The Phone Call That Starts Everything
It is after midnight when the call comes in. Maybe it is later than that — maybe the survivor has been sitting with the phone in her hand for hours, replaying the moment she woke up to a man crouched at the foot of her bed with his pants undone and a condom out. The man said he knew her. The front desk gave him a key. She screamed, he ran, and the police later found him and charged him with attempted sexual assault. She is calling us because the man who did this is the criminal case, but the business that handed him the key is the civil case — and that is the case Attorney911 was built to fight.
This page is for her. It is also for any woman — and the men and children who suffer this same betrayal — who checked into a hotel thinking the room was a sanctuary, and woke up in a crime scene the hotel itself made possible. If you or someone you love was sexually assaulted because a hotel in Gonzales County gave a key to the wrong person, this page explains what the law in Texas says you can do, who you can hold responsible, what evidence has already been destroyed, what is still recoverable, and what it is going to take to put your life back together.
We do not write for traffic. We write for the one person in Gonzales County who needs to know the truth tonight. That truth is uncomfortable: the same chain of hotels that promises “a comfortable stay” runs on a key-control system that any half-trained employee can defeat in under a minute. When that system fails and a stranger walks into your room, the law in Texas gives you the right to hold not just the attacker, but every company in the building — the franchisor, the franchisee, the management company, the front-desk worker, and the insurance tower that stands behind them all.
“Hotel guests are invitees under Texas law. A property owner owes its invitees the duty to exercise reasonable care to keep the premises safe, including protection from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties.” — Texas common-law premises-liability doctrine; see Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Gonzalez, 968 S.W.2d 934 (Tex. 1998).
If you have just lived what the woman in Gonzales lived in December 2022, you are not imagining that the hotel failed you. You are correct. The question now is what you can do about it — and we are going to walk you through every step.
What Actually Happened in Gonzales, and Why It Was Foreseeable
In December 2022, a woman checked into a Holiday Inn Express & Suites in Gonzales, Texas. She was traveling for work. She was alone. She went to sleep. She woke to a man crouched at the foot of her bed. The details reported in the case are the kind of details a survivor carries in her body for the rest of her life: his pants undone, a condom out, the silence before she understood what was happening, the scream, the scramble, his flight.
When she called the front desk in the aftermath, the staff did not deny what they had done. They said, “Oh yes, we did give a key to the man. He said he knew you.” That admission is the case. That admission is the reason an insurance defense lawyer cannot stand up in a Texas courtroom and tell a jury that the hotel exercised ordinary care. The hotel’s own employee told the survivor, within minutes of the attack, that they had issued her room key to a man who was not registered, not identified, and not verified — because he said he knew her.
The man was arrested. He was arraigned on a felony charge of attempted sexual assault. That case is the criminal case, and it belongs to the State of Texas. Our case is different. Our case is the civil case against the business that made the attack possible. In Texas, that is called a negligent security claim, and the legal theory is as old as the innkeeper’s common-law duty: when you take a person’s money and hand them a key, you have taken on the duty to protect them from foreseeable harm while they are inside your walls.
The Holiday Inn Express & Suites in Gonzales is not a stand-alone motel. It carries the flag of one of the largest hotel companies in the world. The brand sets the standards. The franchisee follows them, or does not. The front-desk worker handed our survivor’s key to a stranger. Every level of that brand-to-bedside chain is a potential defendant, and our work begins by unwinding which company did what — and which company had the money to answer for it.
Read more about how Attorney911 investigates hotel negligence cases across our practice areas.
The Texas Law That Protects You — Invitees, Not Customers
Texas draws one of the sharpest lines in American premises-liability law between a licensee (a social guest) and an invitee (a paying customer). A hotel guest is an invitee, period. The duty owed to an invitee is the highest duty a Texas property owner owes anyone: to exercise reasonable care to keep the premises safe, including protection from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties.
That duty has three practical consequences you must understand:
First, the hotel cannot delegate the duty. A hotel cannot insulate itself by hiring an independent contractor to run the front desk, by licensing its flag to a franchisee, or by pointing to a property management company it has never met. The duty runs with the land, and with the brand that holds itself out to the public as a safe place to sleep. Texas courts have consistently refused to let commercial defendants escape their invitee duty by hiding behind contractual structures that they themselves created.
Second, foreseeability is what the case turns on. The hotel does not have to have known that this particular attacker would walk into this particular room on this particular night. Texas law asks whether the danger was foreseeable in a more general sense: had similar incidents occurred on the property or in the area? Were there red flags the staff should have caught? Did the hotel have policies, training, or procedures designed to prevent exactly this — and did the staff ignore them? In Gonzales County, as in most of rural Texas, the hotel industry trains its staff to spot cash-only rentals, refusal of housekeeping, foot traffic that does not match the registration, and strangers asking for keys to rooms that are not theirs. The case file we build looks at every red flag the staff missed, every policy the brand required, and every failure to enforce either.
Third, the duty is not satisfied by a locked door. The whole point of handing a guest a key is that the locked door behind it is supposed to be the protection. When the hotel itself defeats that protection by handing a duplicate key to a stranger, the locked door is no longer a defense — it is the instrument of the harm.
“A premises owner has a duty to protect an invitee from criminal acts of third parties if those acts are foreseeable. The foreseeability of criminal conduct may be established by prior similar incidents at or near the premises, by expert testimony, or by the nature of the business.” — Texas common-law premises-liability doctrine.
The Holiday Inn Express where our survivor was attacked is, in the language of the brand, an “intermediate-tier” limited-service hotel. That is the brand’s own internal risk classification. The brand knows that limited-service properties have thinner staffing, fewer on-site managers, and front-desk workers who are often alone at night. The brand writes the policies that respond to those risks. The brand trains the staff on those policies. The brand audits compliance with those policies. When a survivor is assaulted because the front desk handed a stranger her key, the question is not only what the night clerk did — it is what the brand failed to teach, and what the franchisee failed to enforce.
The Shell Game: Who You Sue and Why It Matters
The hotel industry is a shell game on purpose. The flag on the building is a brand, not a defendant. The company that issued the key is a different company than the company that owns the building, which is a different company than the company that employs the front-desk worker, which is a different company than the company that holds the insurance policy, which is a different company than the publicly traded parent whose stock ticker you can look up on a financial news site. Every one of those companies will tell you they are not responsible for what happened in that room. Every one of them is wrong, in a different way.
In Gonzales, the property is a Holiday Inn Express & Suites. The brand belongs to InterContinental Hotels Group PLC, the United Kingdom-domiciled parent of a global hotel empire. The brand family includes Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Crowne Plaza, Staybridge Suites, Candlewood Suites, and many others. IHG does not own the building in Gonzales. IHG licenses the flag. IHG writes the standards. IHG charges royalties. IHG is the franchisor.
The franchisor is the company that designed the key-control system. The franchisor is the company that required the franchisee to verify identification before issuing a duplicate key. The franchisor is the company that wrote the front-desk training manual that says, in plain language, do not give a guest’s key to a stranger no matter what the stranger says. The franchisor is the company whose enforcement team is supposed to audit that policy on a regular cycle. When the front-desk worker hands the key to a stranger anyway, every one of those standards has failed, and the franchisor is in the case.
The franchisee is the local LLC that owns the building and operates it under the Holiday Inn Express flag. The franchisee’s name is on the deed. The franchisee signs the franchise agreement. The franchisee collects the room revenue. The franchisee hires (or fails to hire) the night clerk. The franchisee is in the case for direct negligence — negligent hiring, negligent training, negligent supervision, negligent entrustment, and negligent key control.
The property management company, if separate from the franchisee, is in the case for the same reasons, plus whatever the management contract says about who is responsible for what on the property.
The front-desk worker is in the case individually, although in our experience, the night clerk is rarely a real source of recovery. The clerk is usually paid minimum wage, has no insurance, and is the first person the corporation will throw under the bus. We name the clerk as a defendant to preserve testimony and to make clear that the liability runs to the corporation that put an underpaid, undertrained worker behind the desk in the middle of the night.
The insurance carrier is not technically a defendant, but the insurance carrier is the entity that actually pays. Holiday Inn franchise agreements typically require the franchisee to carry commercial general liability, and they often name the franchisor as an additional insured. The real recovery runs through that policy, and identifying the carrier early is part of the work we do in the first week of the case.
In a Holiday Inn Express sexual assault case, we typically name as defendants:
- The local franchisee LLC that owns and operates the property
- The property management company, if different
- InterContinental Hotels Group PLC and its U.S. operating subsidiaries, on franchisor-control theories
- The night clerk and any other employees who participated in the key issuance
- A John Doe for the attacker himself, whose identity will become known through the criminal case file
The point of the shell game analysis is not to confuse you. The point is to make sure no one escapes. The case we build names every entity in the chain and assigns responsibility to the one whose act or omission caused the harm.
The Evidence That Already Exists — and the Evidence That Is Disappearing Right Now
This is the section of the page that may be the most important for you to read carefully, because every hour that passes without a preservation letter is an hour the hotel can legally erase the proof.
In a negligent security case, the evidence that wins or loses the case is almost always in the hotel’s hands. The hotel has the surveillance video. The hotel has the electronic key-card records showing which keys were swiped in which doors at which times. The hotel has the front-desk shift logs. The hotel has the night clerk’s training file. The hotel has its own incident reports and any prior complaints about this same clerk or this same property. The hotel has its franchise-agreement compliance records. None of this evidence is in your possession. All of it can be legally destroyed by the hotel on its own retention schedule, and all of it is at risk of disappearing before a lawyer even gets a call.
We send the preservation letter the day you call. We do not wait for the police to finish their criminal case. We do not wait for the insurance carrier to call. We do not wait to see whether the hotel “does the right thing.” We send a written, served, spoliation-anchored preservation demand that names every category of evidence we need and tells the hotel — and its parent, and its management company, and its franchise compliance team — that they are now on notice of a civil claim and that destruction of evidence after that notice will be sanctioned.
The categories of evidence that matter in a Gonzales hotel sexual assault case, and how fast each can disappear:
Surveillance video. Hotels retain surveillance video on a rolling overwrite cycle, commonly 30 to 90 days. Some properties hold longer; some overwrite in days. The hallway camera at the front desk. The elevator camera. The corridor camera near the survivor’s room. The exterior-parking-lot camera. The lobby camera. Every one of these cameras captured the attacker walking in, walking to the desk, getting the key, walking to the room. Every one of them was recording when the survivor ran down the hall screaming. Every one of them is overwriting on a cycle that started the moment the recording began. Send the preservation letter the same day.
Electronic key-card records. Modern hotel key systems record every key issuance and every door unlock, with a timestamp and a key-card ID. The system can prove which card was used to open the survivor’s door, when, and how many times. Key-card data is typically retained for 30 days to several years depending on the property management system vendor. Demand it now.
Front-desk shift logs and the night clerk’s identity. The shift log for the night of the attack names the night clerk, the time the clerk came on, and the time the clerk went off. The log will reveal whether the clerk was alone, whether a manager was on duty, and whether any other employee was present. The clerk’s training file — what the brand required, what the franchisee delivered, what the clerk signed off on — is the spine of the negligent-training claim. Demand it now.
Prior complaints and incident reports. Has this clerk had prior complaints? Has this property had prior key-control failures? Has the brand received reports of similar incidents at other Holiday Inn Express properties? Each prior incident is a building block of foreseeability. The hotel’s own complaint log is the source. Demand it now.
Franchise-agreement compliance records. Holiday Inn Express properties are subject to brand quality-assurance inspections. The brand sends inspectors. The inspectors write reports. The reports are supposed to be acted upon. A pattern of key-control failures flagged by the brand and not corrected by the franchisee is the franchise-breach story. Demand it now.
Police records. The criminal case file will include the arrest report, the attacker’s statement, the survivor’s statement, and any forensic evidence collected. Texas’s Crime Victims’ Compensation Act and the Marsy’s Law amendments to the Texas Constitution give crime victims a right to information about and participation in the criminal process. We coordinate with the criminal case so the civil case is informed by everything the State develops.
“The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 56B.001 et seq., recognizes that crime victims have a right to be informed, present, and heard at every stage of the criminal justice process.” — Texas Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
The County Sheriff’s call-for-service history. Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office records of prior calls to the property establish foreseeability in a different way: did deputies respond to prior incidents at this hotel? Were there prior domestic-violence calls? Prior disturbances? Prior reports of strangers on the property? The Texas Public Information Act, Chapter 552 of the Government Code, allows us to request those records. We do.
Survivor’s medical and counseling records. The forensic sexual-assault exam (rape kit) at a Texas emergency department, performed by a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, captures the physical evidence of the attack. The emergency department records capture the survivor’s immediate psychological state. The counseling records that follow — for PTSD, for major depression, for the insomnia and panic that follow an assault in a place that was supposed to be safe — capture the long arc of the harm. The law protects these records, and we work with survivors’ treating providers to make sure the records tell the full story without re-traumatizing the survivor.
Every one of these categories has a clock. The fastest clock is the surveillance video. The second-fastest is the key-card data. The third is the front-desk shift log. The slowest is the franchise-agreement compliance record, which is supposed to be retained for years but is in the hands of an entity that does not yet know it is a defendant. The preservation letter freezes all of them. We send the letter the same day.
Texas’s Modified Comparative Negligence — What It Means for You
Texas follows a 51% bar rule. If you are found 51% or more at fault, you recover nothing. If you are found 50% or less at fault, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault.
The defense will try to pin percentage points on you. They will say you should have used the deadbolt. They will say you should not have opened the door. They will say you should have traveled with a companion. They will say you should have chosen a different hotel. None of those arguments defeat your case, but each of them is designed to push your percentage up. We know the playbook. We have seen it run against survivors in every Texas county. The truth is that Texas juries, when they understand the facts, are not fooled by it. A woman who is sleeping in her locked hotel room is not at fault for the man who crouched at the foot of her bed. The defense’s job is to make her feel like she is. Our job is to make sure the jury sees through it.
The right jury, in the right venue, with the right evidence, returns the right verdict. The Gonzales County courthouse is the venue. The evidence is the hotel’s own admission. The right verdict is the one that makes the survivor whole.
The Insurance Playbook — Three Plays They Will Run and the Counter to Each
The hotel carries insurance. The insurance carrier hires a lawyer. The lawyer’s job is to pay as little as possible, as slowly as possible, while looking reasonable. We have seen the playbook hundreds of times. Here are three of the plays you should expect, and what we do about each.
Play One: The Recorded Statement. Within days of the attack, a friendly-sounding adjuster will call. The adjuster’s tone is sympathetic. The adjuster says things like “we just want to understand what happened” and “we want to get this resolved for you.” The adjuster is recording the call. The recording is built to be quoted against you later, in deposition and at trial. The adjuster will ask about your memory of the night, about your alcohol consumption if you had any drinks, about your relationship history, about whether you had the deadbolt engaged, about whether you were asleep or awake when the attack began. Every answer becomes a sentence fragment in a transcript the defense will read back to a jury.
The counter. You do not give a recorded statement to the hotel’s insurance carrier before you have a lawyer. You do not give a recorded statement to anyone before you have a lawyer. We schedule and conduct every recorded statement ourselves, after we have seen the evidence, after we have deposed the night clerk, after we know the holes in the hotel’s story. If the adjuster pushes, we tell the adjuster, in writing, that all communication goes through counsel. The adjuster’s friendly call ends.
Play Two: The Quick Check. Within weeks, sometimes days, a settlement offer arrives. The number is low — often insultingly low. The offer comes with a release buried in the paperwork. The release says that if you cash the check, you cannot sue the hotel, the franchisee, the franchisor, the management company, the night clerk, or anyone else connected to the property, for anything, ever. The adjuster frames the offer as a kindness: “We just want to take care of you.”
The counter. You do not sign a release for a number that does not begin to cover a lifetime of treatment. You do not sign a release before you have finished treatment. You do not sign a release before you have a life-care plan from a qualified expert. You do not sign a release before we have a damages model. The quick check is designed to lock you out of the case before you know what the case is worth. We reject the offer, in writing, and we let the defense know that the survivor is represented, that the evidence is preserved, and that the case is going to move.
Play Three: The Surveillance Footage “Could Not Be Located.” A few weeks after the attack, when you have lawyered up, the hotel’s insurance carrier responds to a request for the surveillance video with a one-line email: the footage is “no longer available” or “could not be located” or “was preserved but inadvertently overwritten.” The truth is the hotel destroyed the evidence after we sent the preservation letter. That is spoliation. Spoliation has consequences.
The counter. We file a motion for sanctions. In Texas state court, the trial court has inherent authority to sanction parties who destroy evidence after a preservation duty attaches. The sanctions can include an adverse-inference instruction that tells the jury to assume the lost video would have proved the survivor’s case. Federal court is even sharper: the federal spoliation doctrine lets us argue that the jury should infer the lost evidence was unfavorable to the spoliator. Either way, the spoliation is the defense’s problem, not ours. We make it their problem, in writing, in a motion, in front of a judge.
There is a fourth play that the defense will not announce but will run throughout the case: the delay play. The defense will seek continuances. The defense will delay producing documents. The defense will delay responding to discovery. The defense will delay the deposition of the night clerk. The defense will delay the mediation. The defense will delay the trial setting. Delay benefits the defense, because delay puts financial pressure on a survivor who is paying for treatment and losing income. We do not let the delay play run. We set a schedule, we enforce it, and we push the case to resolution.
What Your Case Is Worth — The Honest Math
We will not quote you a number on a website. The reason is that the value of your case depends on facts we cannot know until we investigate. But we can tell you what the math looks like, and we can tell you the categories of damages that the law in Texas allows you to recover.
In a negligent security sexual assault case, the recoverable damages fall into three buckets.
Economic damages. This is the bucket with receipts. Medical expenses, past and future. Counseling and psychiatric care, past and future. Lost wages, past and future. Lost earning capacity — the difference between what you were earning before the attack and what you are able to earn after. For a survivor whose career depends on travel, who can no longer stay in hotels without panic, who can no longer close her eyes in a room that is not her own, the lost-earning-capacity number is real and it is large. The lifetime cost of trauma treatment — talk therapy, EMDR, psychiatric medication, periodic intensive treatment — runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime.
Non-economic damages. This is the bucket without receipts. Physical pain. Mental anguish. Loss of enjoyment of life. The loss of the sense of safety that most people take for granted. The nightmares. The hypervigilance. The way the trauma rewires the body’s response to ordinary stimuli — a hotel hallway, a knock at the door, a key sliding into a lock. Texas law recognizes these damages and lets a jury quantify them. There is no formula. There is no cap in a premises liability case in Texas (caps apply in medical malpractice and certain other contexts; they do not apply here). The jury is the conscience of the community, and the community in Gonzales County understands what it costs to be attacked in your bed.
Punitive damages. Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 41.003 allows punitive damages when the defendant acted with malice, fraud, gross negligence, or oppression. When a hotel trains its staff to verify identification before issuing a key, and a staff member ignores that training and hands a key to a stranger, and a woman is attacked in her bed, the question of whether that conduct rises to gross negligence is a question for the jury. Punitive damages in Texas premises cases have run into the millions when the evidence supports them. We pursue them when the facts support them.
For a sense of the range: negligent security verdicts in Texas and similar jurisdictions have ranged from the mid-six-figures to the tens of millions, depending on the severity of the injury, the clarity of the evidence, and the venue. The Gonzales case, as described in the public record — a man crouched at the foot of the bed with a condom out, the hotel’s own admission that it gave him the key — is the kind of case that supports a substantial recovery. The right number is the number that makes the survivor whole and that punishes the conduct that caused the harm. We will tell you what we believe that number is once we have investigated.
“Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.”
The Human Cost — What the Survivor Lives With
The legal case is built on evidence and law. The human case is built on the truth of what sexual assault does to a person.
The survivor in Gonzales did not consent to anything. She went to sleep in a locked room in a branded hotel. She woke to a stranger at her bed. Her body’s response — the freeze, the scream, the scramble — was the same response that trauma researchers have documented in thousands of sexual assault cases. The Mayo Clinic and the American Psychiatric Association describe the constellation: nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive memories, hypervigilance, avoidance of people and places that trigger the memory, insomnia, panic attacks, depression, dissociation, difficulty concentrating, and a persistent sense that the world is not safe.
The diagnosis is not a guess. It is a formal medical diagnosis with a checklist that a treating clinician works through — exposure to a traumatic event, intrusive symptoms, avoidance, negative alterations in cognition and mood, hyperarousal, duration of more than a month, functional impairment. Each of those items can be proved in the medical record. Each becomes a paragraph in the damages case we present to the jury.
The cost of treatment is not abstract. The American Medical Association has published estimates of the lifetime economic burden of sexual assault that run into the tens of thousands of dollars per survivor in direct medical and lost-productivity costs, and the non-economic cost is the part that is hardest to put on a spreadsheet but hardest to bear in real life. The survivor in Gonzales is not a number. She is a person whose life was rearranged in a single night, and the law in Texas gives her the right to ask the hotel that allowed it to help put the life back together.
What Attorney911 Does — and What We Do Not Promise
We are a trial firm. We are not a settlement mill. We prepare every case as if it will go to verdict, and the defense knows it. That changes the math of every negotiation.
Ralph Manginello is the managing partner. He has been licensed in Texas since 1998 — more than 27 years — and is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He built this firm on the principle that the people who get hurt by corporations deserve a lawyer who is not afraid of corporations. He will sit with you at your kitchen table, in your language, in your time, and he will tell you the truth about your case. If the truth is that the case is not strong, he will tell you that. If the truth is that the case is strong, he will tell you that too. He is from Houston. He has spent his career in the Texas courtrooms where cases like this one are decided.
Lupe Peña is the associate attorney who runs the insurance-playbook side of the case. Lupe is a former insurance-defense attorney. He spent years inside the rooms where claims like yours are priced, where reserves are set, where the recorded-statement call is engineered, where the doctor who will testify for the defense is chosen, and where the surveillance and the social-media mining is done. He knows how the defense thinks because he used to be the defense. He now uses that knowledge for the survivor. Lupe is a native Spanish speaker, conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter, and is admitted to practice in Texas state court and in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
If you want to talk to one of us tonight, the call is free and confidential.
What we do for a Gonzales hotel sexual assault survivor, beginning the day you call:
- We send the preservation letter. The hotel, the franchisee, the franchisor, the management company, and the night clerk each receive a written demand to preserve every category of evidence. The letter is served the same day.
- We connect you with a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner and a trauma therapist who can begin the medical record and the treatment record. We do not choose your providers; we help you find ones who will see you promptly.
- We coordinate with the criminal case. The District Attorney’s office in Gonzales County is prosecuting the attacker. We make sure the civil case benefits from every piece of evidence the State develops, and we make sure your rights as a crime victim under Texas law are protected.
- We open a claim with the hotel’s insurance carrier. The claim goes through our office, not yours. The adjuster speaks to us, not to you.
- We build the damages model. We collect medical records, counseling records, employment records, and the records of the lost-earning-capacity claim. We engage a forensic economist and a life-care planner when the case warrants.
- We file suit when the defense will not pay a fair number. We do not file suit to look tough; we file suit because it is the next right step. The decision to file is yours, and we make it together.
What we do not promise: we cannot guarantee a result. We cannot tell you the case is worth a specific number before we investigate. We cannot undo the harm. We can fight for the recovery that the law gives you, and we can build the case that gives a Texas jury the chance to do the right thing.
“Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.”
The Deadline You Cannot Afford to Miss
Texas has a two-year statute of limitations for personal injury claims, including negligent security and premises liability claims. The clock generally starts running on the date of the injury. The attack on the Gonzales survivor happened in December 2022, which means the deadline to file suit is December 2024 — but every additional month of delay makes the case harder to build, the evidence harder to find, and the recovery harder to prove. If you are reading this and you or a loved one was attacked at a hotel in Gonzales County, the time to call is now.
If the attack happened elsewhere, or in a different time frame, the deadline is different. Do not rely on a website to tell you how much time you have. Call us. We will tell you, in plain language, exactly what the deadline is for your case.
There are exceptions to the two-year rule that can extend the deadline — minority, mental incapacity, the discovery rule in certain cases — and there are doctrines that can shorten it. We work through the exceptions and the doctrines in the first consultation, not at the deadline.
What to Do Tonight
If you or someone you love is the survivor in this case, or a case like it, here is what to do in the next twenty-four hours.
Get to safety. If you are still in Gonzales, get somewhere safe. A friend’s home. A family member’s home. A different hotel that is not a Holiday Inn Express. Not your own car alone. Wherever the body says it can rest.
Get a forensic exam. The emergency department at the nearest Texas hospital can perform a sexual assault forensic exam. The exam is confidential. The kit can be tested now or held by law enforcement. The exam is the foundation of the medical record. It is also medical care. It is not optional if the survivor’s health is the priority.
Preserve everything. Every text message. Every email. Every voicemail. Every photo of the hotel room. Every receipt. Every name and badge number of any hotel employee you spoke to. Every screenshot of the hotel’s website. Every printout of the brand’s published key-control policies. Save them in two places. Do not delete anything.
Do not give a recorded statement. Not to the hotel. Not to the hotel’s insurance company. Not to anyone who calls in a friendly tone. You do not have to talk to anyone before you have a lawyer. The recorded-statement call is the defense’s most effective tool, and you can decline it.
Do not sign a release. If a check arrives with a release attached, do not sign the release. The release will lock you out of the case for a number that does not cover your treatment. The check is not a gift. The release is the price.
Do not post about the case on social media. Anything you post can be used by the defense. The defense will look at your social media. They will look at your friends’ social media. The only safe statement is no statement.
Call us. The consultation is free. The consultation is confidential. The consultation is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. You can also reach us at (713) 528-9070 or by email at ralph@atty911.com. Hablamos Español.
Frequently Asked Questions
I was sexually assaulted at a Holiday Inn Express in Gonzales, Texas. Can I sue the hotel?
Yes. In Texas, a hotel guest is an invitee, and a property owner owes its invitees a duty of reasonable care to keep the premises safe, including protection from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties. When a hotel hands a guest’s room key to a stranger and that stranger sexually assaults the guest in her room, the hotel has breached that duty. You can sue the franchisee that operates the property, the franchisor (InterContinental Hotels Group PLC) on theories of franchisor control, the property management company if separate, and any individual employees who participated. You can also name the attacker as a defendant. The case is a civil case for money damages. The criminal case against the attacker is a separate case handled by the State of Texas.
What is the statute of limitations for a negligent security case in Texas?
Texas’s general personal-injury statute of limitations is two years from the date of the injury, codified at Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003. For a sexual assault that occurred in December 2022, the deadline to file suit is generally December 2024. There are exceptions that can extend or shorten the deadline — minority, mental incapacity, the discovery rule in limited cases — and there are specific notice requirements for claims against government entities. Do not rely on a general rule; call us and we will tell you exactly what the deadline is for your case.
How much is my case worth?
The honest answer is that we cannot tell you until we have investigated. Damages in a Texas negligent security sexual assault case fall into three categories: economic damages (medical bills, counseling, lost wages, lost earning capacity), non-economic damages (pain, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life), and — when the evidence supports it — punitive damages under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 41.003. Cases with strong evidence of brand and franchisee failure, severe psychological injury, and lasting disability have recovered into the millions. We will give you our honest assessment of value after we have reviewed the evidence.
The hotel’s insurance company is already calling me. Should I talk to them?
No. Not before you have a lawyer. The adjuster who is calling you in a friendly tone is recording the call. Every answer you give becomes a transcript the defense can quote against you. The settlement check that may arrive in the next few weeks comes with a release that will lock you out of the case for a number that does not cover your treatment. Tell the adjuster, in writing if possible, that you are represented and that all communication should go through your attorney. If you have not yet retained a lawyer, tell the adjuster you are not giving a statement at this time. We will take it from there.
What evidence does the hotel have that I need to preserve?
The hotel has the surveillance video from the front desk, the elevator, the corridor, and the lobby. The hotel has the electronic key-card records showing which card was used to open your door and when. The hotel has the front-desk shift log naming the night clerk. The hotel has the night clerk’s training file. The hotel has prior incident reports and prior complaints about this clerk or this property. The hotel has the franchise-agreement compliance records showing whether the brand’s key-control standards were being followed. None of this evidence is in your possession, and all of it can be destroyed by the hotel on its own retention schedule. We send a preservation letter the day you call us that freezes all of it.
Will my case have to go to trial?
Most negligent security cases settle before trial. The hotel’s insurance carrier has a strong incentive to settle a case with clear evidence of failure to follow the brand’s own key-control policies, because a trial verdict is more expensive than a settlement, and a trial verdict in a case with strong facts can result in a punitive-damages award. We prepare every case as if it will go to trial, which improves the settlement outcome. Whether your case settles or goes to verdict is a decision we make together, based on the strength of the evidence and the defense’s willingness to pay a fair number.
How long will my case take?
That depends on the facts, the evidence, and the defense. A straightforward negligent security case with clear evidence and a cooperative defense can resolve in twelve to eighteen months. A case with contested liability, complex discovery, or a defense that chooses to fight every step can take two to four years. We will give you our honest assessment of the timeline after we have investigated, and we will keep you informed at every stage.
I am not the survivor — I am the survivor’s parent / spouse / sibling. Can I bring the case?
In Texas, the survivor herself is the plaintiff in her own case. A parent or spouse can support the case, can sit at the table during meetings with us, and can help the survivor make decisions, but the legal claim belongs to the survivor. If the survivor is a minor, a parent or guardian brings the case on the minor’s behalf. If the survivor is an adult who is not able to make decisions for herself because of the trauma, we work with the family to identify the right legal structure. The most important thing a family member can do is to support the survivor in getting medical care, in getting counseling, and in reaching out to a lawyer.
What does it cost to hire Attorney911?
It costs you nothing up front and nothing out of pocket. We work on contingency. You pay no fee unless we recover for you. The fee is 33 and one-third percent of the recovery before trial, and 40 percent if the case goes through trial. We advance the costs of the case — filing fees, expert fees, deposition costs, the forensic economist, the life-care planner — and we are repaid those costs out of the recovery. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing. The consultation is free. There is no risk in calling.
I was assaulted somewhere other than a Holiday Inn Express. Can you still help?
Yes. Attorney911 handles negligent security and premises liability cases across Texas, including assaults and injuries at hotels, motels, apartment complexes, parking garages, shopping centers, bars and nightclubs, restaurants, office buildings, and any other property where the owner owed a duty of care to an invitee. The Holiday Inn Express case is the case described in this page, but the legal theory and the trial-readiness apply to every negligent security case we handle. If you were assaulted or injured on someone else’s property because they failed to protect you, call us.
I was assaulted at a hotel in a different state. Can you help?
The legal doctrine — invitee duty, foreseeability, negligent key control, negligent hiring, training, and supervision — is similar in most states, but the specific rules and the specific deadlines differ. Attorney911 is licensed to practice in Texas, and we regularly work with local counsel in other states when a case requires it. Call us, tell us where the assault happened, and we will tell you whether we can help, and if we cannot, we will help you find a lawyer who can.
Will I have to testify in court?
Possibly. If the case settles, you will not have to testify at trial. If the case goes to trial, your testimony is likely to be the most important part of the case. We prepare survivors to testify with dignity and without re-traumatization. We work with you on direct examination, on cross-examination preparation, on what to expect, and on what the courtroom looks like. You will not be alone. Your lawyer will be with you at every stage.
What if the attacker is found not guilty in the criminal case?
The criminal case and the civil case are separate. The standard of proof is different (beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal; preponderance of the evidence in civil). A not-guilty verdict in the criminal case does not bar a civil case, and it does not mean the civil jury will not find the attacker liable by a preponderance of the evidence. The civil case stands on its own.
What if I do not remember everything about the night?
That is normal. Trauma affects memory. The brain’s encoding of an event under extreme stress is fragmented — the sensory details may be vivid (the sound of the door, the weight on the bed) while the sequence and the timeline may be confused. The defense will try to use that fragmentation against you. We use it for you, by presenting the medical literature on trauma memory, the treating-clinician testimony, and the other evidence in the case (the hotel’s admission, the key-card record, the surveillance video if we have it). Your fragmented memory is not a weakness in the case. It is the case.
How do I get the police report?
The police report is the property of the law-enforcement agency that responded. In Gonzales County, the Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office or the local police department will have the report. Texas law gives crime victims a right to information about the criminal case, and we work with the District Attorney’s office and the law-enforcement agency to make sure you receive the records you are entitled to. We do not add to your burden. We make the request on your behalf.
How long do I have to decide whether to hire a lawyer?
You have two years from the date of the attack to file suit, and the deadline is unforgiving. But the practical answer is that the sooner you call, the more evidence we can preserve and the stronger the case we can build. The hotel’s surveillance video may already be gone. The night clerk may have moved on to another job. The key-card data may have been overwritten. Every day that passes without a preservation letter is a day the evidence is at risk. Call us today.
The Bottom Line
A woman checked into a Holiday Inn Express in Gonzales, Texas, in December 2022. She went to sleep in a locked room in a branded hotel. She woke to a man crouched at the foot of her bed. The hotel gave that man her key. The hotel admitted it. The man was arrested. The woman is living with what happened for the rest of her life.
The law in Texas gives her the right to hold the hotel accountable. The hotel is a business. The business has insurance. The insurance is paid for with the room rates of guests who trust the brand. When the brand fails to protect a guest in the way it promised, the law in Texas says the brand and the franchisee and the management company answer for the failure.
Attorney911 exists for this case. We are a Texas trial firm. We have spent 27 years in Texas courtrooms. We know the playbook of the insurance defense bar, and we know how to beat it. We are not the cheapest firm and we are not the fastest. We are the firm that prepares every case as if it will go to verdict, and the defense knows it.
If you or someone you love is the survivor in this case, or a case like it, call us. The call is free. The consultation is confidential. The consultation is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in English and in Spanish. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. You can also reach Ralph Manginello directly at (713) 528-9070, or by email at ralph@atty911.com. Hablamos Español.
We do not promise a result. We promise the work. The work is what wins cases.
“Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.”
Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC
1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911)
(713) 528-9070
ralph@atty911.com · lupe@atty911.com
Hablamos Español