Everything that could go wrong probably has gone wrong for Larry Cook.

A former driver for Tulsa-based Arrow Trucking, Cook said he stands to lose everything if his luck doesn’t turn around soon since being hurt on the job in October 2009.

Cook said his “nightmare” started back on October 29, 2009, when he was instructed by his former company, Arrow Trucking, to pick up a load of empty trailers in Los Angeles and haul them to a terminal in Phoenix.

He said a wrecker service was stacking the trailers when Cook noticed that one wasn’t lining up quite right. He told the wrecker operator to stop so he could climb up and fix the problem.

“Once I got it situated, I hollered down to the wrecker operator to ease it down and something either slipped or broke, I don’t know which. But the trailer hit me in the head and the next thing I know I am on the ground and medics are working on me and I am being taken by ambulance to the hospital,” Cook told Land Line recently.

After about 20 hours in the emergency room, Cook, who suffered a head wound and two bulging discs in his neck, was released from the hospital. He took a cab back to his truck, where he then set out on his six and-a-half hour trek back to his home near Phoenix.

“Arrow (Trucking) had someone pick up my load, but I had to drive myself back – in a neck brace – to my home in Arizona,” he said.

Cook said once home, he called Arrow Trucking, who was self-insured and had an in-house workers compensation department.

The news he received was not good. Cook said a claims adjuster told him he needed to hop on a Greyhound bus and head back to Tulsa for treatment. The company would not pay for out-of-state treatment.

“At that time I could barely sit in the car to and from my doctor’s office and they wanted me to sit on a bus for 1,100 miles back to Tulsa – I just couldn’t imagine doing that,” Cook said.

His doctor in Arizona also sent a statement to Arrow Trucking that he was in no condition to travel until further tests were done to determine the full extent of his injuries.

“The adjuster kept telling me the only way we can pay the claim is to go to a Tulsa doctor, which I couldn’t do, so they kept jacking me around on not paying for anything up until the day they closed their doors,” he said.

Arrow Trucking shuttered operations just before Christmas, stranding drivers and equipment out on the highways without notice.

He has received some support from a trucker assistance group known as Trucker Charity Inc. Currently, Cook said he is receiving government assistance from the state of Arizona. But he has had no other income since October 2009 and is behind on his rent, car payment and medical bills from the accident in California. To make matters worse, his wife had two heart attacks in August 2009 and has no income coming in at the present time.

On Tuesday, Feb. 2, Cook said he was referred to a surgeon who may have to remove one of the bulging discs in his neck.

Up until a few days ago, Cook said still had hope that he would receive some compensation from Arrow Trucking stemming from being hurt on the job. That’s because his former company had a $2.35 million bond and former Arrow Trucking attorney Jay McAtee was hired by the state to pay Arrow Trucking’s outstanding workers compensation claims.

Cook said his Tulsa-based attorney called him with the news that there were “at least 90 claims ahead of us and money was going fast.”

The Tulsa World interviewed one former claims worker who said “there was a closet that had a waist-high stack of bills and claims in it.” However, another former employee stated it was “more like a file room” than a closet.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Cook said. “I told the wife that this latest news is just another stab in the gut with a knife from Arrow (Trucking) and every day they keep twisting it in a little harder,” he said.

– By Clarissa Kell-Holland, staff writer
clarissa_kell-holland@landlinemag.com