What Happened in Midland County — and What It Means for You If You Were Hurt
You are reading this because you saw the news, or because you or someone you love was the person behind the headline. Either way, you are in the right place. Here is what happened: on a Thursday in July 2026, the Texas Anti-Gang Center — Permian Basin arrested three men in Midland County on outstanding criminal warrants. The charges are serious: indecency with a child by sexual contact, indecent exposure and obscene display, sexual assault, and assault causing bodily injury. One arrest happened during a traffic stop near Midkiff Road and Illinois Avenue in central Midland. Two others happened out on the county roads — the 5400 block of ECR 63 and the 1500 block of SCR 115 — the rural grid of the Permian Basin where oilfield service routes, lease-access roads, and residential parcels stitch together the land around the Midland metro.
The criminal side of this will be handled by the Midland County District Attorney. That is the prosecution — the State of Texas against the accused. Prison, probation, the sex offender registry, a protective order: those are criminal outcomes. They are real, and for many survivors they matter deeply. But they are not the only door.
This page is about the other door — the one most crime victims in Texas never learn exists until it is closing. The civil door. The one where a survivor, not the State, decides whether to hold the person who hurt them accountable in a court that answers not with a prison sentence but with money — money for the therapy that is not free, money for the wages that stopped, money for the sleep that never came back, money for the childhood that was stolen, money for the life that was rerouted. A civil claim is separate from the criminal prosecution. It can move forward even if the criminal case is still pending, even if there was never a conviction, even if the prosecutor never filed charges. It belongs to the survivor. And it runs on its own clock.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are not counsel on the Midland County arrests you read about. This page is legal information, not legal advice, and contacting the firm is free and confidential. But if you or someone you love was the victim of a crime in Midland County or anywhere in Texas — a sexual assault, an assault causing bodily injury, an act of indecency against a child — what follows is what we want you to know before you make a single decision, and before anyone from an insurance company or a defense attorney’s office calls you.
Criminal Case vs. Civil Case — Two Separate Roads That Do Not Cancel Each Other Out
The most common thing a crime victim tells us is some version of “I thought the criminal case was my case.” It is not. The criminal case belongs to the State of Texas. The prosecutor decides whether to file, whether to dismiss, whether to plea, whether to try. The survivor is a witness — a central one, sometimes a treated one, but a witness. The survivor does not control the outcome. The survivor does not receive a judgment. The survivor does not get paid.
The civil case is different in every way that matters. In a civil claim, the survivor is the plaintiff — the person who files the lawsuit, who decides whether to settle, who decides whether to go to trial, who decides what the case is worth. The standard of proof is lower than in a criminal case: a civil plaintiff must prove their case by a preponderance of the evidence — more likely than not — not beyond a reasonable doubt. A person can be acquitted in criminal court and still be found liable in civil court for the same act. That is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working as designed, because the two courts are asking different questions: the criminal court asks “did the State prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?” and the civil court asks “is it more likely than not that this person caused this harm, and what is that harm worth?”
If you are navigating both — a criminal prosecution that is still open and a civil claim you are considering — the two can proceed in parallel. Your civil lawyer and the prosecutor coordinate so that the civil discovery does not interfere with the criminal case. In some situations the civil case may be paused while the criminal case finishes, but not always. What matters is that you do not wait for the criminal case to resolve before you talk to a civil lawyer, because the civil clock is ticking on its own schedule, and the evidence that wins a civil case is dying on its own schedule too. If your case involves criminal charges, our firm also handles criminal defense — which means we understand both sides of the courtroom in a way that matters when the two systems overlap.
Texas Intentional Tort Claims — Assault, Battery, and the Civil Side of a Crime
When someone commits a sexual assault, an indecency offense against a child, or an assault causing bodily injury, they have committed both a crime and a civil wrong. The civil wrong has a name: battery. In Texas, battery is an intentional tort — a civil claim where the person who was harmed sues the person who caused the harm for money damages. The elements are straightforward in concept: the defendant intentionally caused a harmful or offensive contact with the plaintiff’s person, and the plaintiff suffered damages as a result.
Texas recognizes intentional tort claims — assault, battery, sexual battery — by crime victims against the persons who committed the offenses. These claims are separate from any criminal proceeding. They do not require a criminal conviction. They require proof — by a preponderance of the evidence — that the defendant committed the act and that the act caused the plaintiff’s injuries.
Texas also recognizes exemplary damages — what most people call punitive damages — in cases involving intentional torts and certain reckless conduct. Exemplary damages exist to punish the wrongdoer and deter others, above and beyond compensating the victim. Texas’s exemplary damages framework requires the plaintiff to prove the defendant acted with malice or gross negligence, and the standard is clear and convincing evidence — a higher bar than the preponderance standard that governs the underlying claim, but still lower than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of criminal court. Texas law caps exemplary damages in many cases, but those caps may not apply the same way to intentional criminal conduct, and the specific cap analysis depends on the facts of each case. What matters is that exemplary damages are available, they are powerful, and they exist precisely for the kind of conduct that brings a person to a criminal courtroom.
Here is the legal deadline that matters most:
A person must bring suit for personal injury not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues.
That is Texas’s statute of limitations for personal injury — two years from the date the cause of action accrues. For an assault or sexual assault, the cause of action generally accrues on the date the offense occurred. Two years sounds like a long time. It is not. Criminal investigations take months. Prosecutions take longer. By the time the criminal case has resolved, the civil clock may have already expired — which is exactly why a crime victim should talk to a civil lawyer early, not after the criminal case is done.
There are exceptions. If the victim was a minor, the clock may be tolled — paused — until the victim turns 18. For certain sex offenses against children, Texas extends the limitations period. And under federal law — specifically the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act — survivors of sex trafficking have a ten-year window, and if the victim was a minor, the ten years do not begin until the victim’s eighteenth birthday. That is a dramatically longer runway than the two-year Texas personal injury deadline, and it is one of the reasons why identifying whether a case involves trafficking, not just a single assault, can change everything.
Texas follows a modified comparative negligence framework with a 51% bar. In plain English: if the defense argues the victim was partly at fault — and in sexual assault and battery cases, they try — the victim’s recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault, and if the victim is found to be 51% or more at fault, recovery is barred entirely. In an intentional tort case, comparative fault is a weaker defense than in a negligence case, because a person who intentionally commits battery cannot easily shift blame to the victim. But the defense will try, and the attempt itself can be retraumatizing — which is why the lawyer a crime victim chooses matters not just for the law but for how the case is lived through.
Negligent Security and Third-Party Liability — Following the Real Money
Here is the hardest truth in a crime victim civil case, and we will not pretend it is not true: the person who committed the crime may have no money. A prison sentence does not generate a paycheck. A person convicted of sexual assault may be judgment-proof — meaning a judgment against them is a piece of paper that cannot be collected, because there are no assets behind it.
This is where most crime victims give up. It is also where the right lawyer starts working harder, not less. Because the person who committed the crime is not always the only party who bears legal responsibility. In many cases, a third party — a property owner, a business, an institution — was negligent in a way that foreseeably enabled the harm. And that third party may have insurance, assets, and a balance sheet that can actually pay a judgment.
Negligent security is the legal theory that reaches a property owner or business when criminal conduct was foreseeable and the owner failed to take reasonable steps to prevent it. A hotel that ignores a pattern of police calls to its property. An apartment complex that leaves broken locks unrepaired after prior assaults. A parking lot with no lighting where attacks have happened before. A business that hired a person with a violent record without checking. In each case, the question is the same: was the criminal act foreseeable, and did the property owner or business fail to take reasonable precautions against it?
Our firm handles hotel injury and premises liability cases — and the negligent security theory is often where the real recovery lives in a crime victim case. We have also litigated cases involving hotel sexual assault and negligent security, where the failure of a business to protect a guest from a foreseeable criminal act was the core of the case.
Under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a survivor of sex trafficking can sue not only the trafficker but any business that knowingly benefited from the trafficking venture — including a hotel that rented rooms to a trafficker while ignoring the warning signs. The statute provides:
“An individual who is a victim of a violation of this chapter may bring a civil action against the perpetrator (or whoever knowingly benefits, or attempts or conspires to benefit, financially or by receiving anything of value from participation in a venture which that person knew or should have known has engaged in an act in violation of this chapter) in an appropriate district court of the United States and may recover damages and reasonable attorneys fees.”
That is 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a). The statute gives survivors a ten-year window to file — and if the victim was a minor, ten years from the victim’s eighteenth birthday. It also shifts attorney’s fees to the defendant if the survivor prevails, which makes these cases economically viable even when the damages are modest.
The “red flags” that establish constructive knowledge — the signs a business should have seen — are specific and documented in the case law: cash-only payments for rooms, repeated refusal of housekeeping, heavy foot traffic to a single room, requests for rooms near exits, a young person who never appears at the front desk, a controlling companion who speaks for the victim, prior law enforcement activity at the property. These are not subtle. The hospitality industry trains staff to recognize them. A business that ignored all of them and kept taking the room money is not an innocent bystander.
The Medicine of Crime-Victim Trauma — PTSD, Tonic Immobility, and the Invisible Wound
The most dangerous myth in a crime victim civil case is the one the defense relies on most: “there are no broken bones, so where is the injury?” The answer is in the brain, and the science is not soft.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a formal psychiatric diagnosis with eight separate diagnostic criteria under the DSM-5, and a survivor must meet every one of them: the traumatic event itself, intrusive symptoms (nightmares, flashbacks, unwanted memories), avoidance of trauma-related stimuli, negative changes in cognition and mood, alterations in arousal and reactivity (hypervigilance, exaggerated startle, sleep disturbance, irritability), symptoms lasting more than one month, functional impairment, and the symptoms not being attributable to a substance or medical condition. This is a checklist, not a feeling. A clinician diagnoses it. Validated instruments — the CAPS-5 and the PCL-5 — measure it objectively. The injury is real, and it is provable.
The science on sexual assault and PTSD is devastating. In the largest epidemiological study ever conducted on trauma and PTSD — the National Comorbidity Survey — rape carried the highest conditional probability of producing PTSD of any traumatic event measured, for both men and women. Not combat. Not natural disasters. Not car wrecks. Rape. The event most likely to leave a person with permanent psychological injury is the one that happened to you.
And one of the cruelest myths about sexual assault — the one that defense lawyers have used for decades to undermine survivors — is the claim that “a real victim would have fought back.” The science says the opposite. Tonic immobility — an involuntary, brainstem-mediated freeze response in which the body literally cannot move or speak — was reported by 70% of rape survivors in a peer-reviewed clinical study, with 48% reporting extreme tonic immobility. The muscles lock. The voice will not come. It is a reflex, like a flinch. It is not consent. It is not a choice. And the survivors who experienced it go on to suffer PTSD at nearly three times the rate of those who did not.
The lifetime economic cost of rape — medical care, lost productivity, criminal justice costs — was estimated by the CDC at $122,461 per victim, in a peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. That figure is in 2014 dollars. It counts only the things you can put on an invoice. It does not begin to measure the marriage that strained, the front door that cannot be walked through alone at night, the career that was abandoned, the childhood that ended. But it is a number — a real, government-published, peer-reviewed number — that puts a floor under what a civil claim is worth.
Evidence Preservation — What Exists, Who Holds It, How Fast It Dies
A crime victim civil case is built on evidence, and the evidence is on a clock. Some of it is the criminal justice system’s evidence — held by the Midland County District Attorney, the arresting agencies, the Texas Department of Public Safety. Some of it is the victim’s own evidence — medical records, therapy records, the first person they told. And some of it belongs to third parties — hotels, businesses, property owners — who have no obligation to keep it unless someone tells them to.
Criminal case files. Police reports, witness statements, forensic evidence, and the complete investigative file are maintained by the Midland County District Attorney and the arresting agencies. These are not automatically available to a civil plaintiff, but they can be obtained through civil subpoena once the criminal proceedings have matured or through cooperative coordination with the prosecutor’s office. The criminal file is the foundation of any parallel civil claim — it contains the official record of what happened, documented by law enforcement, often including forensic evidence and witness statements that a civil lawyer could never recreate.
TAG traffic-stop records. One of the Midland County arrests happened during a traffic stop near Midkiff Road and Illinois Avenue. Traffic-stop records — dashcam footage, bodycam footage, dispatch audio, the officer’s report — are held by the arresting agency. Texas law enforcement retention cycles vary, but bodycam footage is typically preserved for about 90 days unless it is flagged for pending prosecution. If the footage is not flagged, it can be legally overwritten. A civil preservation demand — a formal letter telling the agency to save the recording — can freeze that clock, but only if it goes out before the overwrite cycle runs.
SANE / forensic exam records. If the survivor had a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner exam — the “rape kit” — it was created at a hospital within hours of the assault. Evidence-retention windows for untested kits vary by Texas law, and the kits themselves are critical evidence. The contemporaneous medical record — the documented injuries, the toxicology, the forensic swabs — is created at the moment of the exam and is far more powerful than anything reconstructed months later.
Mental health records. The first therapy intake, the first crisis-counseling note, the first PCL-5 score sheet — these are the contemporaneous records that prove the injury was real and was connected to the event. They pre-date any “litigation motive” accusation. But clinic record-retention cycles can be short, and records can be lost. Request and preserve them early.
Outcry witnesses. The first person the survivor told — a friend, a family member, a teacher, a hotline volunteer — is an outcry witness. Their memory of that conversation degrades. Identify and document them fast. In Texas, outcry statements in child-sexual-assault cases have special legal status, and the outcry witness can be a critical piece of both the criminal and civil case.
Third-party business records. If the crime happened at or near a business — a hotel, an apartment complex, a parking lot — that business may have surveillance video, key-card logs, incident reports, and police call-for-service records. Surveillance video is the fastest-dying record in the entire file. Many businesses overwrite on a rolling 30-day loop. If no one tells the business to save it, it disappears — legally. The preservation letter that freezes that footage has to go out within days, not months.
This is what we mean when we say the day you call is the day the clock starts working for you instead of against you. Every record that is preserved is a piece of the case. Every record that dies is a piece the defense does not have to answer for.
The Insurance Reality — Why Intentional Torts Are the Hardest Claims to Collect
Here is the structural problem in every crime victim civil case, and we will tell you the truth about it: standard liability insurance policies — the kind a homeowner, a business, or a property owner carries — typically contain exclusions for intentional torts and assault-and-battery claims. The insurance company’s first move is to say “this assault is excluded from coverage,” and walk away.
This is why the perpetrator is often not the real target of a crime victim civil case. The perpetrator may have no assets and no insurance that covers intentional conduct. The real target — the one with the insurance tower and the balance sheet — is the third party whose negligence enabled the harm. A hotel with a CGL policy that covers negligent security even if it excludes the assault itself. An apartment complex whose failure to fix a broken lock was negligence, not an intentional tort. An employer whose negligent hiring of a person with a violent history was a separate, insurable wrong.
The coverage fight is its own battle, and it is where Lupe Peña’s experience inside the insurance defense industry pays off. He spent years at a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. He knows the policy language, the coverage opinions, the reservation-of-rights letters, and the tactics carriers use to walk away from a claim. Now he uses that knowledge for the people the insurance industry used to treat as files to close.
This is not a guarantee of recovery. It is an honest description of the terrain. Some crime victim cases have a clear path to a solvent, insured defendant. Some do not. Part of what a crime victim lawyer does — the first thing, often — is figure out whether there is a reachable defendant with assets or insurance, before asking the survivor to relive the hardest experience of their life in a legal proceeding that may not pay.
The Insurance Adjuster’s Playbook — Three Moves and Their Counters
If a third-party defendant — a hotel, a property owner, a business — has insurance, an adjuster will be assigned. And the adjuster’s job is to pay as little as possible, as slowly as possible. Here are three plays you will see, and how each one is countered.
Play 1: The friendly “just checking in” call. Within days of the incident, someone will call the survivor — sometimes the business’s insurer, sometimes a third-party adjuster, sometimes a “victim advocate” hired by the defense. The voice is warm. The questions seem caring. “We just want to hear your side of the story.” “We want to make sure you’re okay.” Every word is recorded. Every answer is built to be quoted later in a motion or a cross-examination. The survivor who says “I’m doing okay” has just given the defense a piece of evidence that their injuries are not serious.
Counter: Do not give a recorded statement to anyone without your lawyer present. Not the business’s insurer. Not the adjuster. Not the “victim advocate” who showed up unannounced. The only statement that helps a crime victim civil case is one given with counsel present, after the survivor understands exactly how each word will be used.
Play 2: The fast check with a release buried under it. A check arrives — sometimes within weeks. It looks like help. Attached to it, often on the back page, in small print, is a release — a legal document that, once signed, extinguishes every claim the survivor has against the business, the property owner, and sometimes everyone involved. The check is designed to arrive before the survivor has talked to a lawyer, before the medical bills are tallied, before the PTSD is diagnosed, and before the full scope of the harm is known.
Counter: Never sign anything from an insurance company without having a lawyer read it first. A release is permanent. The money it offers is almost always a fraction of what the case is worth. The right to sue, once signed away, does not come back.
Play 3: The symptom-gap argument. The defense will pull the survivor’s medical records and look for gaps — a period between the assault and the first therapy appointment, a gap between the ER visit and the follow-up, a statement in the ER records that the survivor “denied pain” or “appeared calm.” Those gaps are then used to argue the harm was not serious, or was not caused by the assault, or was pre-existing. The defense will also mine the survivor’s social media — looking for a photo of a smile, a night out, a vacation — and argue that a person who smiled six months after an assault cannot have been seriously injured.
Counter: The medical literature answers the symptom-gap attack directly. Tonic immobility explains why a survivor may appear calm at the scene. PTSD’s “delayed expression” specifier — written into the DSM-5 itself — explains why full criteria may not appear until six months after the event. A social media photo of a smile is not evidence that the nightmares stopped. A crime victim’s lawyer builds the medical record from day one — connecting the survivor to the right clinicians, the right diagnostics, the right documentation — so that the defense’s gap argument has nothing to grab onto.
For more on what not to say to an insurance adjuster, this resource walks through the specific phrases and tactics in more detail.
Damages and Case Value — What a Crime Victim Civil Claim Is Worth
A crime victim civil claim is worth what a jury would award, reduced by the realities of collectibility, insurance coverage, and comparative fault. That is the honest answer. No lawyer who has not seen the medical records, the police reports, and the defendant’s financial picture can put a number on a case — and any lawyer who quotes a number on the first phone call is not telling the truth.
What we can tell you is what the damage categories are, so you know what is on the table:
Economic damages — the money side you can add up. Past and future medical expenses, including emergency treatment, psychological counseling, psychiatric care, and medication. Lost wages and lost earning capacity — the income the survivor has already lost and the income they will lose in the future because of the injury. The cost of a life-care plan if the trauma requires ongoing, structured care.
Non-economic damages — the human side no receipt can measure. Pain and suffering. Mental anguish. Emotional distress. Loss of enjoyment of life. Disfigurement. The life the survivor no longer gets to live. In a sexual assault case, these are often the largest category — because the psychological injury is the primary injury, and its cost is measured in years, not in bills.
Exemplary damages — punitive damages, available in Texas for intentional torts and certain reckless conduct, designed to punish the wrongdoer and deter others. Texas requires clear and convincing evidence of malice or gross negligence, and caps may apply depending on the facts. In cases involving intentional criminal conduct, exemplary damages can be substantial — and they send a message that goes beyond the individual case.
The CDC’s peer-reviewed estimate of the lifetime cost of rape — $122,461 per victim in 2014 dollars — is a floor, not a ceiling. It counts medical care, lost productivity, and criminal justice costs. It does not count pain, suffering, mental anguish, or the value of a stolen childhood. In cases involving children, the lifetime cost is often far higher — because the injury spans more years, because developmental damage compounds, and because the therapy may be needed for decades.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Every case is different. What we can promise is that we will tell you the truth about what your case is worth — not what sounds good, but what the evidence, the law, and the collectible defendants support.
Your First 72 Hours — A Roadmap for Crime Victims
If you or someone you love has been the victim of a crime in Midland County, here is what matters in the first 72 hours:
First: safety and medical care. If you are in danger, call 911. If you have been sexually assaulted, go to the nearest hospital with a SANE program — the forensic exam must happen within a narrow window, and the evidence it preserves cannot be recreated. Physical injuries should be documented by a medical professional, not self-reported later. Your safety and your health come before anything legal.
Second: the criminal report. If you have not already, file a police report. In Midland County, this may go to the Midland Police Department, the Midland County Sheriff’s Office, or the Texas Department of Public Safety, depending on where the crime occurred. If the crime happened on a county road — like the ECR 63 or SCR 115 areas mentioned in the arrests — the sheriff’s office or DPS may be the primary agency. The criminal report starts the criminal case, and it also creates the official record that a civil case will build on.
Third: do not sign anything from an insurance company. No release. No settlement. No “authorization” form. If someone offers you money in the first days after a crime, that money is designed to make your case go away before you know what it is worth.
Fourth: do not give a recorded statement to anyone. Not the business’s insurer. Not the property owner’s lawyer. Not the adjuster who sounds sympathetic. Anything you say can and will be used to reduce or deny your claim. Your statement to the police is necessary. Your statement to an insurance company is not.
Fifth: document everything. Write down what happened, in your own words, while it is fresh. Take photographs of any injuries. Save every text, every message, every record of contact with the person who harmed you. Identify the people you told — the outcry witnesses — and write down their names. If the crime happened at a business, photograph the scene — the lighting, the locks, the cameras, the signage — before anything changes.
Sixth: call a lawyer. The preservation letter — the formal demand that evidence be saved — goes out the day you call. Every day before that call is a day the evidence is dying. The consultation is free. The fee is contingency — we do not get paid unless we win. And the conversation is confidential, even if you never hire us.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. The line is live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — not an answering service, but our staff. If you are more comfortable in Spanish, Lupe Peña conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. Hablamos Español.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue the person who assaulted me even if they are in prison?
Yes. A prison sentence does not extinguish your civil claim. The civil case is separate from the criminal prosecution, and it can proceed even while the criminal case is pending or after a conviction. The practical question is whether the person who harmed you has assets or insurance that can pay a judgment — and in many cases, the real defendant is not the perpetrator but a third party whose negligence enabled the harm. A lawyer can evaluate both paths.
How long do I have to file a civil claim in Texas?
Texas’s statute of limitations for personal injury is two years from the date the cause of action accrues — generally the date of the assault. If the victim was a minor, the clock may be tolled until the victim turns 18. For sex trafficking claims under the federal TVPRA, the window is ten years — and ten years from the victim’s eighteenth birthday if the victim was a minor. These deadlines are real and unforgiving. Talk to a lawyer early, not after the criminal case resolves.
What if the person who hurt me has no money?
This is the most common question, and the answer is where the right lawyer earns their fee. The person who committed the crime may be judgment-proof, but a third party — a hotel, an apartment complex, a business, an employer — may have been negligent in a way that foreseeably enabled the harm. Negligent security, negligent hiring, and negligent supervision are civil claims that reach insured defendants with balance sheets. Identifying whether such a defendant exists is one of the first things a crime victim lawyer evaluates.
Will my civil case interfere with the criminal prosecution?
Not necessarily. The two cases can proceed in parallel, and your civil lawyer and the prosecutor can coordinate so that civil discovery does not compromise the criminal case. In some situations, the civil case may be paused until the criminal case resolves. What matters is that you do not wait for the criminal case to finish before consulting a civil lawyer — because the civil clock is running on its own schedule, and the evidence is dying on its own schedule.
Can I sue a hotel or business where the crime happened?
Yes — if the business was negligent in a way that foreseeably enabled the harm. A hotel that ignored red flags of trafficking, an apartment complex that left broken locks unrepaired after prior assaults, a parking lot with no lighting where attacks had happened before — each can be liable under a negligent security theory. Under the federal TVPRA, a business that knowingly benefited from a trafficking venture can be sued directly, with a ten-year statute of limitations and a fee-shifting provision.
What if I was assaulted as a child — is it too late?
Possibly not. Texas tolls the statute of limitations for minors in many cases, meaning the clock may not start until the victim turns 18. For certain sex offenses against children, Texas has extended limitations periods. And under the federal TVPRA, if the trafficking or sex offense occurred when the victim was a minor, the ten-year clock does not begin until the victim’s eighteenth birthday. Many survivors who assume they have run out of time are still squarely within the window.
Do I have to testify in court?
In a civil case that goes to trial, the plaintiff generally testifies. But most civil cases settle before trial — and in many cases, the survivor’s testimony can be given in a deposition, not in open court. A crime victim’s lawyer can also seek protective orders to limit the scope of questioning, close the courtroom during sensitive testimony, and use other procedural tools to protect the survivor from unnecessary retraumatization. The decision to testify, settle, or go to trial is always the survivor’s.
What does it cost to hire a crime victim lawyer?
Our firm works on contingency. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The fee is 33.33% of the recovery before trial and 40% if the case goes to trial. We advance the costs of the case — filing fees, expert fees, record retrieval — and those costs are repaid from the recovery. If there is no recovery, you owe us nothing for our time. This is not generosity. It is the only fee structure that gives a crime victim access to the same quality of legal representation that an insurance company buys for the defendant.
Can I get compensation for PTSD even without physical injuries?
Yes. PTSD is a diagnosable, treatable, and compensable injury. The DSM-5 defines it with eight specific criteria. Validated clinical instruments measure it. Peer-reviewed research establishes that rape — the event most likely to cause PTSD — produces lasting psychological injury at higher rates than combat or natural disasters. A civil claim can recover the cost of treatment, the lost earning capacity, and the pain and suffering caused by psychological injury, even when there are no physical scars. The invisible wound is the wound.
What if the person who hurt me was never convicted?
You can still bring a civil claim. The criminal standard — beyond a reasonable doubt — is higher than the civil standard — preponderance of the evidence. A person can be acquitted in criminal court and still be found liable in civil court for the same act. The civil case does not depend on a conviction. It depends on whether you can prove, more likely than not, that the defendant caused your injuries.
Why Attorney911 — Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years in Texas courtrooms, including federal court. He is the Managing Partner of The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — Attorney911. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he learned early that the story is not what the headline says — it is what the person living it feels. He has tried cases across Texas, he has built a career on the cases that other firms said were too hard, and he has never confused a legal brief with a human being. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Houston Bar Association. He is rated “Excellent” on Avvo with a 5.0 client-review score. He is lead counsel in the active $10 million hazing lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston — a case that, like a crime victim case, is about holding institutions accountable for the harm they enabled.
Lupe Peña is a former insurance-defense attorney. He spent years inside a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. He knows the playbook from the inside: the low reserve set in the first 48 hours, the recorded-statement call engineered to get you to say “I’m feeling okay,” the fast check with the release buried under it, the IME sent to a doctor the insurer picks. He knows how claims are valued in the software, how surveillance is used, and how delay is deployed as a weapon. Now he sits on your side of the table. He is fluent in Spanish — he conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. He is a third-generation Texan with family roots to the King Ranch, born and raised in Sugar Land. He knows this state, its courts, and its people.
Together, Ralph and Lupe handle personal injury, wrongful death, and catastrophic injury cases across Texas — from their offices in Houston, Austin, and Beaumont, and through local counsel and pro hac vice arrangements where required. The firm has recovered more than $50 million for clients over its history. The Google rating is 4.9 stars across more than 251 reviews. The hotline — 1-888-ATTY-911 — is live 24/7 with real staff, not an answering service.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we guarantee is this: the consultation is free. The fee is contingency — we do not get paid unless we win. The conversation is confidential. And the first thing we do, the day you call, is start working to protect the evidence before it disappears and to protect you before the insurance company calls.
If you or someone you love was the victim of a crime in Midland County — a sexual assault, an assault causing bodily injury, an act of indecency against a child, or any violent crime — you have a civil right to hold the person who hurt you, and anyone whose negligence enabled it, accountable. That right is yours, not the State’s. It runs on a clock. And the evidence that proves your case is dying on a clock that runs faster.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win. Hablamos Español.