When a man is killed in a hotel room, the family does not have to wait for a criminal verdict to start protecting their civil rights
A 49-year-old man is dead. Police found him inside a guest room at the Courtyard by Marriott on Venture Parkway in Duluth, Georgia, in the early morning hours of May 6, 2026. Gwinnett County Police say the shooting was “isolated” and “domestic” and that no one else in the hotel was in danger. That language is meant to calm the public. It is not meant to address what the family is owed.
We are speaking directly to whoever is reading this on behalf of Ephrim Forbes. You are reading a page that exists because your family is now part of a small, terrible group of people in Gwinnett County who have had a loved one die inside a place they paid to sleep safely. The page that follows is not about us. It is about what Georgia law gives you, what evidence is already disappearing, and what the next 72 hours of your decisions will look like.
If you are reading this in the hours after the death, please call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 before you do anything else. A preservation letter has to leave our office the same day you call, or the single most important records in your case begin to erase on schedule.
The Georgia law that governs this case
“The owner or occupier of land is liable for damages caused by his failure to exercise ordinary care to keep the premises safe when the dangerous condition is known to the owner or occupier and the guest or invitee neither knows nor could have known of the danger, by the use of ordinary care, equal to the knowledge of the owner or occupier.”
— Georgia premises-liability doctrine, building on OCGA § 51-3-1 (codified duty of care owed by proprietors).
Georgia law is, in plain terms, friendly to injured guests and to the families of guests who are killed. The state has refused to adopt a rigid rule that a hotel owes no duty to protect guests from the criminal acts of third parties. Instead, Georgia courts apply a flexible foreseeability test. A hotel is liable when the danger was foreseeable, when the hotel knew or should have known of the danger, and when the hotel failed to take reasonable steps to address it.
In a shooting inside a hotel room, the core questions are:
- Did the hotel have notice that violence was foreseeable at that location? This is proven through prior calls for service to the address, prior incident reports, the hotel’s own internal logs, and the general crime profile of the Gwinnett Place Mall submarket around Venture Parkway and I-85.
- Did the hotel have reasonable security measures in place, and were they functioning on the night of the shooting? This includes working key-card systems, working surveillance cameras, trained front-desk and night-audit staff, screening of visitors, and a documented protocol for disturbances in guest rooms.
- Did hotel staff see, hear, or have reason to suspect something wrong, and did they fail to act? This is proven through internal incident reports, housekeeping logs, front-desk shift logs, and employee witness statements.
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, the hotel bears some portion of the civil liability for the death. Georgia’s modified comparative-fault rule (50% bar) does not erase a negligent-security claim if the hotel’s fault is greater than zero. Georgia’s Wrongful Death Act, OCGA § 51-4-1 et seq., allows the surviving spouse and children of the deceased to recover the full value of the life of the deceased. That full value is not capped, and it includes both the economic side (what Mr. Forbes would have earned and provided) and the non-economic side (the loss of his life, his companionship, his guidance, and his presence). Georgia law does not reduce a human life to a balance sheet, but it does require the balance sheet to be presented so the jury sees the full picture.
Where the hotel’s conduct amounts to what Georgia law calls an “entire want of care” — that is, a complete failure to do the things a hotel is supposed to do to keep its guests safe — punitive damages are available under OCGA § 51-12-5.1, on top of the full compensatory recovery.
The statute of limitations for a Georgia wrongful-death action is generally two years from the date of death under OCGA § 9-3-33, with a parallel survival action that also runs on a two-year clock. That clock is the reason this page exists, and the reason we want you to call us this week rather than next month. Two years sounds long until you realize that half the evidence in your case is on a much shorter clock than that.
The evidence that is already disappearing
The single most important thing a wrongful-death attorney does in the first week of a case like this is preserve evidence. In a hotel shooting, several critical pieces of evidence are on clocks that are far shorter than the two-year statute of limitations. If we do not stop those clocks, the case will be fought in the dark.
Hotel surveillance video (the fastest-dying record)
Surveillance loops in hotels commonly overwrite on a rolling seven-to-thirty-day cycle. Some systems are even shorter. The cameras that cover the lobby, the elevators, the guest-room corridor, the parking lot, and the side entrances hold the video of who entered the property, when, and how. The front-desk camera may show who checked in, who was given a key card, and who walked into the elevator. The corridor camera may show who approached the room. Without that video, the case is reduced to the recollections of witnesses whose memories are already fading. The preservation letter goes out the same day you call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. We do not wait to send it. We send it now.
Electronic key-card and property-management-system logs
Every key card is a data point. The hotel’s property-management system records who was issued a key card, which room it opened, and when. The system also records reservation data, payment data, and the digital trail of every guest’s stay. These logs can be purged during system maintenance, during software upgrades, or simply on a rolling retention schedule. The preservation letter we send demands that all of this be frozen in place. If the hotel purges after receiving the letter, we have a spoliation claim we can bring directly to the judge.
Gwinnett County 911 and computer-aided-dispatch records
Gwinnett County Police Department computer-aided-dispatch records show every call for service to the address, every prior disturbance, and every previous police response. This is the public record that proves the hotel knew, or should have known, that the property had a history requiring heightened security. Public records are stable, but the data behind them can be re-organized or archived. We request these records immediately and through the formal Georgia Open Records Act process.
Internal hotel incident reports and shift logs
Hotels keep written logs of disturbances, noise complaints, refusals of service, and unusual activity. These are the contemporaneous records of what the staff saw and did. They are routinely destroyed on a short retention cycle. If the hotel has purged them, the absence of those records becomes evidence of spoliation that we can put in front of a jury.
The sooner you call us, the sooner these records freeze. 1-888-ATTY-911.
The insurance playbook and how we counter it
Within hours of a fatal hotel shooting, the hotel’s insurance carrier will begin building its own case. The first calls you receive will sound friendly. They are not. Here is what is coming, and how we respond.
Play one: the recorded statement
A claims adjuster or a private investigator will call you, often within the first 48 hours, and ask you to “just tell us what happened.” The call is being recorded. The questions are designed to pin you to a version of events before you have had time to process the loss, and before you have spoken to a lawyer. The recorded statement becomes the floor of the insurance company’s defense. Our counter: you do not give a recorded statement to the other side’s insurance company without us on the call. Not now, not later, not ever. If an adjuster is asking for a recorded statement, the answer is: “Call my attorney at Attorney911, 1-888-ATTY-911.” That is the entire statement.
Play two: the quick check with a release
In the first weeks, you may receive a check in the mail, sometimes for a few thousand dollars, with a release form printed on the back or attached. The release is what they want. Once signed, your right to bring the wrongful-death case is gone in exchange for pennies on the dollar. Our counter: no check is accepted, no release is signed, and no document from the other side is reviewed without us. You can read about the kinds of statements to avoid in our guide on what not to say to an insurance adjuster.
Play three: the sympathy framing
The insurance adjuster will say the hotel is “devastated,” that the hotel “cooperated fully with police,” and that the hotel “wants to do the right thing by the family.” Those statements are not evidence. They are not settlement offers. They are not admissions of fault. They are positioning. Our counter: we measure the hotel by what it did before, during, and after the shooting, not by what its insurance carrier says about it now. The truth lives in the surveillance video, the key-card logs, the prior incident reports, the staff training records, and the police call history. We pursue the evidence and let the evidence set the tone.
Play four: blame the victim
The defense will attempt to characterize the shooting as a private matter for which the hotel bears no responsibility. Under Georgia law, that argument does not eliminate a hotel’s duty to its guest. The hotel had a duty to provide reasonably safe premises, to screen entrants, and to act on what its staff saw and heard. The argument also does not eliminate punitive exposure where the hotel’s security failures rise to the level of an “entire want of care.” Our counter: the hotel’s duty ran to the guest who paid for the room and the safety, and the duty is not erased by the identity of the person who fired the shot.
What we do in the first 72 hours
The first 72 hours after a hotel shooting are not a waiting period. They are the period in which the case is won or lost on evidence preservation. Our work in that window looks like this.
Within hours of being retained, we send a written preservation and litigation-hold letter to the hotel, the franchisee, the property-management company, the franchisor, the Gwinnett County Police Department, the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office, and any third-party security or video-management vendor that touches the property. The letter names every category of record to be preserved and warns of spoliation consequences under Georgia law. We also send an Open Records Act request to Gwinnett County for the full CAD and call history for the address.
Within the first week, we retain a forensic security expert to evaluate the property, begin identifying the operating entities through Secretary of State records, the county property records, and the franchise filings, and start the witness identification process. We do not assume anything about who was in that room beyond what the police have said publicly. We work the case from every direction at once.
Within the first month, we obtain the death certificate, the Gwinnett County Medical Examiner’s report, the Gwinnett County Police incident report, and the initial set of preserved records. We then sit down with the family and give them an honest, written case-value analysis that walks through what we know, what we are still investigating, and what the realistic range of outcomes looks like.
We work on contingency. You pay no fee unless we win. The initial consultation is free. If you cannot come to us, we come to you.
You can read about how our contingency fee structure works in plain English.
What the next conversation looks like
We do not pitch in the first conversation. We listen. We will ask you what you know, what the police have told you, what you have been asked to sign, and what you have been told by the hotel. We will explain the Georgia legal framework in plain English. We will tell you honestly what we can do and what we cannot do, and we will tell you what the next steps are.
If we are the right firm for your case, we will say so. If we are not, we will tell you that too, and we will point you toward someone who is.
The call is free. The consultation is confidential. No fee unless we win.
1-888-ATTY-911
A direct word to the family
Mr. Forbes was 49. He was in a hotel room in Duluth, Georgia, a city that millions of people drive through every year on I-85. The hotel he checked into is part of a brand that promises a certain standard of safety, and a franchised national brand in a busy commercial corridor has resources to do better than what happened that night.
The criminal investigation is the police’s work. The civil case is ours. We do not wait for the criminal process. We do not concede the hotel’s framing of the night. We preserve what can be preserved, we build the case from the evidence, and we put the hotel in front of a Gwinnett County jury with the truth of what its security looked like before, during, and after the shooting.
If you are reading this and you are a member of Mr. Forbes’s family, we are asking you to do one thing before you do anything else. Call us.
1-888-ATTY-911
The call is free. The consultation is confidential. We work on contingency, and no fee unless we win. We serve Spanish-speaking families in full, with the same depth and the same voice. Hablamos Español.
The first thing we do is freeze the evidence. The first thing you do is call.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page provides general information about Georgia law and the civil claims that may arise from a fatal hotel shooting. It is not legal advice for your specific case, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. To get legal advice for your specific situation, call Attorney911 at 1-888-ATTY-911 for a free consultation.