We Are Here Because a Son Did Not Come Home
If you are reading this, someone you love was taken from you at a house party in El Paso. The questions arrive before the grief does, and they arrive every morning after: How did this happen? Who let this party happen? Who is responsible? What do I do now? What am I allowed to do?
You do not have to answer those questions alone. We handle the civil case for families across Texas when a death was caused by someone else’s choices — and a mansion party that the property owner knew was a magnet for violence, run for profit, advertised on social media, and held in a home that the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office had been called to more than twenty times that year, is the kind of case we were built for. The criminal system will handle the man who pulled the trigger. Our work is to hold every other person who helped create the conditions for that trigger to be pulled — the property owner who rented the house for a “mansion party,” the promoters who filled it, the security that wasn’t there — fully accountable in a Texas civil courtroom. We do it on contingency, which means you pay nothing unless we recover for your family. Your first call is a free consultation, day or night, at 1-888-ATTY-911.
What Happened at 5000 Fort Defiance Drive
On the night of August 6, 2022, and into the early hours of August 7, 2022, a five-bedroom, ten-bay-garage home in the 5000 block of Fort Defiance Drive in El Paso County’s Montana Vista community was rented out for what sheriff’s investigators called a “mansion party.” The home belongs to the family of a man who had been convicted in federal court of running a major cocaine trafficking organization that supplied Connecticut’s largest drug dealers. The home itself is worth about $1.1 million, and the party was advertised and promoted on social media to draw a young crowd from across the region.
The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office later described the environment that night in a public statement that should make every property owner and promoter in Texas pause:
“The parties are ‘the perfect storm for violence’ with illicit drug use, unregulated drinking and the convergence of rival gang members at the same location, police said in a statement.”
— El Paso County Sheriff’s Office public statement, reported August 10, 2022
After the party, a shooting occurred in the 3700 block of North Zaragoza Road near Montana Avenue. Cisqo Rodriguez, 21 years old, was mortally wounded. He was transported to the Hospitals of Providence East Campus on Joe Battle Boulevard in far East El Paso, where he was pronounced dead. An 18-year-old, Isaac Carlos, was arrested the next day and charged with manslaughter in connection with the death. Sheriff’s Major Crimes Unit investigators worked the case.
This page is not about the criminal charge against Carlos. That case is moving through the El Paso County criminal courts. This page is about the civil rights of Cisqo’s family — the right to hold the property owner, the promoters, and every other responsible party accountable in money damages for a death that should never have happened.
The Property Owner Had Twenty-Plus Warnings Before This
This is the part of the case that makes it so winnable — and so infuriating for the family. A property does not become the site of a fatal shooting by accident when the owner and the local sheriff’s office have been warning each other about the property for the better part of a year.
The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office publicly reported that deputies had responded to more than twenty incidents at the Fort Defiance Drive home in 2022 alone, in the months leading up to Cisqo’s death. The documented incident list, as reported by the Sheriff’s Office, included:
- One death
- Six drug offenses
- Two aggravated assaults
- Four driving-while-intoxicated cases
- Additional disturbances, fights, and other calls
In other words, the owner was not surprised. The owner did not have to guess what would happen when a “mansion party” was held in a home that already had a documented pattern of drug activity, alcohol-fueled fights, and a prior death on the property. Every call to 911 was a letter the owner received in real time telling him, in writing, exactly what his property was being used for. A property owner who knows, or has every reason to know, that gatherings at his home will produce violence has a legal duty under Texas law to do something about it — to stop renting the property for parties, to install real security, to refuse promoters who draw the kind of crowd that produces stabbings and shootings. The failure to take any of those steps is exactly what Texas law calls negligence, and when a death is the result, it is exactly what the Texas Wrongful Death Act was written to compensate.
The fact pattern here is about as clean as it gets for a negligent-security case in Texas. The owner had actual notice. The owner had constructive notice through the volume and severity of the prior calls. The owner profited — directly or indirectly — from renting the home for a party that brought hundreds of people to his door. And the death occurred in close temporal and geographic proximity to the owner’s own property. Texas juries understand this kind of case, and Texas juries punish it.
Who Can Be Held Civilly Responsible
When we file a wrongful death suit in Texas, we name every person or company whose conduct contributed to the death. In the El Paso mansion party case, that list is long, and it is intentional. The criminal case focuses on the trigger-puller. The civil case focuses on everyone who created the conditions that made the trigger-pulling possible.
The defendants we evaluate in this kind of case include:
-
The property owner — the owner of the Fort Defiance Drive home, who had actual notice of the danger and failed to stop hosting dangerous events on the property. Texas premises-liability law imposes a duty on a property owner to take reasonable steps to protect lawful invitees from foreseeable criminal harm. Twenty-plus prior calls to the property, including a prior death, makes the danger to a new guest entirely foreseeable.
-
Any property management company or landlord involved in renting the home for the event.
-
The party promoter or organizer — the person or company that advertised the party on social media, sold tickets or collected cover charges, and arranged for it to happen. A promoter who holds itself out as running a commercial event owes a duty of reasonable care to the guests it draws in.
-
Any security company hired (or not hired) for the event — the absence of licensed, trained security is a separate negligence theory.
-
Any business that sold alcohol to minors at or in connection with the event — Texas Dram Shop liability can apply when an establishment serves alcohol to a minor and that minor causes a death.
-
Other shooters or assailants whose conduct contributed to the death, individually and jointly.
-
The homeowner’s insurance carrier — most homeowner policies have coverage for bodily injury on the premises, and we pursue every available policy. In some cases, an umbrella or excess policy provides additional coverage that the family does not know exists until we make the formal discovery demand.
In Texas, liability among multiple defendants is governed by the proportionate responsibility statute, Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code Chapter 33. Each defendant pays his or her share of the fault — and a defendant who is more than 50 percent at fault can be held jointly and severally liable for the full damages award. That matters in a case like this: if a property owner sat on twenty warnings and rented the home out anyway, a Texas jury can find him more than 50 percent at fault and hold him for the full recovery.
What Texas Law Gives You
Texas gives the family of a person whose death was caused by another’s wrongful act two distinct civil claims, and we always bring both.
The Texas Wrongful Death Act — Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code Chapter 71. This is the family’s claim. It belongs to the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the deceased. The damages recoverable include:
- The pecuniary loss the family has suffered and will suffer in the future — the financial support, services, and care the deceased would have provided had he lived.
- Mental anguish suffered by the family.
- Loss of companionship and society — the loss of the relationship itself.
- Loss of services and support the deceased provided.
- Parental guidance, if applicable.
The Texas Survival Statute — Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 71.021–71.022. This is the claim the deceased could have brought had he lived. It belongs to his estate. The damages recoverable include:
- The pain and suffering the deceased experienced between the moment of injury and the moment of death.
- The medical and hospital bills incurred before death.
- The funeral and burial expenses.
- Any lost earnings between injury and death.
The two claims are brought together in one wrongful death lawsuit. Together they capture both what Cisqo personally went through and what his family has lost.
Texas also permits punitive damages in wrongful death cases. Punitive damages are not compensation. They are punishment. They are designed to send a message to a defendant that conduct like this — renting out a house with twenty prior 911 calls for a profit-driven party, watching the crowd grow, watching the violence start, doing nothing — will cost far more than any profit it ever produced. To recover punitive damages, we must prove the defendant’s conduct rose to gross negligence, malice, or fraud. Twenty-plus prior police calls and a documented prior death at the property is exactly the kind of record a Texas jury uses to make that finding.
The Two-Year Deadline in Texas
Texas is a two-year state. Under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003, a wrongful death action must be filed within two years of the date of death, and a survival action likewise within two years. The clock starts running on the date of death, not the date of the criminal case, not the date you find out who else was responsible. If you wait to call, you can lose the right to sue — permanently.
“A civil action brought under this subchapter may be commenced not later than the second anniversary of the date of the cause of action accrues.”
— Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003(b) (two-year limitations period, applied to wrongful death)
There are narrow exceptions — the discovery rule can toll the deadline when the wrongful act was concealed, and the criminal case can sometimes toll a civil claim against the same defendant — but those exceptions are narrow and fact-specific. If you are the family of someone who died in a case like this, the safest move is to call a Texas wrongful death lawyer now, not later. We cannot get time back once it has run.
For the Cisqo Rodriguez case specifically, the two-year clock from the August 7, 2022 date of death would have run in August 2024. The criminal case against Isaac Carlos was still moving through the El Paso County courts. Whether the civil claim remains viable depends on facts we would need to evaluate directly — and we will tell you honestly what we find. For any Texas family dealing with a similar event now, the two-year clock applies, and the call cannot wait.
What Evidence Exists and How Fast It Can Disappear
The single most important thing a Texas wrongful death lawyer does in the first days after a death is preserve the evidence. The people who run these events know that evidence is the case. The evidence clock in a case like this is brutal, and every piece of proof we need has its own destruction timer.
Here is the evidence we move to preserve in a mansion-party shooting case, and how fast it can die:
El Paso County Sheriff’s Office call-for-service records and dispatch logs. This is the single most important document in the case. It is the proof that the property had twenty-plus prior calls, including a prior death. The Sheriff’s Office preserves these records, but the specific 911 audio, CAD (computer-aided dispatch) entries, and unit response notes have the fastest internal-retention cycles. We send a Texas Public Information Act request to the Sheriff’s Office immediately and a litigation-hold letter the day we are retained.
Hospitals of Providence East Campus medical records. Cisqo Rodriguez was taken to the Hospitals of Providence East Campus on Joe Battle Boulevard. The medical record from the ER, including the triage time, the treating physicians, the time of pronouncement, and any blood alcohol or toxicology work performed at the hospital, is the spine of the survival claim. Texas hospitals are required to retain adult medical records for a minimum period, but the records are routinely purged on a rolling cycle. The medical-records custodian must be put on written notice to preserve.
Surveillance video from the home and from the surrounding neighborhood. Any cameras on the home itself, on neighboring homes, on business security systems in the Montana Vista area, on the El Paso County Sheriff’s vehicles, and on the Hospitals of Providence East Campus are all potential sources of footage. Residential and commercial video systems overwrite on a rolling cycle — many within 14 to 30 days. The preservation letter has to go out within days, not months.
Social media evidence. The party was advertised on social media. Instagram posts, Snapchat stories, TikTok videos, and Facebook event pages from the promoters and the attendees are the proof of how the party was marketed, how many people were expected, and what was promised. Snapchat stories disappear in 24 hours by default. Instagram stories in 24 hours. The accounts themselves are often deleted by users in the days after a fatal shooting. The platform preservation requests (through Snapchat Law Enforcement, Meta, TikTok) must go out the same week.
Key-card, door access, and alarm records from the home. If the home had any electronic entry system, the data is on a server we can demand. Most residential systems store limited history on the device, so this evidence is fragile.
Text messages, call detail records, and social media direct messages of the shooter, the promoter, and the property owner. These are the smoking-gun records. They are stored on phones that the people involved control, on carriers that retain content for limited windows, and on cloud accounts that the people involved can delete. We serve litigation-hold letters and, when necessary, subpoenas to the carriers and the cloud providers early.
Property records and rental agreements. Who rented the home to whom, on what date, for how much, for what stated purpose? El Paso County deed records and any short-term-rental platform records (Airbnb, Vrbo, local property-management companies) answer these questions. The rental agreement itself may have prohibited exactly the kind of use that occurred — and a defendant who violated his own lease is in worse shape than one who did not.
Insurance policies. The homeowner’s policy, the promoter’s commercial general liability policy, any event-insurance certificate, the security company’s coverage, and the shooter’s homeowner’s policy are all on the table. The homeowner’s carrier is the most likely to deny coverage, arguing the conduct was intentional or criminal — but Texas courts have repeatedly found that coverage obligations run to all claims, including assault-and-battery claims, unless an exclusion specifically applies. We send a Covenant v. DiPorta / Dekel style demand letter early, demanding the carrier acknowledge a duty to defend the property owner.
Toxicology reports. If Cisqo’s blood was drawn at the hospital, the result is the single most important fact about what happened in the moments before the shooting. If it was not drawn, the absence is itself a fact we can prove. The El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office records must be requested immediately.
The 911 audio from the shooting itself. The dispatch audio, the responding-officer body-worn camera footage, and the dashcam footage from the first patrol cars on scene are the freshest, most accurate record of what happened. Texas law makes the body-worn camera footage a public record subject to a Public Information Act request, but the agency can withhold portions during an active criminal investigation.
We move on all of this within the first 72 hours.
The Insurance Company Playbook
Here is the part the family almost never sees. By the time you call us, the insurance carrier for the property owner, the promoter, the security company, and possibly others has already been working the case. Their playbook is consistent. We know it because Lupe Peña used to sit on their side of the table.
Lupe Peña is a former insurance-defense attorney. He trained inside a national defense firm. He knows the software — Colossus, the reserve-setting models, the IME-doctor-selection system, the surveillance vendor list, the social-media mining workflow. He knows what the carrier’s playbook is because he ran it. He now uses that knowledge on the other side of the table, for the family.
Here is what the carriers will try, and what we do about it.
Play One: The Friendly Recorded Statement. Within a week of the death, an adjuster will call a family member — often the grieving parent or the oldest sibling — and ask, very gently, to “just tell us what happened.” That call is being recorded. The questions are engineered to elicit statements the carrier can use to limit or deny coverage. We have seen adjusters ask grieving parents to describe the deceased’s drug use, his mental health, his relationship with his family, his employment status, his prior run-ins with the law. Every one of those answers is ammunition. The counter is simple: do not give a recorded statement to anyone — not the property owner’s insurance carrier, not the shooter’s insurance carrier, not your own insurance carrier — until you have spoken to us first. We will be on a call with you when the conversation happens, if a conversation needs to happen at all.
Play Two: The Quick Check With a Release. Within a month, the property owner’s carrier will offer a settlement that looks large relative to funeral expenses. The check arrives with a release printed on the back, or with a separate release agreement. The number is calibrated to be enough to cover the funeral and a few months of living expenses, and small enough that the carrier can close its file and walk away. The counter is the same: nothing is signed, nothing is deposited, nothing is cashed until we have read the release line by line. A release is forever. A wrongful death case is not.
Play Three: The IME Doctor. The carrier picks a doctor it pays to examine the deceased’s medical records, or in some cases the surviving family, and issues a report minimizing the extent of the injury, the causation, or the future damages. In a death case, this often takes the form of a defense medical expert disputing the cause of death, the timeline, or the extent of conscious pain and suffering before death. The counter is our own retained forensic pathologist and our own retained economist and life-care planner to put the right expert in front of the jury.
Play Four: Comparative Fault on the Decedent. The carrier will argue that the deceased “contributed to his own death” by attending a party where alcohol and drugs were present, or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or by choosing to associate with people he should not have associated with. Under Texas law, the deceased’s conduct can reduce the family’s recovery, and if the deceased is found more than 50 percent at fault, the family’s recovery is barred entirely. The counter is proof that the deceased was a twenty-one-year-old invited to a party at a private home, and that no fault of his own created the danger the property owner allowed to exist on the property. Texas juries in El Paso County, in our experience, are skeptical of the “blame the victim” move when the victim is a young man who was invited to a party and the property owner had twenty prior 911 calls.
Play Five: The Social Media Sweep. The carrier will hire a vendor to mine the deceased’s social media for drug use, gang affiliation, prior fights, anything that paints him as the kind of person who “put himself in this situation.” The counter is that the law does not allow a property owner to abdicate his duty to a paying guest because of the guest’s social media history. The duty is to the guest, not to the guest’s online persona. We use the social-media mining in our own case, not theirs — to show the deceased as a real person with a real life, not as a caricature the carrier tries to paint.
Play Six: The Slow File. The carrier delays responding to the demand letter, delays setting a reserve, delays producing the policy, and lets the two-year statute of limitations tick. The hope is that the family, pressed by grief and by the bills, will accept a low offer just to get the file closed. The counter is our willingness to file suit, to push the case into discovery, and to drag the policy into the open. The carrier does not want a jury to read its denial letter. We make sure the jury does.
Play Seven: The Bare Policy Limits Offer. When the carrier finally makes an offer, it is often at the policy limit — but only the limit visible to the family. There is almost always an umbrella or excess policy above the primary, and there is almost always a second carrier. The counter is full discovery of every policy in the tower, and the identification of every additional insured.
What Your Case Is Worth
We do not promise numbers, and no honest Texas wrongful death lawyer does. But the architecture of damages in this case is strong, and we can walk you through the math.
A 21-year-old man in El Paso, with a work-life expectancy into his mid-sixties, has decades of lost earnings ahead of him. The foreman of a construction crew, a young father, a young apprentice electrician, a young warehouse supervisor — the specific occupation matters for the number, but every occupation produces a real economic-loss calculation. The forensic economist we retain will project his expected earnings, his expected employer-paid benefits, his expected raises, his expected promotions, and his expected retirement age. The calculation is reduced to present-day dollars and presented to the jury with the work-life expectancy tables published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Then there is the human side. Mental anguish for a parent who lost a child is real, and Texas juries in El Paso County understand that. Loss of companionship, loss of the relationship the family had with the deceased, the empty chair at Thanksgiving, the silence in the house — these are the losses the Wrongful Death Act was written to address.
Then there is the punitive layer. Texas permits punitive damages where the defendant’s conduct rose to gross negligence, malice, or fraud. A property owner with twenty-plus prior police calls — including a prior death — who rents the property out again for a profit-driven mansion party, is the textbook example of the kind of conduct that supports punitives.
The case-value framework we work from in a Texas mansion-party shooting case like this is:
- Low end — approximately $1,250,000. This is the floor in a case with limited economic loss (the deceased was early in his career, with no dependents, and a single defendant with a small policy), or where a jury finds significant comparative fault on the deceased.
- High end — exceeding $6,000,000. This is the ceiling in a case with strong economic-loss evidence, a sympathetic family, a defendant with significant insurance coverage and a balance sheet, and a punitive-damages finding.
The actual number in any given case depends on the specific facts, the specific jury, and the specific defendants. We will tell you honestly where your case sits on that range once we have done the investigation.
How We Build the Case
The first seventy-two hours matter more than the next two years. Here is the order of operations when a Texas family calls us about a mansion-party shooting case.
Within twenty-four hours of being retained, we send litigation-hold letters to every potential defendant — the property owner, the property-management company, the promoter, the security company, and the social-media platforms that hosted the party’s promotional material. We send a Texas Public Information Act request to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office for the 911 audio, the CAD log, the body-worn camera footage, and the incident report. We send a medical-records request to the Hospitals of Providence East Campus and to the El Paso County Medical Examiner. We send preservation letters to the homeowner’s insurance carrier, the homeowner’s umbrella carrier, and the promoter’s commercial general liability carrier.
Within the first week, we file the wrongful death petition in the appropriate Texas district court. In El Paso County, that is the district court in the 34th Judicial District or one of the other El Paso County district courts. We sue every responsible defendant in one action. We plead negligent security, negligent hiring, negligent entrustment, premises liability, public nuisance under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 125, gross negligence, and any civil conspiracy or aiding-and-abetting theories the facts support.
Within the first month, we serve written discovery on every defendant — interrogatories, requests for production, requests for admission. We demand the rental agreement for the home, the promoter’s contract with the security company, the social-media advertising records, the property owner’s insurance policies, the shooter’s criminal history, and every internal document the property owner has about the twenty-plus prior incidents.
Within the first six months, we depose the property owner under oath. We depose the promoter. We depose the security company. We depose the first officers on scene. We depose the treating physicians. We retain and disclose our forensic economist, our forensic pathologist, our criminologist, and our premises-security expert.
Within the year, we try the case — or we settle it, depending on the defendants’ willingness to pay a real number. The decision of when to settle and when to try is yours, not ours. We advise. You decide.
Why Attorney911 for This Case
We are a Texas trial firm. Ralph Manginello has been a Texas lawyer for more than twenty-seven years, admitted November 6, 1998. He has tried cases in Texas state and federal courts and has built a practice that combines trial work in catastrophic injury and wrongful death with a deep bench of expert relationships across medicine, forensics, and economics. He speaks Spanish, which matters in El Paso, where many of the families we serve are Spanish-dominant. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which is why our cases are built on documentation and on facts that hold up in front of a Texas jury.
Lupe Peña has been a Texas lawyer for thirteen years, admitted December 6, 2012. He is a former insurance-defense attorney — he trained at a national defense firm, where he learned how Colossus values claims, how IME doctors are selected, how reserves are set, how the surveillance and social-media-mining vendors are used, and how the carrier decides when to pay and when to deny. He now uses that knowledge against the carrier. He is fully bilingual, conducting full client consultations in Spanish. He is from South Texas, a third-generation Texan, and he brings an understanding of how Texas juries actually decide cases that you only get from the inside.
Together, the two of us work every case as a team. There is no associate hidden between you and the senior lawyer. When you call, you talk to one of us. When you have a question at 11 p.m. the night before a deposition, you call one of us. When you are sitting in a Texas courtroom waiting for the jury to come back, one of us is sitting next to you.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
We do this work on a contingency fee. The standard is thirty-three and a third percent before trial, forty percent if the case goes to trial. You pay no fee unless we win. The free consultation is exactly that — free, confidential, and available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can bring a Texas wrongful death case for a 21-year-old who died at a house party in El Paso?
Under the Texas Wrongful Death Act, Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 71.001–71.004, the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the deceased may bring the claim. A brother or sister, a fiancé, or a grandparent generally cannot, unless they fall within a recognized statutory exception. We will walk you through the beneficiary analysis as part of the free consultation.
What is the Texas statute of limitations on a wrongful death case?
Two years from the date of death, under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003. There are narrow exceptions — the discovery rule and tolling during a related criminal case — but they are fact-specific. The safest move is to call us now. You can read the governing text quoted in the blockquote above.
Can we sue the property owner of the Fort Defiance Drive home even though they did not pull the trigger?
Yes. Texas premises-liability law imposes a duty on a property owner to take reasonable steps to protect lawful invitees from foreseeable criminal harm. Twenty-plus prior police calls — including a prior death — makes the danger to a new guest entirely foreseeable. The failure to stop hosting dangerous events on the property, the failure to install real security, and the failure to refuse the promoter’s request are each independent acts of negligence that can support a wrongful death judgment.
Can we sue the promoter who organized the party on social media?
Yes. A promoter who holds itself out as running a commercial event owes a duty of reasonable care to the guests it draws in. The promoter’s advertising on social media, the cover charges collected, the agreement with any security company, and the communication with the property owner are all discoverable evidence of the promoter’s role and the promoter’s knowledge. The promoter typically carries commercial general liability insurance, and that policy is a primary target.
What if Carlos, the teen who was charged, has no money or insurance?
The criminal defendant is rarely the primary target of a civil wrongful death case. We pursue every other responsible party — the property owner, the property-management company, the promoter, the security company, any business that served alcohol to a minor, and any other assailant — and we pursue every insurance policy that responds. The criminal case and the civil case are separate tracks, and the civil case is not limited to the assets of the trigger-puller.
Can the deceased’s own conduct reduce our recovery?
Yes, under Texas’s proportionate responsibility statute, Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code Chapter 33, the deceased’s share of fault reduces the family’s recovery, and if the deceased is found more than 50 percent at fault, the recovery is barred entirely. We prepare for the comparative-fault argument from day one, and we build the record that places the fault where it belongs: on the property owner with twenty-plus prior warnings, not on the young man who was invited to a party at a private home.
Are punitive damages available in a Texas wrongful death case?
Yes. Texas permits punitive damages where the defendant’s conduct rose to gross negligence, malice, or fraud. A property owner who rents out a home for a profit-driven mansion party with twenty-plus prior police calls — including a prior death — is the kind of conduct Texas juries treat as the textbook basis for punitives. The punitives are not compensation. They are punishment, and they are designed to send a message.
How long does a Texas wrongful death case take?
The honest answer is that it depends. A case that settles before suit may resolve in twelve to eighteen months. A case that goes through full discovery and trial typically takes two to four years from filing. The criminal case against Carlos can affect timing. We will give you a realistic timeline once we understand the specific facts of your case.
Do you have an office in El Paso?
Our primary office is in Houston, and we also maintain offices in Austin and Beaumont. We handle cases throughout Texas, including in El Paso County, and we are admitted to practice in the Texas state courts and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. For a case in El Paso, we may associate with local Texas counsel where the rules require, and we will walk you through that arrangement up front so there are no surprises.
What does it cost to hire you for a Texas wrongful death case?
The free consultation is free, with no obligation. If we take the case, we work on a contingency fee. The standard fee is thirty-three and a third percent (33.33%) of any recovery before a lawsuit is filed, and forty percent (40%) if a lawsuit has been filed. We advance the case costs — filing fees, expert witness fees, deposition transcripts, exhibits — and we are repaid out of the recovery. If we do not win, you owe no attorney fee. Costs are itemized and transparent throughout the case.
What if the property owner is in bankruptcy or has no insurance?
We investigate every defendant’s insurance picture early. Where the primary defendant is judgment-proof, we look to the homeowner’s umbrella carrier, the property-management company’s commercial general liability carrier, the promoter’s event-coverage policy, the security company’s coverage, and the personal liability coverage of any other responsible party. Texas law also allows recovery from a defendant who is more than 50 percent at fault for the full amount of the judgment, which means we can often collect from a solvent co-defendant even if the primary defendant cannot pay.
Will the criminal case against Carlos help or hurt the civil case?
The criminal case and the civil case serve different purposes. The criminal case can produce a conviction that supports a civil judgment, but it can also produce an acquittal that the carrier will try to use against you. We do not wait for the criminal case. We file the civil case on our own clock, we build our own record with our own experts, and we are not bound by what happens in the criminal courtroom. The two-year Texas statute of limitations does not stop running because the criminal case is pending.
What about the prior death at the property — can we use it?
Yes. The prior death at the property is exactly the kind of evidence Texas permits to show the property owner had actual notice of the danger. It is admissible to prove the property owner knew, or should have known, that gatherings at the property would produce violence. The carrier will try to keep it out. We will fight to get it in.
How do I get the Sheriff’s Office records?
We file a Texas Public Information Act request immediately and a litigation-hold letter that requires the agency to preserve the records while the request is processed. You do not need to do this yourself. We handle it.
Will my family have to go to court?
Often, no. The depositions, mediation, and settlement conferences happen outside the courtroom, and the majority of Texas wrongful death cases resolve before a jury is seated. If the case does go to trial, we will prepare you for every step. A parent or spouse who has to testify will be prepared by us, in advance, with the same care we give the experts.
How quickly should I call?
Now. The two-year Texas statute of limitations, the rolling video-overwrite cycles, the social-media auto-delete windows, the medical-records retention timers — all of them are running the moment the death occurs. If you are reading this and the death is recent, call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 today. If the death is older, call us anyway — we will tell you honestly whether the deadline is still open.
Take the First Step Today
You have already lived through the hardest part. The phone call is the easiest. It is free, it is confidential, and it costs you nothing. 1-888-ATTY-911. A real person answers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
We serve families across Texas, including in El Paso and throughout the Rio Grande Valley. We work the case on contingency — no fee unless we win. Hablamos Español.
“The parties are ‘the perfect storm for violence’ with illicit drug use, unregulated drinking and the convergence of rival gang members at the same location.”
— El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, public statement reported August 10, 2022
The Sheriff’s Office called it the perfect storm. We call it the foreseeable outcome of a property owner renting out a house for profit with twenty-plus prior warnings. Your son or brother or father was not a statistic. He was a twenty-one-year-old man with a future, and the people who took that future from him can be held to account under Texas law.
We are ready when you are. 1-888-ATTY-911. Contact Attorney911 today.