A widow has won a bitter victory — her husband’s death by electrocution to the genitals has to be revisited by their insurance company.
Paul Martin, 35, was found lying naked from the waist down in his upstate basement in December 2008 after hooking himself up to an electrical contraption made of purple wire with a bare loop on one end.
“The other purple wire ‘handle’ end was held in the victim’s hand, and the center ‘live’ wire appeared to be a possible switch, which was held in his other hand,” said a police report.
Widow Amanda Martin sued The Hartford life-insurance company after it denied her claim for accidental-death benefits because it said her hubby, an electrical engineer, died from “a deliberate act on his part.”
A federal judge in Rochester sided with The Hartford and pulled the plug on Amanda’s suit last year.
But that decision was vacated by the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, which said The Hartford’s stance “would exclude injuries resulting from merely negligent acts, even if the insured did not intend to injure himself.”
The court said The Hartford must reconsider its refusal to pay $81,000 in accidental-death benefits.
Its stated grounds were that Martin’s shocking demise was an “intentionally self-inflicted injury.”
In a sworn affidavit, Amanda Martin said her husband — with whom she had a daughter in 2006 — suffered from hypertension and diabetes, which she believed also left him with erectile dysfunction.
On the morning of his death, a Saturday, the family was planning to go out for breakfast with Paul’s mom and then attend an elementary-school craft show.
But when Amanda got out of bed, her daughter was alone in the living room and Paul was nowhere to be seen.
Amanda checked the basement of their upstate Spencerport home and found Paul lying face-down and not breathing, with “wires attached to him.”
“I tried to move Paul, but got an electrical shock,” she wrote in her affadavit.
After managing to toss the wires aside, Amanda tried to revive Paul with CPR, “but it was too late.”
“What had happened to Paul was a surprise to me,” she wrote.
“I had no idea that Paul might have been involved in such activity.”
Amanda couldn’t be reached yesterday, and her lawyer didn’t return a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for The Hartford said, “Our policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation.”