SIGABRT (signal 6) after a job is killed by the Linux OOM killer

We have a situation where certain memory-heavy tasks will cause our dedicated server to run out of memory and trigger the OOM killer.
The killer terminates the Resque job (which is fine) with a SIGKILL, but it also breaks Resque for any subsequent jobs (not so fine).

To replicate this issue I created a Resque job that purposely eats up all all available RAM and causes an OOM and gets reaped.
After it's reaped all subsequent tasks fail like this:

Strangely, the Workers tab for the worker in question shows this:

This doesn't make sense to me because all 24 of those tasks very much failed (and their failure shows up on the Failures tab)
Also, why is there a heartbeat? The PID should be dead, right?

I was hoping for some guidance on this issue. Right now we are thinking of setting up a cron to check dmesg for "process killed" and restarting Resque, but that seems like a dirty solution.

I am using version 2.2 of Resque.

Thanks!

Start by reproducing the memory-heavy Resque job on Linux and observe the worker after the OOM killer terminates it. Investigate why subsequent jobs fail while the Workers tab still shows a heartbeat, using the reported Failures and worker status as the completion criteria.