Your wife may have a claim, but the ugly part is this: in Montana, a psychological injury without a physical injury is where insurers start playing hot potato.

And if she owns the business, the first question is even more basic than that.

Was she actually covered under the business's workers' comp policy?

The owner issue is where this goes sideways fast

A lot of small business owners in Butte assume "the company has coverage" means everybody has coverage.

Not always.

Montana generally requires workers' comp for employees. But owners, partners, LLC members, and corporate officers can be treated differently depending on how the policy was set up and whether they elected coverage for themselves.

That matters here because your wife is not just another employee behind a desk. She's the owner. She has five people depending on her. If she's the one who saw a fatal incident in the shop, on a job site, or during a delivery run off Harrison Avenue or out toward the industrial stretch near I-90, the workers' comp carrier may be trying to deny the claim by saying she was excluded as an owner.

That's argument number one.

Argument number two is the mental-injury fight.

Montana does not make these claims easy

If someone breaks an arm at work, everybody knows what bucket that goes in.

Debilitating anxiety, panic attacks, nightmares, and not being able to walk back into the building after watching someone die? Insurance companies act like that's fog.

In Montana, "mental-mental" claims - psychological injuries not tied to a physical injury - are often heavily disputed. Carriers love to say it's stress, grief, burnout, or a personal condition instead of a work injury.

But witnessing a sudden fatal workplace accident is not normal job stress. It is a specific traumatic event.

That distinction matters.

If she now cannot run payroll, cannot supervise staff, cannot drive in from Anaconda without shaking, cannot even pass the business without spiraling, that is not the same thing as "work has been hard lately."

Why three insurers are probably all dodging

This is usually what's happening:

• the workers' comp carrier says she isn't covered as an owner, or says the condition is not a compensable work injury;
• the business liability carrier says liability insurance is for claims against the business, not for the owner's trauma;
• a third carrier - commercial auto, premises, contractor, or another employer's insurer - says there's no direct bodily injury claim by her, so they owe nothing.

Each one is hoping the other two can run out the clock.

The adjuster doesn't give a damn that five employees are waiting to see whether the business survives spring.

What she may actually be entitled to

If she elected workers' comp coverage for herself, the main path is usually workers' comp benefits tied to the traumatic event. That can mean medical treatment, wage-loss benefits if she cannot work, and coverage for mental health care that is properly documented and connected to the incident.

If she did not elect owner coverage, then workers' comp may be blocked for that reason alone.

That does not automatically end everything.

If some outside party caused the fatal event - a delivery company, subcontractor, property owner, equipment company, drunk driver, another business on site - she may have a third-party claim separate from workers' comp. That is where pain, emotional distress, and broader losses can become part of the fight, but only if another legally responsible party exists.

That's the split people miss in Butte all the time: workers' comp is one lane, third-party liability is another, and owner status can blow up the first lane before it even starts.

The evidence that usually decides this

Not a dramatic statement. Paper.

The strongest proof is usually the election-of-coverage documents, the workers' comp declarations page, the first report of injury, the incident report, and the early medical records.

Those first mental health records matter more than people realize. If the chart says "work stress" in one place and never clearly states she witnessed a fatal workplace accident, the insurer will drive a truck through that gap. Around Butte, where businesses are small and everybody tries to keep moving, owners often wait too long to get that documented because they're worried about staff, vendors, and making rent.

That delay helps the carriers.

If the accident happened near the business yard, in a service bay, on a warehouse floor, or during a run over those steep grades where I-90 bends through the pass west of town, the timeline needs to be nailed down cleanly: what happened, who died, who insured what, whether your wife was acting as an owner-employee, and when her symptoms made her unable to function.

If three insurers are pointing fingers, the real question is not "can they all deny her?"

It's which one is lying about being first in line.