What happened
A man died Monday morning after an accident involving a skid loader on Main Street in Clio, a town of a few dozen people in Wayne County, just north of the Missouri line. Wayne County Sheriff Keith Davis confirmed the death to KCCI and said the accident happened on Main Street on the morning of Monday, September 7. The sheriff said it was not yet clear what caused it. As of Tuesday morning's reporting the man's name had not been released, and no outlet had said whether the skid loader was being used on a job site, at a business, on a farm or on private property. (KCRG; Western Iowa Today)
That is the whole of what has been published, and this article does not pretend otherwise. What follows is written for the family that is now trying to understand what a death like this means legally, because in my experience the questions arrive in the first week whether or not the facts have.
Our condolences
Somebody in or around Clio went out to do a morning's work on Monday and did not come back, and in a town that small there is no one who does not know the family. Our thoughts and prayers are with them, and with the Wayne County deputies and the volunteer responders who were called to a scene like that among neighbors. We hope the coming days bring them the answers the sheriff is still working toward, and the support a community like Clio knows how to give.
Safety context
The skid loader is one of the most useful machines in rural America and one of the most dangerous to the people who run it. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has published a standing alert, Preventing Injuries and Deaths from Skid-Steer Loaders, after investigating a series of fatalities, and the pattern in them is consistent: operators crushed between the lift arms and the frame, pinned between the bucket and the frame, run over, or caught in a rollover. The mechanism is usually the machine's own lift arms or bucket coming down — because an operator climbed out over the side and bumped a control, because a foot pedal was activated while leaning out of the cab, or because someone was working under raised arms without a lift-arm support in place. NIOSH's list of contributing factors reads like a checklist of things that get skipped when a job is routine: safety interlocks bypassed, seat belt off, side screens removed, warning devices inoperable, no procedure for locking out the hydraulics before maintenance.
Work of every kind still kills more than five thousand Americans a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries counted 5,070 fatal work injuries in 2024 — a rate of 3.3 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers, and down 4 percent from the year before. The number is falling. It is still fourteen people a day.
If you run one of these machines, the advice from NIOSH is unglamorous and specific: never leave the seat with the lift arms raised unless the arm supports are locked in; never bypass the seat bar or interlock; keep the side screens on; wear the belt; and never let anyone work under raised arms that are held up only by hydraulics.
The rights of families after an accident like this
Whether the law offers this family anything, and which law, depends on a fact nobody has published: was he working when he died? So this section answers both ways.
If he was working for someone. Iowa's workers' compensation system pays death benefits to a worker's dependents without any need to prove the employer was careless, and the benefits are more substantial than most families expect. Under Iowa Code § 85.31, a surviving spouse and dependent children receive weekly benefits at 80 percent of the worker's average weekly spendable earnings, beginning at the date of death. A surviving spouse receives those benefits for life or until remarriage — and on remarriage, if there are no children still entitled to benefits, two years of benefits are paid in a lump sum. Children receive benefits to age 18, and to age 25 if they are actually dependent, with full-time enrollment in school treated as prima facie proof of dependency; a child who was physically or mentally incapacitated from earning at the time of the injury receives benefits for as long as that incapacity lasts. Separately, under § 85.28, the employer must pay reasonable burial expenses up to twelve times the statewide average weekly wage, on top of everything else. Those are Iowa's rules; if the employment was based across the line in Missouri or Nebraska, a different state's system may apply, and which one pays better is a real question worth asking early. Two things trip families up here. First, "working" is broader than a W-2: a man paid by the day or by the job, a man everyone called a contractor, or a man helping out a neighbor's operation for pay may all be employees for compensation purposes, and that classification is the first fight in many of these cases. Second, the comp insurer's calculation of "average weekly spendable earnings" sets every payment that follows, and it is wrong — usually low — more often than people imagine.
Third-party claims, whether or not he was working. Workers' compensation is generally the family's only remedy against the employer. But Iowa Code § 85.22 expressly preserves the right of the employee — or, in a death, the legal representative — to bring an action for damages against any third party other than the employer whose legal liability caused the injury, while still collecting compensation from the employer. A third-party claim can reach what comp never pays: the family's loss of the person himself, and his conscious pain before death. In a skid-loader death, the honest candidates for that claim are specific. If the lift arms or bucket dropped when they should not have, the manufacturer's design of the controls, the interlocks and the lift-arm supports comes into question, along with any dealer that modified or serviced the machine. If the machine was rented, the rental company's maintenance and the condition of the safety systems on delivery matter. If a general contractor or property owner controlled the site and the way the work was done, that party can bear responsibility that the direct employer does not. And if he was not working at all — a man on his own place, with his own machine — then the workers' compensation half of this page does not apply to his family, and any claim stands or falls entirely on whether someone else's product or conduct caused the machine to do what it did. § 85.22 also gives the comp insurer a subrogation interest in a third-party recovery, and requires any settlement to be memorialized with the Workers' Compensation Commissioner; how that lien is handled changes what a family actually keeps.
None of that is a statement about what happened on Main Street on Monday. It is a description of the questions, and every one of them depends on evidence: the machine itself, its controls and hydraulics and interlocks as they were that morning; its maintenance and rental records; whether an arm support was on the machine and whether it was used; who owned the equipment and who controlled the work. A skid loader gets put back into service, repaired or sold within days of an accident unless someone asks that it not be. Iowa generally allows two years to bring an action under Iowa Code § 614.1(2), but the machine will not wait two years.
Learn more about your rights: if this touches your family, it may help to read about how workers' compensation works when someone is hurt or killed on the job, about what death benefits a family is owed and how they are calculated, and about when a wrongful death claim exists alongside a compensation claim.
How I help families in crisis
A family in Clio this week is dealing with a sheriff's investigation, a funeral, and — if he was working — an insurance carrier that will call before the week is out. My job is to take that off their shoulders: to find out whether there is a compensation claim and open it correctly, with the wage figure checked rather than accepted; to send the preservation letter that keeps the skid loader out of service and unrepaired until it has been examined; to find out who owned the machine, who maintained it and who controlled the work, because that is where any third-party claim lives; and to deal with every adjuster so that nobody grieving has to.
And it means telling the family the truth. Sometimes the answer after all that is that a good man died doing his own work on his own land with his own machine and there is no one to hold responsible. A family deserves to hear that straight, from someone who actually looked, rather than to assume it because nobody ever did.
Over my career I have recovered more than $23 million for injured people and grieving families, earned countless five-star reviews from clients and endorsements from fellow attorneys, and been honored as part of a personal injury team named Best of Omaha in 2025 and 2026.
If this is your family, call whenever you are ready and we will figure out together what applies — you will not be charged for the conversation, you will owe nothing when it ends, and if there is a case I am paid only from what I recover for you.
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Frank Younes
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