Midland, Texas Shooting: Your Legal Rights After Eleven People Were Shot
If you are reading this, someone you love was in the path of a gunman in Midland this morning. You may be sitting in the family unification center at Midland Memorial Hospital right now, waiting for a surgeon to come through the doors and tell you whether your husband, your wife, your child, your parent is going to survive. You may be at your kitchen table at two in the morning, unable to close your eyes, trying to understand what just happened to your family and your town. Either way, you are in the right place — not because we can undo what happened on those streets, but because what you do in the next few days will shape whether the people responsible for the conditions that allowed this violence are ever held to account.
Eleven people were shot in Midland, Texas, on the morning of June 12, 2026. One person did not survive. Nine victims were taken to Midland Memorial Hospital — four were in surgery when the first reports went public, and five were listed in stable condition. First responders were dispatched around 8 a.m. to a shooting in southeast Midland. The suspected shooter was trailed through parts of south Midland before a SWAT standoff erupted at the 4600 block of West Wall Street in southwest Midland. Authorities declared the incident resolved shortly before noon and confirmed the suspected shooter was dead. Mayor Lori Blong declined to release the shooter’s identity, the victims’ identities, or any information about what prompted the shooting or whether the victims were targeted.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are trial lawyers who take Texas catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death cases, and we are writing this for you, the family sitting in the waiting room or the person searching at 2 a.m. because someone they love was shot. This page is legal information, not legal advice. Nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship. But everything here is true, it is specific to Texas law, and it is written to give you the knowledge you need to protect your family’s rights at the moment those rights are most vulnerable. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we can tell you is this: the law gives you more power than you think — but that power has an expiration date, and the evidence that proves your case is disappearing right now.
What Happened in Midland on June 12, 2026
The facts as publicly reported are still developing. What we know is this: at approximately 8 a.m. on Friday morning, June 12, 2026, first responders were dispatched to a shooting in southeast Midland. The suspected shooter — identified only as male — moved through parts of south Midland, and the violence spanned multiple locations before culminating at the 4600 block of West Wall Street in southwest Midland, where a SWAT team engaged the shooter in a standoff. The incident was declared resolved shortly before noon. The shooter was confirmed dead.
Midland Memorial Hospital established a family unification center for relatives seeking information about loved ones. Nine victims were being treated there — four in surgery, five in stable condition. At least eleven people were shot in total. One was killed. Mayor Blong provided a statement:
“Our goal here is to reassure you that we have strong response from our local Midland Police Department. We’re gonna be continuing to give you updates as we have confirmed details.”
The mayor did not say what prompted the shooting or whether the victims were targeted. That question — whether this was random or targeted — matters enormously for the legal analysis, but it is an active investigative question, and no one should speculate about it publicly. What we can tell you is that the legal rights of every person shot, and the family of the person who was killed, exist regardless of the shooter’s motive. The question is not whether the shooter was at fault — he was. The question is whether anyone else, whose property or business became the setting for this violence, also bears legal responsibility for failing to prevent it.
Who Can Be Held Legally Responsible for a Mass Shooting in Texas
The shooter is dead. That is the first fact every family confronts, and it is the fact the insurance industry and the defense bar hope will end the conversation. It does not. The shooter’s estate may carry some liability — an intentional-tort claim for battery can be filed against the estate in probate — but the practical reality is that most shooters’ estates have negligible assets. Recovery from the shooter’s estate alone is unlikely to be meaningful.
But the shooter is rarely the only party who answers in a mass-shooting case. Under Texas law, several categories of defendants may bear legal responsibility, and identifying them is the first job of a thorough investigation:
Property and business owners at each shooting location. This is where the real fight lives. If any of the eleven people were shot on commercial property — a store, a parking lot, a business along the shooting route — the owner of that property may owe a duty of reasonable care to the people lawfully on the premises. Under Texas premises law, a property owner who invites the public onto its property for commercial benefit owes those visitors a duty to protect them from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties. That duty is not automatic — it requires proof that the owner knew or should have known about the danger — but where it can be proven, the property owner’s insurance, not the shooter’s empty estate, is where recovery comes from.
Contracted security companies. If a business along the shooting route had hired a security company — for patrols, for surveillance monitoring, for access control — that company may bear its own negligence exposure if it failed to perform the security undertaking it was paid to provide. The Texas Private Security Bureau within the Department of Public Safety regulates licensed security companies, and any contracted security provider at a shooting location faces both regulatory and tort exposure for inadequate performance.
The shooter’s employer, if a workplace connection exists. If the shooter was employed at or connected to any of the shooting locations, the employer may face claims for negligent hiring, retention, or supervision — particularly if the employer knew or should have known of the shooter’s dangerous propensities and failed to act. This requires discovery of employment records and any prior complaints, and it is a theory that becomes available only after investigation reveals the employment relationship.
The gun seller or transferor. If the firearm was provided to the shooter by a party who knew or had reason to know of the shooter’s dangerousness, a negligent-entrustment or illegal-transfer claim may exist. This requires investigation of the firearm’s provenance — who sold it, how it was transferred, what the seller knew — and it is a theory that applies only on specific facts.
The mobile, multi-location nature of this shooting is the single greatest challenge to a premises-liability case. Because the shooter moved across multiple areas of Midland — southeast to south to southwest — the defense will argue that no single property owner could have foreseen a mass-shooting event at its specific location. The plaintiff strategy must counter by showing that foreseeability attaches to the class of criminal harm — violent assault with a firearm — rather than to the specific catastrophic manifestation, and that each location had its own documented risk profile. This is a demanding legal argument under Texas law, but it is not a hopeless one. The success of the entire liability investigation turns on whether prior-incident evidence at any of the shooting locations can be found and preserved before it disappears.
What Texas Wrongful Death and Survival Law Allows Your Family to Recover
Texas has two parallel legal tracks that open when someone is killed by another’s conduct. They are separate claims with separate beneficiaries and separate damages, and a family that walks through only one door leaves money on the table.
The first is the wrongful-death action, which belongs to the surviving family — the spouse, the children, and the parents of the person killed. Under Texas’s Wrongful Death Act, these beneficiaries may recover for the loss of the decedent’s earning capacity, the loss of care and maintenance and counsel the decedent would have provided, the loss of society and companionship, the mental anguish of the survivors, and funeral expenses. In Midland — the heart of the Permian Basin, where oilfield wages are among the highest in the country — the loss of earning capacity for a working-age decedent can be substantial. A roughneck, a frac operator, a wireline hand, a truck driver hauling produced water — these are people whose annual earnings can reach well into six figures, and a forensic economist projects those lost earnings across a full worklife expectancy to produce a number a Midland County jury understands because the jurors work alongside people who earn those wages.
The second is the survival action, which belongs to the estate of the person killed. This claim carries forward what the decedent would have recovered had they survived — the conscious pain and suffering they experienced between the injury and death, plus the medical expenses incurred before death. For a gunshot victim who survived even briefly in conscious agony before dying, this is a separate and significant damages component. Our wrongful death practice handles both tracks together, because the law allows them to be pursued simultaneously, and because a family that pursues only the wrongful-death claim loses the survival claim’s pain-and-suffering recovery entirely.
Texas does not impose a general cap on non-economic damages — pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of society — in personal-injury or wrongful-death cases outside the medical-malpractice context. That is a significant advantage for Texas families. A jury in Midland County can award the full measure of a family’s grief and loss without a statutory ceiling cutting it down. The caveat is that Texas does cap exemplary — punitive — damages, which are available only on a showing of gross negligence: prior notice of a dangerous condition plus conscious indifference to that danger. For any premises defendant, the punitive-damages cap applies, but the compensatory damages — the economic losses and the full non-economic harm — remain uncapped.
The deadline. Texas’s statute of limitations for wrongful death and personal injury generally runs two years from the date of death or injury, under the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. For the families of the person killed on June 12, 2026, the two-year clock generally runs to June 12, 2028. For the ten surviving gunshot victims, the two-year clock on their personal-injury claims runs from the date they were shot. Two years sounds like a long time. It is not. The evidence that proves your case — the surveillance footage, the police body-camera video, the 911 call recordings, the prior-incident reports at shooting locations — is on a much shorter clock, and the defense’s entire strategy is to let that evidence quietly disappear before you ever get to court.
Can a Property Owner Be Liable When a Shooter Opens Fire on Their Premises?
This is the question that decides whether a Midland shooting case has a deep-pocket defendant or whether the families are left pursuing a dead shooter’s empty estate. The answer under Texas law is: yes, but only if the property owner knew or should have known that violent crime was a foreseeable risk on its premises.
Texas premises liability for third-party criminal acts is primarily a common-law doctrine, not a regulatory scheme. There is no federal statute that mandates a specific level of security at most private businesses. The duty arises from the relationship between the property owner and the person on the property: if you are a business invitee — a customer, a shopper, a person lawfully on the property for the business’s commercial benefit — the owner owes you a duty of reasonable care, which includes taking steps to protect you from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties.
The battleground is the word foreseeable. Texas courts require actual or constructive knowledge of prior similar criminal incidents at the premises to establish that a property owner should have foreseen the danger. This is a demanding standard. A property owner does not have to foresee a mass shooting specifically — it has to have had notice that violent crime was a risk at its location, and it has to have failed to take reasonable security measures in response.
For a single-location shooting, the foreseeability analysis focuses on one property. For the Midland shooting, which spanned multiple locations from southeast to southwest, the analysis is fragmented across every property where a victim was shot. This is the defense’s strongest argument: that no single property owner could have foreseen a mass shooting at its specific location. The plaintiff’s counter is that foreseeability attaches to the class of criminal harm — violent assault with a firearm — not to the specific catastrophic manifestation, and that each location had its own documented risk profile that made some level of armed violence foreseeable.
What does “reasonable security” look like? It depends on the property and the risk profile, but it can include: adequate lighting in parking areas, functioning surveillance cameras, security guards or patrols, access-control measures, and — critically — policies and procedures for responding to reports of suspicious activity or prior violent incidents. When a property owner has prior-incident evidence showing a pattern of violent crime at its location and has done nothing — no additional lighting, no security upgrade, no guard, no camera — a jury can find that the owner’s failure was a cause of the harm that followed.
Our premises liability practice investigates these questions property by property, pulling calls-for-service data from the Midland Police Department, Texas DPS incident reports, and civil-litigation databases to build the crime-history profile of each location on the shooting route. That investigation is the foundation of the entire case.
Foreseeability: The Fight That Decides Whether a Property Owner Pays
Here is the thing a generalist lawyer misses and the defense is counting on you not knowing: in a mobile, multi-location mass shooting, the foreseeability argument does not have to win at every location to produce a meaningful recovery. It has to win at one.
If the investigation reveals that even a single business on the shooting route — a store where a victim was shot, a parking lot where the shooter passed through, a commercial property at the 4600 block of West Wall Street — had a documented history of prior violent incidents (armed robberies, assaults, prior calls for police service for violent crime) and had failed to implement adequate security in response, that property owner faces a viable negligent-security claim. And a single viable premises defendant with insurance coverage changes the entire trajectory of the case.
The defense will argue that a mass shooting is inherently unforeseeable — that no property owner can be expected to anticipate a rampage. This argument has surface appeal, especially to a conservative Midland County jury. But it has a structural weakness: Texas law does not require foreseeability of the specific catastrophic event. It requires foreseeability of the class of harm. If a property had prior incidents of armed violence — even if those incidents were smaller, less lethal, different in scale — the argument is that the owner was on notice that armed violence was a risk at its location and should have taken reasonable steps to protect invitees from exactly that class of harm.
The trial strategy is to build the foreseeability case rung by rung, not in a single leap. Medical consensus on the danger of gun violence. The industry’s own security standards for the type of premises. Regulatory data on crime at the location. The defendant’s own manuals or policies. Prior-incident notice — the calls-for-service records, the prior incident reports, the prior civil claims. And the internal communications showing the property owner knew about the risk and chose not to act. Each rung is a separate piece of evidence, and the investigation has to move now, before the records that establish those rungs are legally destroyed.
The Evidence Is Disappearing Right Now — What Families Must Know
This is the section that should keep you awake, not because we want to frighten you, but because the evidence that could prove your case is on a countdown that started the moment the first shot was fired. Every type of evidence in a mass-shooting case has a different clock, and every clock is shorter than two years.
Surveillance footage from businesses along the shooting route. Most commercial DVR and NVR systems overwrite on a rolling 7-to-30-day cycle. The cameras that may have captured the shooter’s movements, the precise location where each victim was shot, whether security cameras at each business were functioning, and whether any business had its own surveillance archives documenting prior incidents — all of that footage is being written over right now. The 4600 block of West Wall Street is in Midland’s southwestern quadrant, an area mixing commercial properties, retail, and residential development. Every business with a camera on that block, and every business along the route from southeast Midland through south Midland, holds footage that will be gone within days to weeks unless a litigation-hold letter or preservation order freezes it. This is not a scare tactic. This is how DVR systems work. They are designed to record over themselves.
Midland Police Department body-worn camera and dashcam footage. Every responding and pursuing officer’s body camera and dashcam documented the pursuit route, the shooter’s actions, the scene conditions at each location, the officer observations of business security measures, and the standoff resolution. Texas law-enforcement retention policies vary, but body-camera footage can be destroyed within 90 days absent a formal preservation request. That means the footage of the officers arriving at the scene, seeing the victims, observing the security conditions at each location — footage that can corroborate a negligent-security claim — can be gone before fall.
911 call recordings and dispatch logs. These establish the timeline of reported shots, the caller locations, the police response intervals, and — critically — whether any location on the shooting route had been the subject of prior violent-crime calls. These recordings are typically retained 6 to 12 months but can be overwritten sooner. The prior-call history at each shooting location is a cornerstone of the foreseeability argument, and it lives in these dispatch records.
The Midland Police Department’s complete criminal investigation file. This includes ballistics evidence that ties specific wounds to specific locations, crime-scene photographs, the shooter’s personal effects, and any motive evidence that could reveal a connection between the shooter and any shooting location. The investigation file will be preserved as part of the criminal investigation, but civil access requires cooperation with law enforcement or a court order. Requesting early establishes a discovery pipeline.
Medical records from Midland Memorial Hospital and any transfer facilities. These document the nature and severity of each gunshot wound, the surgical interventions, complications, prognoses, and future care needs. They are foundational for both liability and damages. Hospital records are generally preserved per HIPAA and state retention rules, but trauma-bay and operative notes should be obtained immediately while they remain readily accessible — not months later when they are archived and harder to pull.
Prior incident reports and security assessments for each business along the shooting route. This is the single most critical evidence category for premises-liability claims. These records establish whether property owners had actual or constructive notice of prior similar violent incidents sufficient to trigger a duty to protect invitees. Businesses may destroy or archive old incident logs during routine record purges. Litigation-hold letters must target these documents specifically, by name, before any retention schedule expires.
The preservation letter is the weapon. The day you call is the day the clock starts working for you instead of against you. We send written demands to every business along the shooting route, to the Midland Police Department, to Midland County dispatch, and to Midland Memorial Hospital — ordering them to freeze every piece of evidence before the system erases it. When a defendant lets required evidence die after receiving that letter, the law answers: a judge can tell the jury to assume the lost evidence was as damaging as the plaintiff says it was. The leverage begins the moment the letter is on file.
What Gunshot Injuries Really Cost: The Medical Reality Eleven Families Now Face
A gunshot wound is not an injury that heals and ends. It is a penetrating trauma event that begins a medical timeline measured in years, and for some victims, in a lifetime. The four victims in surgery at Midland Memorial on the morning of June 12 were facing the most severe end of that spectrum — the injuries that required immediate operative intervention because the bullet had reached something that could not wait.
What a gunshot wound does depends on what it hits. A bullet that perforates a hollow organ — the bowel, the stomach — spills contaminated contents into the abdominal cavity and creates a surgical emergency to repair the perforation and wash out the contamination. Infection is not a complication; it is an expected consequence, and it can kill days or weeks after the shooting, long after the news cameras have left. A bullet that strikes a major blood vessel — the femoral artery, the iliac artery, the aorta — produces hemorrhage that kills in minutes unless someone applies pressure and gets the victim to an operating room. The vascular repair may save the life, but the downstream consequences — reduced blood flow to a limb, nerve damage, the need for follow-up vascular surgery — can persist for years.
A bullet that enters the chest can collapse a lung, tear the heart or great vessels, or damage the spine if it traverses the thoracic cavity. A bullet that strikes the head produces traumatic brain injury — and a “mild” classification on the Glasgow Coma Scale is a triage word, not a prognosis. More than a third of patients with a GCS score of 13 — the top of the “mild” range — have potentially life-threatening intracranial lesions. A bullet that traverses the spinal canal produces paralysis, and the lifetime cost of a high spinal-cord injury — a cervical injury that paralyzes all four limbs — runs into the millions of dollars across a lifetime, and that figure deliberately excludes every lost paycheck.
The five victims listed in stable condition at Midland Memorial are not “fine.” Stable means their vital signs are holding. It does not mean the bullet did not cause permanent damage. A stable gunshot victim can still face nerve injury that never regenerates, vascular damage that requires lifelong monitoring, joint damage that produces post-traumatic arthritis within a few years, and psychological trauma that does not appear on any scan but changes every interaction the person has for the rest of their life.
And then there is the injury every one of the eleven victims shares, whether their physical wounds were surgical or stable: post-traumatic stress disorder. The DSM-5 — the diagnostic manual every psychiatrist uses — defines PTSD with eight specific criteria, and a person who was shot, who watched someone else get shot, who ran for their life, who heard the gunfire and saw the blood, meets every one of them. PTSD is not a mood. It is a formal medical diagnosis with a code, with structured diagnostic instruments, and with a treatment pathway that can last years. For a mass-shooting survivor, the nightmares, the hyperarousal, the avoidance of the place where it happened, the flashbacks — these are the expected clinical course, not the exception. And the treatment — the therapy, the psychiatric medication, the years of follow-up — has a dollar cost that belongs in every demand.
What Is a Mass Shooting Case Worth in Texas?
The honest answer is that the range is enormous, and it depends on a single binary question: can the investigation identify a viable premises defendant with insurance coverage and prior-incident notice?
At the low end — if no property owner along the shooting route can be shown to have had prior notice of similar violent incidents — recovery is limited to the shooter’s estate, which is likely negligible, and to the Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund, which provides statutorily capped awards that help families but are not a substitute for full tort recovery. In that scenario, the aggregate value across all victims is in the range of several hundred thousand dollars — real money, but a fraction of what the harm actually warrants.
At the high end — if one or more property owners are shown to have had actual knowledge of prior similar violent incidents at their premises and failed to implement adequate security — the combined value of one wrongful death (potentially of a high-earning Permian Basin oilfield worker whose lost earning capacity alone can reach well into seven figures) and ten gunshot-injury claims, several requiring surgery, can reach eight figures. The aggregate damages across 11 victims are catastrophic in severity. The economic damages alone — emergency transport, surgical intervention, ICU and hospital stays, follow-up care, lost wages, diminished earning capacity, and a life-care plan for any victim with permanent disability — can run into the millions. The non-economic damages — physical pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, loss of enjoyment of life, and the full loss of society and companionship for the family of the person killed — are uncapped in Texas outside the medical-malpractice context.
The mobile, multi-location nature of the shooting is the single greatest value deflator, because it fragments the foreseeability argument across multiple premises and complicates any single defendant’s share of total responsibility. But it is also an opportunity: more locations mean more potential defendants, more insurance policies, and more chances that at least one property owner had the prior-incident notice that opens the door to full tort recovery.
Our experience with mass-shooting litigation has taught us that the case value is not determined by the severity of the harm alone — that is a given. The case value is determined by the quality of the investigation that identifies the defendants who can pay for that harm.
The Insurance Adjuster’s Playbook: What They Will Try and How to Stop It
Within days of a mass shooting, the insurance machinery begins to move. Property owners’ carriers will dispatch adjusters, investigators, and defense lawyers to every location on the shooting route. They will begin building the defense before most families have finished grieving. Here is what they will do, and here is how each play is countered.
Play 1: “This was an unforeseeable act of a deranged individual — no property owner could have prevented it.” This is the defense’s headline argument, and it has surface appeal. The counter is not to argue that the property owner should have foreseen a mass shooting specifically — it is to show that the owner should have foreseen armed violence generally, because prior similar incidents at the property put it on notice. The prior-incident evidence — police calls for service, prior incident reports, prior civil claims — is the counter to this play, and it is why the investigation must move immediately to pull that evidence before it is destroyed.
Play 2: “The victims were not on our property when they were shot — our premises had nothing to do with this.” In a mobile, multi-location shooting, the defense will argue that the shooting did not occur on their client’s premises, or that the shooter merely passed through. The counter is forensic: ballistics evidence, crime-scene photographs, and surveillance footage that establish the precise location where each victim was shot. If a victim was shot on or adjacent to a defendant’s property — in a parking lot, on a sidewalk the property owner was responsible for maintaining, in a doorway — the premises connection is established. The police investigation file and the business surveillance footage are the evidence that defeats this play.
Play 3: The fast, low settlement offer to a survivor. An adjuster may contact a gunshot victim or their family within days, offering a quick check — $10,000, $25,000, even $50,000 — that comes with a release attached. The release extinguishes every claim the victim has against the property owner, forever, before the full extent of the injuries is known. A gunshot wound that looks survivable can develop a compartment syndrome that costs a limb. A “stable” victim can develop a post-traumatic seizure disorder. PTSD can surface weeks or months after the event. The counter is simple: never sign anything from an insurance company in the first weeks after a shooting. The full scope of the harm is not yet known, and a release signed before it is known is exactly what the adjuster is counting on. What you should not say to an insurance adjuster is one of the first conversations we have with every client.
Play 4: Social media surveillance. The defense will monitor every victim’s social media account, looking for a photograph of a smile, a check-in at a restaurant, a post that looks like normal activity — anything that can be used to argue the injuries are exaggerated. The counter is privacy discipline: do not post about the shooting, your injuries, your medical treatment, or your daily activities on any social media platform. Assume everything you post will be screenshot, printed, and shown to a jury.
Play 5: “Comparative fault — the victim should have run, should have hidden, should have been more aware of their surroundings.” Texas follows a modified comparative negligence system with a 51% bar — if a plaintiff is found to be 51% or more at fault, they are barred from recovery. In a mass-shooting context, comparative fault is unlikely to reduce victim recovery: a person who is shot by a gunman while going about their daily business is not at fault. But the defense will look for any angle — a victim who was in an area after hours, who was on a property they were not authorized to be on, who the defense can argue was comparatively negligent in any way. The counter is to establish that every victim was lawfully going about their life and that the gunman’s conduct, and the property owner’s failure to protect against foreseeable violence, were the causes of the harm.
How a Shooting Case Is Actually Built
Here is what the first weeks and months of a real investigation look like — not a summary, but the actual walk.
In the first week, the preservation letters go out. Every business along the shooting route — from southeast Midland through south Midland to the 4600 block of West Wall Street — receives a written demand to preserve all surveillance footage, incident logs, security assessments, employee statements, and any prior crime documentation. The Midland Police Department receives a demand to preserve all body-camera footage, dashcam recordings, 911 dispatch audio, CAD records, and the complete criminal investigation file. Midland Memorial Hospital receives a demand to preserve all trauma-bay records, operative notes, imaging, and nursing documentation for every victim. These letters do not ask — they order. They put the recipient on legal notice that the evidence must be frozen, and they create the spoliation leverage that follows if the evidence disappears.
In the first month, the crime-history investigation begins. We pull calls-for-service data from the Midland Police Department for every address on the shooting route — the record of every police response to every location, going back years. We search Texas DPS incident reports and civil-litigation databases for prior violent incidents at each property. We identify which locations have a documented history of violent crime and which do not. This is the map that tells us where the foreseeability argument is strongest.
Also in the first month, the medical evidence is assembled. Every victim’s medical record from Midland Memorial Hospital — and from any facility to which a victim was transferred — is obtained, reviewed, and organized by injury type, severity, treatment, prognosis, and future care needs. For the four victims who required surgery, the operative reports, the postoperative course, and the surgeon’s prognosis are the foundation of the damages claim. For the five victims in stable condition, the question is not whether they were injured — a gunshot wound is a serious injury by definition — but what the permanent consequences will be. For the family of the person killed, the medical records establish the conscious pain and suffering between the shooting and death, which is the survival-action claim.
In the following months, expert witnesses are retained. A board-certified security consultant reviews each premises and opines on industry-standard security measures for that property type — what should have been in place, what was in place, and what the gap was. Forensic medical experts document each victim’s injury pattern and project future care needs. A forensic economist quantifies the earning-capacity losses in the Permian Basin wage context — not a national average, but the real wages a Midland oilfield worker earns, projected across a real worklife expectancy, reduced to present value.
Then comes discovery — the formal process of demanding documents, taking depositions, and forcing the defendants to answer under oath. The property owner’s security plans, incident logs, employee and manager depositions, and any corporate franchisor or parent-entity safety policies are all discoverable. The depositions are where the case is won — where the security director explains, under oath, why the cameras were not working, why the guard was not scheduled, why the prior incident was logged but never acted upon.
In Texas, Stowers demands — formal settlement demands that trigger the carrier’s duty to settle — should be evaluated against any applicable liability policies once the liability picture clarifies. And mediation should be approached with awareness that Midland County’s conservative jury pool may favor the defense on foreseeability while supporting strong economic-loss awards once liability is established. The voir dire — the jury-selection process — should explore jurors’ views on gun violence, property-owner responsibility, and whether they believe mass shootings are inherently unforeseeable. That is the defense’s core theme, and it has to be neutralized from the first question.
Your First 72 Hours: A Practical Roadmap
Hour 1 to 24: Medical first. Your only priority in the first hours is the medical stability of your loved one. If you are at Midland Memorial Hospital, stay there. Talk to the doctors. Understand the injuries. Make the medical decisions that need to be made. Nothing legal matters more than the person in the bed. But while you are there, do one thing: ask the hospital to preserve all records related to your loved one’s treatment, including the trauma-bay notes and operative reports. Those notes are the most detailed and accessible right now, while the events are fresh.
Hour 24 to 48: What not to sign, say, or post. Do not sign anything from any insurance company. Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance adjuster. Do not post about the shooting, your loved one’s condition, or your daily activities on social media. Do not discuss the incident with anyone who is not your immediate family, your doctor, or your lawyer. If someone from a property owner’s insurance company contacts you — and they will — the only words you need are: “I am not prepared to discuss this. Please contact my attorney.” You do not need to have an attorney yet to say those words. You need to say them because everything you say in the first days will be recorded, transcribed, and used.
Hour 48 to 72: When to call. The evidence-preservation clock is running. Surveillance footage from businesses along the shooting route is overwriting itself right now. Body-camera footage from responding officers is on a 90-day countdown. Prior-incident reports at shooting locations can be purged on the business’s own retention schedule. The day you call a lawyer is the day the preservation letters go out — and the preservation letters are the only thing that stops the evidence from disappearing. You do not need to have made a decision about filing a lawsuit. You do not need to know whether you have a case. You need to freeze the evidence before it is gone, and that means calling now.
Why Attorney911: The People Who Will Fight for You
Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years in courtrooms, including federal court. He is a journalist who became a lawyer — he knows how to investigate, how to find the story the defense is hiding, and how to tell it to a jury in a language they cannot ignore. He is admitted to the State Bar of Texas (Bar #24007597, licensed November 6, 1998) and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He is the managing partner of The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. He is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Houston Bar Association. He is lead counsel in the active $10M+ hazing lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston. Read more about Ralph.
Lupe Peña is the advantage. Before he joined this firm, Lupe sat on the other side of the table — inside a national insurance-defense firm, in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. He knows how the Colossus valuation software prices a claim. He knows how the IME doctors are selected. He knows the surveillance tactics, the delay strategies, the recorded-statement traps. He knows all of it because he used to run it. Now he uses that knowledge for injured people. Lupe is admitted to the State Bar of Texas (Bar #24084332, licensed December 6, 2012) and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. Read more about Lupe.
The firm has recovered $50,000,000+ in aggregate — a marketing figure that represents decades of fighting for injured Texans. Individual recoveries include a $5M+ brain-injury settlement, a $3.8M+ amputation settlement, a $2.5M+ truck-crash recovery, and a $2M+ maritime back-injury settlement. We handle cases on contingency: 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The first consultation is free. The call is free. And the person who answers the phone at 1-888-ATTY-911 is a live human being on our staff — not an answering service, not a call center, not a chatbot. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because emergencies do not keep business hours.
We serve your family fully in Spanish. Hablamos Español.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue if the shooter is dead?
Yes. The shooter’s death does not end the legal analysis — it redirects it. You can file a claim against the shooter’s estate for the intentional tort of battery, though the practical recovery from a shooter’s estate is often minimal. More importantly, the shooter’s death does not eliminate other potential defendants: property owners, security companies, and employers who may bear their own responsibility for the conditions that allowed the violence. Those defendants have insurance. The shooter’s estate likely does not.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit?
Texas’s statute of limitations for wrongful death and personal injury generally runs two years from the date of death or injury under the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. For the person killed on June 12, 2026, the two-year clock generally runs to June 12, 2028. For the surviving gunshot victims, the two-year clock runs from the date they were shot. But the evidence that proves your case — surveillance footage, body-camera video, prior-incident reports — is on a much shorter clock. Two years to sue; days to save the proof.
I was shot but I was released from the hospital. Do I still have a case?
Yes. A gunshot wound is a serious injury by definition — there is no such thing as a minor gunshot wound. Even if you were released from Midland Memorial in stable condition, you may face nerve damage, vascular complications, infection, post-traumatic arthritis, and psychological trauma that does not appear for weeks or months. PTSD is the expected clinical course for a shooting survivor, not the exception. The full scope of your injuries is not known on the day you are discharged — it is known months later, after the body has had time to reveal what the bullet actually did. Never sign a release before that full picture is known.
The shooting happened at multiple locations. Which property owner is responsible?
This is the central question of the investigation, and the answer is: every property where a victim was shot, and potentially every property the shooter traversed, must be investigated. In a mobile, multi-location shooting, the foreseeability argument is fragmented across multiple premises, and the defense will argue that no single property owner could have foreseen the event. The counter is that foreseeability attaches to the class of harm — violent assault with a firearm — and that each location had its own documented risk profile. The investigation pulls calls-for-service data, prior incident reports, and crime-history profiles for every location on the shooting route, from southeast Midland to the 4600 block of West Wall Street.
What if the shooting was random — not targeted at my loved one?
Whether the shooting was targeted or random does not affect the victims’ legal rights. The question is not whether the shooter meant to shoot a specific person — it is whether the conditions at the property where the shooting occurred made the violence foreseeable and whether the property owner took reasonable steps to prevent it. A random shooting at a property with a history of violent crime is, paradoxically, a stronger negligent-security case than a targeted shooting at a property with no such history, because the randomness proves the danger was foreseeable to everyone except the property owner.
What is the Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund and does it affect my case?
The Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund provides statutorily capped financial assistance to victims of violent crime and their families. It can help with medical bills, counseling, funeral expenses, and lost wages. Applying to the fund does not prevent you from pursuing a civil claim against a property owner or other defendant. However, any amount received from the fund may be subject to subordination — meaning the fund may seek reimbursement from your civil recovery. The fund is a resource, not a substitute for full tort recovery. It helps families, but it is not designed to make them whole.
Will I have to go to court?
Most personal injury and wrongful-death cases in Texas settle before trial — but the possibility of trial is what creates the leverage to settle. A case that is prepared for trial from day one is the case that settles for the most money, because the insurance company knows the alternative is a Midland County jury. We prepare every case as if it will be tried, and we try cases when the defendant will not offer what the harm is worth.
How much does it cost to hire Attorney911?
Nothing up front. We work on contingency: 33.33% of the recovery before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. The call is free. And the evidence-preservation letters that could save your case go out the day you call — at no cost to you. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes, but the contingency structure means our interests and yours are exactly aligned: we win when you win, and we win more when you win more.
My family member was killed. Who can bring the case?
Under Texas’s Wrongful Death Act, the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the decedent may bring a wrongful-death claim. If none of these beneficiaries bring the claim within three months of the death, the executor or administrator of the estate may bring it on their behalf, unless the beneficiaries direct otherwise. The survival action — for the decedent’s conscious pain and suffering and pre-death medical expenses — is brought by the estate. A personal representative must be appointed by the probate court to bring the survival action. We handle that appointment as part of the case.
I am not sure I want to sue. What should I do first?
You should call a lawyer. Calling a lawyer is not the same as filing a lawsuit. The first thing we do is send the evidence-preservation letters — and those letters cost you nothing. They freeze the evidence before it disappears, and they give you the time and the information you need to decide whether you want to pursue a claim. You can decide later whether to file a lawsuit. You cannot decide later to preserve evidence that has already been destroyed. The call is free, the consultation is confidential, and the decision about whether to sue is yours — not ours. Contact us at 1-888-ATTY-911. We are available 24/7. Hablamos Español.