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