This is a workmen’s compensation case in which the issue is whether there was evidence to support a jury finding that the claimant had “good cause” for her failure to file a claim within six months after the date of her injury. Mrs. Moronko, the petitioner, fell down an escalator and was injured while working as a saleslady at J. J. Newberry’s on May 25, 1965. Although the six month statutory period for filing a workmen’s compensation claim expired November 25, 1965, Mrs. Moronko did not file her claim with the Industrial Accident Board until January 12, 1966.
After Mrs. Moronko received her injury, Newberry’s compensation carrier and the respondent, Consolidated Mutual Insurance Company, began paying $30.00 weekly benefits to Mrs. Moronko, and continued to do so until December 14, 1965. There is testimony in the record that an agent of the respondent made representations to Mrs. Moronko during this time that she “ * * * [shouldn’t] worry, everything is taken care of.”
At trial, the jury answered affirmatively special issues which found that Mrs. Moron-ko relied upon those representations and the weekly payments as proof that her claim had been filed. Other special issues found that his reliance constituted good cause for her failure to file her claim “ * * * up until the time the same was filed.” After the answers to the issues were returned, *847 the trial court rendered judgment for petitioner for total and permanent incapacity.
The Houston Court of Civil Appeals reversed and remanded the cause.
The petitioner, Mrs. Moronko, contends that there was evidence to support the jury finding that she had good cause to delay filing her claim until January 12, 1966.
The general rule in determining whether a claimant for workmen’s compensation meets the burden of proof in showing that there was “good cause” for a delay past the statutory filing period was stated by this Court in Hawkins v. Safety Casualty Co.,
“The term ‘good cause’ for not filing a claim for compensation is not defined in the statute, but it has been uniformly held by the courts of this state that the test for its existence is that of ordinary prudence, that is, whether the claimant prosecuted his claim with that degree of diligence that an ordinarily prudent person would have exercised under the same or similar circumstances. Consequently, whether he has used the degree of diligence required is ordinarily a question of fact to be determined by the jury or the trier of facts. It may be determined against the claimant as a matter of law only when the evidence, construed most favorably for the claimant, admits no other reasonable conclusion."207 S.W.2d 370 , 372.
In Texas Employers Ins. Assn. v. Fowler,
In Fowler, the court simply said that:
“It appears, therefore, that the process of filing the claim for additional compensation for the injury of March 5, 1936, really extended over a period of some twenty two days. Correspondence with the Board was begun on the day following that upon which appellee was informed of the real facts as now claimed by him and seems to have been conducted with reasonable promptness. Considering these facts, we cannot agree with appellant that the record is devoid of any excuse for the delay in filing formal claim immediately following January 12, 1938, * *140 S.W.2d 545 , 552.
In Hawkins v. Safety Casualty Co.,
The Court of Civil Appeals has also held in this case that no issues were submitted to the jury which determined “good cause” over the time the payments stopped and petitioner filed her claim. The Court of Civil Appeals has accordingly remanded the cause.
At trial, the jury found that the weekly payments led the petitioner to believe that her claim had been filed. The jury then answered affirmatively Special Issue No. 13, which read: “Do you find from a preponderance of the evidence that the plaintiff’s belief, if any, constituted good cause, as that term has been defined, for the plaintiff’s failure to file her claim with the Industrial Accident Board up until the time the same was filed?” “Good cause” was defined for the jury by the court as: “ * * such conduct as an ordinarily prudent person would have exercised under the same or similar circumstances.”
In a narrow grammatical sense, it is possible that the jury may have construed in Special Issue No. 13 the subject noun “belief” as restricting the verb’s object, “good cause”, to only that cause emanating from the particular belief induced by the payments. But even with this construction of the issue the reasonableness of her delay until the claim was actually filed would still be included within “good cause” as defined by the court. The jury was deciding whether the petitioner’s conduct was that of an “ordinarily prudent person” in delaying filing until she did; the jury could and did find that the cause of this delay was a belief induced by the payments, but that even after the payments stopped she acted “ordinarily prudent” in waiting to file until she did.
In fact these issues are almost identical to those in the
Fowler
case. There the jury found that the claimant’s belief that his injury was not serious was a cause for a reasonably prudent person to delay the filing of his claim “for such length of time” until it was there filed. In its decision the court first stated that “ * * * it is plain they [the issues] refer to one subject and that is the period of time over which ap-pellee entertained the belief as to the extent of his injuries.”
This must be the judgment in this case. There was evidence before the jury of petitioner’s efforts to file and the jury decided that they showed “ordinarily prudent” action. Considering these facts, we cannot agree that the jury did not weigh as the court directed them the actions of the petitioner as “ordinarily prudent” under the circumstances of her filing.
The judgment of the Court of Civil Appeals is reversed and the judgment of the trial court is affirmed.
