A Phone Call You Never Wanted to Make
It was a Friday night. Valentine’s Day weekend. Your loved one went out — maybe with friends, maybe to meet someone new. The address was a house in East Memphis, somewhere off Park Avenue, the kind of place you book on an app and pay for by the night. Music was loud enough to be heard from the street. Cars kept coming and going.
By the time the call came, multiple weapons had already fired. The 911 recording would later note the time as just past 11:24 p.m. Six people ran to a white SUV and disappeared into the Memphis night. Someone performed CPR on the lawn. An ambulance came. Your loved one was taken to the hospital in critical condition. The next call told you the rest.
If you are reading this, you are probably somewhere in the days or weeks after that call. You are not thinking about civil litigation right now. You are thinking about the funeral, about your children, about the empty chair, about why this happened. That is exactly where your mind should be.
But the evidence clock is already running. And the people who profited from the property where this happened — the owner, the booking platform, the person who threw the party — are not waiting for you to grieve before they start protecting themselves. That is why we are here. This page answers every question the grieving family asks in the first month: who is legally on the hook, what Tennessee law actually says, how much money a case like this is worth, what records are about to disappear, and what you do right now — tonight, this week, this month — to make sure justice survives your grief.
We are Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña of Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Ralph has spent more than 27 years in Texas and federal courtrooms — admitted November 6, 1998, Texas Bar #24007597, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, journalist before lawyer, 290+ educational videos, member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association. Lupe spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before crossing the bar to fight for injured people — Texas Bar #24084332, admitted December 6, 2012, former defense insider who knows exactly how carriers and property insurers set reserves and pick doctors, fluent in Spanish. Hablamos Español. We take these cases on contingency — you pay nothing unless we win.
Who Can Be Sued When Someone Is Shot at a Short-Term Rental
Short-term rental shootings are not a single-defendant case. They are a stack of cases — each defendant pointing at the others — and the family’s lawyer has to identify every solvent pocket and reach it before the money disappears. The four functional defendants in this kind of case:
1. The Property Owner. The LLC or individual who holds title to the home and pocketed the nightly rate. The owner’s liability runs through negligent security — did the owner know, or should the owner have known, that this property attracted dangerous parties, and did the owner take reasonable steps to prevent them? The owner’s liability also runs through premises liability for any lawful guest on the property, and through negligent entrustment if the owner handed the keys to a tenant the owner knew or should have known was going to throw an open-invite party with no security plan. East Memphis has seen enough party-house activity in this corridor that an owner who converted a home to an STR and continued collecting bookings while ignoring neighbor complaints and police calls is going to have a hard time claiming surprise.
2. The Short-Term Rental Platform. Airbnb, VRBO, and similar booking platforms argue they are just an app connecting travelers to hosts. That argument works in many contexts. It works much less well where the platform knew or should have known the listing had become a party house. Platforms have corporate “no party” policies that, when ignored by a host with repeated complaints, create a paper trail. Platform algorithms, internal trust-and-safety teams, age-verification failures, and the way the platform markets party-friendly homes are all discoverable in litigation. The platform is not always the deepest pocket, but it is frequently a pocket — and it is the pocket with the records that tell you what the host told the platform about who was coming.
3. The Tenant Who Threw the Party. The person who booked the property, advertised a Valentine’s Day party (or a gathering that became one), and brought the guests into a space the host and platform knew had become dangerous. A tenant who rents a home and turns it into a private venue — for a fee, for social standing, or for the night — owes a duty of reasonable care to the people they invited in. The criminal shooters are still the direct cause of the death; the tenant’s liability runs in parallel for creating the unmanaged gathering where the shooting became possible.
4. The Unknown Assailants. Six people who ran to a white SUV. They will be the focus of the criminal investigation. In the civil case, their identity matters less than you would think — the case moves forward against the property defendants now, with the assailants added later if and when they are identified and apprehended. Tennessee law does not require a family to wait for a criminal conviction to pursue the people whose property and permission created the conditions for the killing.
The Four Legal Theories That Carry This Case
In a short-term rental shooting case, the family has four overlapping legal theories. We plead all four; the defense has to answer each one.
1. Negligent Security (The Spine)
The owner (and, where the facts support it, the platform) had a duty to take reasonable security measures to protect lawful guests from foreseeable criminal violence. The question is not whether the owner caused the shooting — the shooter caused the shooting. The question is whether the owner took reasonable steps to prevent the conditions that allowed the shooting. Tennessee’s McClung standard measures that question by prior similar incidents and the totality of the circumstances that put the owner on notice.
The proof in our case lives in: prior police calls to the address, prior neighbor complaints, prior platform complaints, the property’s own incident logs, the lack of working security cameras, the lack of an on-site property manager for a known party gathering, the absence of any meaningful check on who was coming into the home that night, and the platform’s failure to deactivate a listing with a pattern of complaints.
2. Premises Liability (The Duty That Travels)
Tennessee premises liability law imposes on a property owner the duty to use reasonable care to protect invitees — including paying guests at a short-term rental — from dangerous conditions on the premises. An unmanaged, oversized, late-night party is a dangerous condition. The owner who collects the booking fee and walks away has breached that duty. The platform that holds the listing out as a safe alternative to a hotel has, in some circumstances, taken on a similar duty.
3. Negligent Entrustment and Supervision (The Owner’s Choice Argument)
The owner entrusted the home to a tenant. If the owner knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known, that this particular tenant was going to host a large unsanctioned gathering with no security plan, the owner is liable for negligent entrustment. This is where the platform’s records do their most damaging work: prior complaints about the same tenant, prior complaints about the same listing, prior platform warnings that were ignored.
4. Wrongful Death (The Family’s Own Claim)
Independent of any theory against any defendant, the family has a claim under Tenn. Code Ann. § 20-5-106 for the full measure of their loss. Funeral expenses, lost support, lost services, lost companionship, lost guidance, lost protection — the human and financial cost of a person who is no longer there.
What Compensation Can the Family Recover in Tennessee
Tennessee wrongful-death damages split into two categories, and a death case uses both.
Economic damages — uncapped. Funeral and burial expenses. Medical expenses incurred between the shooting and the death. The decedent’s lost earnings from the date of death through what would have been their working life. The lost value of household services the decedent would have provided — childcare, cooking, driving, repairs, household management. The present-value calculation of what a 30-year-old with a 35-year working horizon ahead would have earned, increased by wage growth, reduced to today’s dollars at a court-approved discount rate. These numbers are built by a forensic economist using the decedent’s actual work history, the federal worklife tables, and a defensible discount rate. They are large.
Non-economic damages — capped at $750,000 in most cases, with exceptions. The family’s loss of the decedent’s companionship, guidance, protection, and society. The decedent’s own pain and suffering between the shooting and death (survival action). Tennessee’s $750,000 cap can be pierced where the defendant’s conduct is intentional, fraudulent, malicious, or so grossly negligent as to amount to a knowing disregard of a substantial risk. We analyze that question in every case.
Punitive damages — where the conduct is bad enough. Tennessee permits punitive damages where the defendant acted with intentional misconduct, fraud, malice, or reckless disregard for the rights and safety of others. A property owner and platform that continued to advertise and accept bookings for a listing with a documented history of party complaints — and that profited from the bookings all the way up to the night of the shooting — is a defendant a jury may want to punish. Punitive damages are not capped.
The honest value range for a case like this: $1,250,000 to $4,500,000. That range accounts for Tennessee’s $750,000 cap on non-economic damages in most cases, tempered by the possibility of cap-piercing on intentional-conduct theories and by the uncertainty of comparative-fault allocation. A young decedent with a long working horizon and a clean liability picture will be at the upper end; an older decedent with comparative-fault questions will be at the lower end. We do not promise a number. We do the math in your specific case and tell you what we actually think it is worth, in writing.
The First 72 Hours — A Practical Roadmap
Hour 1–6. Medical and family first. If your loved one is in the hospital, the medical team’s care is the priority. If the funeral home is needed, take your time and use a provider you trust. Do not feel rushed to engage with the property owner, the platform, or any insurance company in the first 24 hours.
Hour 6–24. Preserve what you can. Screenshots of anything on your loved one’s phone related to the party — invitations, group chats, the booking confirmation, social media posts about the gathering, the address. Screenshot your own phone if you were on any group thread. Save voicemails. If your loved one had a Ring, Nest, or other doorbell camera account, do not change the password. Photograph anything in the home before the owner or platform has a chance to clean.
Hour 24–48. Call us. Contact Attorney911 at 1-888-ATTY-911 or (713) 443-4781 for a free, confidential consultation. We answer 24/7. There is no obligation. We will tell you whether the case is one we can help with, and we will tell you the truth about what to expect.
Hour 48–72. We move. The same day you retain us, we send preservation letters to the booking platform, the property owner, the property management company, the platform’s data-hosting vendors, and the relevant third-party evidence holders. We file the public-records requests with the Memphis Police Department and the City of Memphis Land Use Controls office. We begin the prior-incident investigation on the 3800 block of Kelley Circle. We identify the other guests at the party. We preserve the social media evidence. We lock down the timeline.
The first month. Within thirty days we will have: the police report, the CAD logs, the code-enforcement complaint history, the platform’s preservation response (or refusal), the forensic accounting records of the property’s bookings, the prior-incident record, and a detailed valuation of the case. Within sixty days we will have a complete preservation record and be ready to file suit. We do not wait for the criminal case — Tennessee wrongful-death cases are not blocked by pending criminal investigations, and waiting only helps the defense.
What You Should Do Right Now
If you have read this far, you are weighing whether to call a lawyer. The answer is yes, before you do anything else. Specifically:
- Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance company, the property owner, the platform, or any of their representatives. Direct all contact to us.
- Do not sign any release — not a partial release, not a “funeral expense” release, not a “limited” release. Once you sign, the right to sue for the full value of the case is gone.
- Do not delete anything on your phone, your loved one’s phone, or any social media account. Screenshot what matters and stop.
- Do not post on social media about the case, the party, the property, or the decedent’s last hours. The defense will be mining your accounts within days.
- Call us. 1-888-ATTY-911 or (713) 443-4781, 24/7. The consultation is free. The advice is confidential. There is no obligation. We will tell you the truth about your case — including, if appropriate, that another firm is better positioned to help.
Contact Attorney911 now for a free, confidential consultation.
The Bottom Line
A young man went to a party in East Memphis on Valentine’s Day weekend. He did not come home. Six people ran to a white SUV. The property where this happened is a short-term rental in a corridor that local law enforcement has flagged for party-house disturbances. The owner collected the booking fee. The platform processed the payment. The tenant invited the guests. The city has an STR ordinance that may have been violated. The evidence that tells us what the owner, the platform, and the tenant knew is on a clock — a fast one.
Tennessee law gives the family one year to file a wrongful-death claim. The evidence gives us days. We cannot recover the loss. We can recover the accountability, the compensation, and the prevention of the next one.
Call us now. 1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win. We will tell you the truth.
Contact Attorney911 today — 24/7, confidential, free.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page is legal information, not legal advice. The specific facts of your case will determine the specific advice we give. Calling us does not create an attorney-client relationship; that relationship begins only when you and the firm sign a written engagement letter. The legal analysis above is based on Tennessee law as it exists in June 2026, including Tennessee Code Annotated §§ 20-5-102, 20-5-106, 28-3-104, and 29-39-102, the McClung v. Delta Square foreseeability framework, and the Memphis Code of Ordinances Chapter 9-112. Statutes and case law change; the current law controls any actual case. If you are reading this more than 90 days after its publication date, call us for an update — the one-year Tennessee wrongful-death deadline does not pause for an outdated webpage.