The Mystery of the Amazon Driver Who Was Delivered a Beating

Can You Solve the Case?

A workers’ compensation case involving an Amazon driver who was involved in two road rage incidents in the space of several minutes exposes the truth about fighting on the job, and when the resulting injuries might be compensable.

In Part I of this article, you learned what happened in this case. See if you identified the clues and guessed the ending.

Part II

The Clues and the Conclusion

If you thought the video footage didn’t establish that he was saying or doing anything that would have justified the SUV driver punching him, you agreed with the court in Avilla v. Workers’ Compensation Commission, No. 2-25-0093WC (Ill. Ct. App. 01/27/26), which held that injuries arose out of the claimant's employment.

The court rejected the employer’s aggressor defense, citing the following clues:

• Because the videos contained no sound, there was no way of knowing what the claimant said to the other driver just before he was punched. Thus, the employer didn’t demonstrate that the claimant said anything threatening enough to justify the SUV driver in throwing the first punch. Had he done so, that might have shown he was the aggressor.
• When the claimant initially left his truck, he had his arms at his side and was not in a physically provocative stance. Nevertheless, immediately after the men stood face to face, the other driver punched him. “Thus, it was the other driver who chose to escalate the fight from a verbal altercation to a physical assault,” the court said. Further, given how quickly he was punched, the claimant would not have had time to make a threat when the two were face to face.
• The other men instigated the second fight without justification. So, even if the claimant was the aggressor in the first incident, he was not in the second one. “[B]ecause the claimant sustained his injuries during the second incident while he was performing his job duties, ... his injuries arose out of his employment."

The appeals court affirmed the trial court’s ruling, which reversed the Commission’s denial of the claim.

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