Nurse’s Widower Loses $500,000 Benefits Suit Over Drug Injection

Life Insurance Co. of North America properly denied $500,000 in accidental death benefits to the husband of a registered nurse who died after injecting herself with a cocktail of unprescribed narcotics, the Eighth Circuit ruled Tuesday.

LINA reasonably interpreted a policy exclusion for the “voluntary ingestion” of unprescribed drugs to encompass the nurse’s death by self-injection, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held in a panel opinion by Judge Bobby E. Shepherd.

The court’s decision turned on the meaning of the word “ingestion.” The nurse’s widower, Jay Richmond, argued that ingestion meant only oral intake and ...