Iowa Supreme Court reinstates co-employee immunity, reversing a $2.84M gross-negligence verdict over a fatal quarry fall

Iowa's high court has narrowed the path around the workers' compensation exclusive-remedy bar, holding that a co-employee cannot be sued for gross negligence absent proof of actual knowledge of the specific hazard that caused the injury. In Griffith v. Kulper, No. 24-0097, filed February 6, 2026 and amended April 14, 2026, the Iowa Supreme Court vacated a Court of Appeals decision, reversed a Benton County district court judgment entered on a jury verdict, and remanded the case for dismissal with prejudice. Justice Waterman wrote for a unanimous court.

The suit arose from a fatal workplace accident. According to the opinion, Michael Griffith, a novice stockpiler at Wendling Quarries' Garrison quarry, died on January 8, 2020 after falling through an open catwalk gate into a lime surge hopper, where the lime buried him; the medical examiner ruled the cause of death asphyxiation. A post-accident inspection found that the metal linchpins designed to secure the gate were missing and had been replaced with a strip of metal wire. Griffith's widow, Brea Griffith — individually, as administrator of his estate, and on behalf of the couple's minor child — and his father, Brian Griffith, sued three co-employees for gross negligence under Iowa Code section 85.20(2). The case went to trial against supervisor Travis Galloway and safety and environmental director John Kulper, and a jury awarded roughly $2.84 million in damages. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed; the Supreme Court granted further review.

The court framed the dispute as a question of which kind of knowledge the gross-negligence exception demands. Citing Walker v. Mlakar and Thompson v. Bohlken, the opinion sets out the three elements a plaintiff must prove to establish a co-employee's gross negligence under section 85.20: (1) knowledge of the peril to be apprehended; (2) knowledge that injury is a probable, as opposed to a possible, result of the danger; and (3) a conscious failure to avoid the peril. The court reiterated that actual knowledge of the specific peril is required at the first and third elements, and that constructive knowledge — what a defendant should have known or would have discovered on inspection — is insufficient. As the opinion put it, "it is theoretically and factually impossible for an employee to 'consciously fail to avoid' a peril if the employee did not actually know of it."

Applying that standard, the court found the record lacked evidence that either defendant actually knew the pins were missing or the gate was unsecured. Galloway, the opinion states, performed only a cursory drive-by inspection on the morning of the accident, viewing the repositioned hopper from his vehicle by the glow of his headlights without climbing up to check the gate or its linchpins; Kulper was not at the Garrison quarry that day. The court noted that no one had fallen into the hopper since 1996, before safety rails were installed. A jury could find Galloway's inspection negligent, the court wrote, but "our precedent requires actual knowledge of the peril, not merely a failure to inspect that would have led to the peril's discovery," and "[w]e do not impute to co-employees the knowledge they would have gained from an inspection." The court held the Court of Appeals had impermissibly relied on the defendants' constructive knowledge, conflating it with the actual-knowledge requirement.

The opinion situates the holding within the workers' compensation grand bargain. The court restated that Iowa Code chapter 85 is "an injured worker's exclusive remedy against an employer or coemployee," and that section 85.20 extends statutory tort immunity to co-employees subject only to a narrow exception for gross negligence. Concluding that the plaintiffs failed to clear that high bar, the court held that "the death benefits provided under Iowa's workers' compensation statute are the plaintiffs' exclusive remedy for Griffith's fatal on-the-job accident."