplace injury was a proximate cause of death, thereby improperly elevating the causation standard and disregarding Nebraska precedent—including Cox v. Fagen Inc., 249 Neb. 677, 545 N.W.2d 80 (1996)—which holds that a work-related injury need only aggravate, accelerate, or combine with the disease to produce the death to be compensable; 3) The Workers’ Compensation Court erred as a matter of law by excluding the decedent’s inability to receive medically indicated cancer treatment—caused solely by his work injury—from falling within the legal scope of ‘hastening death,’ and by introducing an unsupported ‘prolonging life’ category outside Nebraska’s established causation framework. In doing so, the court failed to apply the well-settled principle that to hasten death is to cause it and improperly concluded that the work-related injury was not a proximate cause of death. This misapplication of law disregards Nebraska precedent and undermines the remedial purpose of the Workers’ Compensation Act. Lane v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 209 Neb. 396, 308 N.W.2d 503 (1981); Edmonds v. IBP, Inc., 239 Neb. 899, 479 N.W.2d 754 (1992); Haynes v. Good Samaritan Hosp., 291 Neb. 757, 869 N.W.2d 78 (2015); Mosher v. Whole Foods Mkt., Inc., 317 Neb. 26, 8 N.W.3d 733 (2024); and Prinz v. Omaha Operations LLC, 317 Neb. 744, 11 N.W.3d 641 (2024); 4) Based on these misapplications of Nebraska law, the Workers’ Compensation Court erred in failing to award statutory death benefits and burial expenses to the decedent’s dependent widow, Appellant, pursuant to Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-122 (Reissue 2019), despite uncontroverted evidence from defense’s own oncology expert of compensable death; 5) As a result of the Workers’ Compensation Court’s failure to award proper compensation from on or about September 27, 2022, the court also failed to award an additional fifty percent (50%) in penalty for waiting time pursuant to Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-125(3) (Reissue 2021); and 6) As a result of the Workers’ Compensation Court’s failure to award proper compensation from on or about September 27, 2022, the court also failed to award attorney fees and interest upon the award pursuant to Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-125(4)-(5)