He certified he could work full-time – while claiming he couldn't work at all
An Alabama court has denied total disability benefits to an injured worker who continued finding and holding jobs for years after his workplace accident.
The decision, handed down on February 27, 2026 by the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, carries a straightforward message for HR professionals managing workers' compensation claims: what an injured employee actually does after getting hurt matters just as much as what they say about their condition.
The case centered on Wesley Dean, a brick mason employed by BISCO Refractories, Inc., who was seriously injured on the job in February 2019 when a piece of equipment knocked him off a platform, sending him 12 to 14 feet to the ground. He fractured his lower spine and his left heel. It was, by any measure, a severe accident.
What followed, however, told a more complicated story. Shortly after the accident, Dean returned to work in a sedentary office capacity. After reaching maximum medical improvement in May 2019, he resumed working as a brick mason. During periods of no work, he applied for unemployment benefits five times, each time certifying that he was physically able to work full-time in his trade. In November 2021, he applied for a job at Walmart as an order filler – a physically demanding role requiring bending, twisting, lifting up to 60 pounds, and extended periods of standing and walking – and confirmed he could meet all its requirements. He ended up working as a forklift operator instead. He earned nearly $40,000 in 2022. By 2023, he was back doing part-time brick mason work through his union.
Yet in June 2025, a trial court awarded Dean over $226,000 in accrued disability benefits plus nearly $667 a week in ongoing payments, finding him permanently and totally disabled and incapable of any gainful employment.
The appellate court was unconvinced. The record showed that Dean had consistently found and held jobs, earned meaningful wages across several years, and had never presented any evidence showing his condition had deteriorated to the point of making him unable to work within his established physical limitations. His own occupational therapist, who had evaluated his physical capacity back in 2019, confirmed before trial that his assessment had not changed – Dean could still handle light-duty work and some medium-duty tasks.
Alabama law sets a high bar for permanent total disability. It is not enough to show that a worker can no longer do the specific job they held before getting hurt. The law requires proof that the person cannot secure any gainful employment at all. Dean, the court found, had not met that standard. The judgment was reversed and the case sent back to the trial court.
For HR teams, the case is a useful reminder of how important thorough documentation is across the full arc of a workers' compensation claim. The details that ultimately undermined Dean's case – his unemployment applications, his Walmart employment records, his earnings history, his own statements about being able to work – were all part of the documentary record, and none of it was disputed.
That kind of evidence does not appear by accident. It is the product of consistent recordkeeping, attentive claims management, and an understanding that what happens after a workplace injury, sometimes years after, can be just as legally significant as the injury itself.
The ruling also highlights a tension that HR professionals encounter regularly: the gap between how an employee describes their condition and what the objective record actually shows. Dean testified to constant, worsening pain that made sustained work difficult. The court did not dismiss that testimony outright, but it found that the evidence of his continued employment simply could not be squared with a finding of total inability to work.
For employers managing long-running workers' compensation matters, that evidentiary gap is worth watching closely – and documenting carefully from day one.
