Brassinga

The Mountain View, Palo Alto and Los Altos Police Departments each had a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team. In order to ensure an adequate response to “incidents,” the three departments cooperated to form the “North County Regional” SWAT team (hereafter the Regional Team) which was composed of all three departments’ SWAT teams. The Regional Team trained together and responded to incidents as a single team, although the members of the Regional Team remained employed by their individual departments.

Regional Team training exercises often utilized the services of “role players.” During a Regional Team training exercise, Theodore Brassinga, a Palo Alto reserve police officer who was not a SWAT team member but was assigned to serve as a role player, was shot to death by Greg Acton, a Mountain View police officer who was a Regional Team member. Plaintiffs, Brassinga’s heirs, filed a wrongful death action against Mountain View and Acton. Mountain View asserted as an affirmative defense that workers’ compensation benefits were the exclusive remedy because either Mountain View was Brassinga’s “special employer” at the time of his death or the Regional Team was the “special…