NJ Cops | Page 85

event must be objectively capable of causing a disabling mental injury to a reasonable person in similar circumstances. Before the Supreme Court, it was found that the Board, “went astray in this case in failing to recognize that once a member has experienced a qualifying incident – a ‘terrifying or horror-inducing event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a similarly serious threat to the physical integrity of the member or another person’ – the objective reasonableness standard of Patterson has been met and only the Richardson factors remain to be satisfied.” Id. at 33 (emphasis added). The Supreme Court ruled that objective reasonableness is satisfied simply by experiencing a qualifying incident. We recently prevailed in pension appeal on that issue in which an officer was denied an Accidental Disability Pension. In this case, the officer was called to serve a high-risk search warrant with a county SWAT team. The team broke down the door with a battering ram; half of the team went upstairs, while the officer’s half went to finish checking the first floor. When he entered the kitchen, he heard a gunshot in his immediate vicinity, and he was hit with plaster and drywall debris. He realized that he was a step away from where the bullet had lodged into the floor. It was later discovered that the shot he heard was an accidental discharge from an officer upstairs, but at the time, the petitioner thought he had come under hostile fire from the suspects. The officer developed PTSD as a direct result of the incident. The Pension Board denied the application for accide