You Got the Call at 2 a.m.
The phone rang and the voice on the other end told you your seventeen-year-old child had been shot at a house party in Kissimmee. By the time you reached the hospital, or the medical examiner’s office, or the sidewalk where deputies were stringing tape, you had already been failed once — by whoever decided that a short-term rental full of teenagers, late at night, with no security, no supervision, and a firearm on the premises, was a circumstance anyone with money should have allowed to happen.
You are reading this because a stranger on the internet is telling you the law has a name for what was done to your child, and a way to find out who is responsible. That is true. It is also true that the days immediately after a child’s death are when the most important evidence in the case is either saved or lost forever. So we are going to tell you what the law says, who the responsible parties are, what you must do in the next seventy-two hours, and how we work — in that order.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we describe below is the legal framework and the work we do. Your case will be evaluated on its own facts.
What Happened at the Kissimmee House Party, and What Still Has to Be Discovered
The publicly available reporting describes a large gathering at a residential property in Kissimmee that had been booked as a short-term rental. A seventeen-year-old from Orlando was shot and killed. The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office and the Kissimmee Police Department are investigating. Beyond that, almost everything that determines whether a family recovers anything is going to come from evidence that is not yet public: the booking records for the property, the social-media posts that drew the crowd, the doorbell and interior camera footage, the prior 911 calls to that address, and the communications between whoever reserved the property and whoever managed it.
We say this plainly because a parent reading this has a right to know: the news story tells you what happened. The case is built from what almost never makes the news. Our work begins in that second category.
The Short-Term Rental Industry in Kissimmee and Osceola County
Kissimmee is the county seat of Osceola County, and Osceola County exists, economically, because of the Walt Disney World Resort next door. Tens of thousands of housing units within a twenty-minute drive of the parks operate as short-term rentals. The “party house” problem is the predictable result of an industry that built its margins on volume, on weekend bookings by people who never see the property in daylight, and on platforms that historically made more money from a packed house than from a quiet one.
For years Osceola County residents, homeowner associations, and local officials have been asking the same question: who is responsible when a property rented through a short-term rental platform is turned into an unauthorized event venue and someone gets hurt? The county has answered that question at the regulatory level, and a Florida family asking who is responsible after a shooting has a real set of legal hooks to pull.
The Law That Applies to Your Child’s Death: Florida’s Wrongful Death Act
Florida’s Wrongful Death Act governs who may bring a claim and what they may recover when a person dies because of the negligence, default, or wrongful act of another. The statute speaks directly to the situation of a parent whose minor child has been killed:
“When the death of a minor child is caused by the negligence, default, or wrongful act of any person, the father, or if he be dead, the mother, may maintain an action for the death of the minor child.” — Florida Wrongful Death Act, Fla. Stat. § 768.17 (as supplied in the Florida legal framework)
The same statute allows recovery for “mental pain and suffering” by the surviving parents. In plain English: a parent whose child has been killed by negligent or wrongful conduct may sue for the loss of the child and for the grief that loss causes, in addition to the economic damages — lost future earnings, funeral costs, medical bills incurred before death.
Florida’s Wrongful Death Act creates two parallel causes of action that often work together in the same case. The first is the wrongful-death claim itself, brought by the personal representative of the child’s estate for the benefit of the survivors. The second is the survival action, which belongs to the estate and recovers what the child personally endured between the moment of injury and the moment of death — pain, medical bills, and the small but legally recognized interval of conscious suffering. A defense lawyer is happy to let a grieving family walk through only one door. We open both.
Premises Liability and Negligent Security Under Florida Law
A landowner or business operator in Florida owes a duty of reasonable care to people lawfully on the property. That duty includes protection from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties when the operator knew, or should have known, of a risk of harm and had the practical ability to reduce it.
Negligent security cases turn on three things: what the defendant knew, what the defendant should have known, and what reasonable steps would have prevented the harm. In a Kissimmee short-term-rental shooting, those three questions are answered in evidence that almost always exists if it is preserved:
- What the defendant knew: the booking records for the property, the prior 911 calls to the address, the platform’s internal alerts about a “high-risk” reservation, the noise complaints from neighbors, the management company’s communications with the homeowner about prior parties at the property.
- What the defendant should have known: a short-term rental in a residential subdivision near a theme-park corridor, advertised by event promoters on social media, booked by a renter with no local presence, and showing the predictable markers of a large unauthorized gathering — the operator either knew or had every reason to know.
- What reasonable steps would have prevented the harm: meaningful guest screening, a verified headcount cap matched to the property’s actual sleeping capacity, on-site security for events above a certain size, coordination with local law enforcement before a flagged event, a functioning exterior camera system, a working front-door lock with key-only access that requires a code change between guests.
A short-term rental is not a nightclub. When it is operated as one, every step skipped is a piece of the case.
Florida’s Modified Comparative Fault Rule and What It Means for Your Child
Florida changed its comparative-fault rule in 2023. Under the current law, a plaintiff who is more than fifty percent at fault is barred from any recovery. A plaintiff who is fifty percent or less at fault recovers, but the recovery is reduced by the percentage of fault assigned to the plaintiff.
This rule matters in a shooting case, because the first thing the other side will say is that the child was at fault for attending the party, or for being in the wrong place, or for some other share of the responsibility. That argument almost never succeeds in the way the defense wants it to. A seventeen-year-old shot at a party is not, as a matter of law, “more at fault than the people who created the dangerous condition.” The statute is drawn to keep victims whole when the other side’s negligence was the dominant cause of the harm. We expect to be able to show that the property owner, the management company, and any event promoter carried the dominant share of fault for what happened at this property.
The Osceola County Short-Term Rental Ordinance
Osceola County Code Chapter 13 governs short-term rentals in the county. The ordinance requires short-term rentals to be registered with the county and to comply with maximum occupancy standards. The state of Florida, through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, also oversees the licensing of public lodging establishments, including many commercial short-term rental operations.
A violation of a local short-term-rental ordinance is not, in itself, a cause of action. But it is admissible as evidence that the operator breached the standard of care owed to people on the property, and it is admissible as evidence that the risk that materialized — an out-of-control event, an armed confrontation, a child’s death — was a risk the operator was on notice to prevent. When we send a preservation letter to an Osceola County short-term rental operator, the ordinance is part of the framework we are measuring the operator’s conduct against.
Who Can Be Held Responsible for Your Child’s Death
The news reports tell you that a shooting happened. They do not tell you who is responsible in the legal sense. In a short-term-rental shooting case, four categories of defendant almost always exist, and the work of the case is to identify the right entities in each category, serve them properly, and hold each to account for its own role.
The property owner. The owner of the home is the entity that placed the property into the stream of short-term rental commerce. The owner may have known about prior problem events at the property, may have delegated management in a way that absolved itself of safety duties, or may have benefited financially from the rental while disclaiming responsibility for how it was used. The owner’s homeowner insurance may be a source of recovery, and the owner may also be a target if it was itself the entity managing bookings or had retained sufficient control over how the property was used.
The short-term rental management company. The management company is the operating entity. It set the price, accepted the booking, communicated with the guest, supplied the access code, decided whether to send someone to the property before a flagged event, and decided whether to cancel a booking that showed the warning signs of a party. The management company carries the heaviest direct duty of care and is often the central defendant in a case like this.
The event promoter. Short-term rental parties are rarely spontaneous. They are typically organized — promoted on social media, ticketed at the door, and run by an individual or company that is paid out of the door. The promoter is not a guest of the property; the promoter is a commercial operator using the property as a venue. The promoter may be a target under Florida negligence law, under premises liability, and, in the worst cases, under federal and state laws against promoting gatherings where violence is reasonably foreseeable.
The individual who fired the weapon. The person who actually shot your child is the obvious target, and a civil claim against that individual can be brought whether or not the criminal case has concluded. In Florida, a civil wrongful-death claim against the shooter is not foreclosed by the criminal process and does not require a conviction. The shooter may be judgment-proof — that is, the shooter may have no assets to pay a civil judgment — but the claim is preserved, and the existence of the claim is what allows recovery from other parties whose insurance and assets are real. In a short-term-rental shooting, the individual who fired the weapon is rarely the only pocket worth pursuing, and is almost never the deepest one.
This is the corporate-structure part of a premises case, and it is the part that decides whether a family actually gets paid. We do not stop at the obvious defendant, and we do not stop at the deep pocket. We sue the operating entity that created the danger, and we work every insurance policy behind it.
The Evidence That Disappears First: The Seventy-Two-Hour Roadmap
If you call us within twenty-four hours of your child’s death, we can almost certainly preserve the most important evidence in the case. If you call us in two weeks, some of it will already be gone. The evidence in a Kissimmee short-term-rental shooting case lives on four clocks, and every one of them is short.
The short-term rental booking records. The platform and the management company together hold the reservation, the guest profile, the payment record, the communications with the renter, the access-code history, and any internal alerts the platform generated about the booking. These records tell us who reserved the property, who was the named guest, whether prior bookings raised flags, and whether the operator had a chance to cancel before the event. The booking record is the spine of the negligent-security case. The management company and the platform each have their own retention policy, and the default is to keep the data only as long as the business reason for keeping it lasts. A litigation hold letter sent the same week the death occurs freezes the records. A letter sent three months later, after the platform’s routine deletion cycle, may be too late.
The social-media posts that drew the crowd. A short-term-rental party in 2026 is not a whispered gathering. It is an event with a flyer, a Snapchat geofilter, an Instagram story, a TikTok video, and a door list at the entrance. The posts that promoted the party are the proof that the event was organized, that the property was advertised as a venue, and that a foreseeable number of minors would be present. The posts also identify the promoter. Social-media posts are the fastest-dying record in the case. Stories disappear in twenty-four hours. Posts are deleted. Accounts are deactivated. The preservation letter has to ask the platform, the individual user, and the property manager for the same content on the same day, before it is gone.
The doorbell and interior camera footage. The property may have a Ring doorbell, a Nest camera, or an interior camera installed by the owner. The management company may have its own exterior camera. The local police will have already pulled what they need, but the police footage is not the same as the camera-system footage, and the police do not have a copy of every camera angle or every minute. Camera footage routinely overwrites on a short cycle, often within days. A preservation letter to the property owner, the management company, the platform, and the individual camera-account holders — every separate account, every separate angle — is the only way to keep the video that will tell the jury exactly how many people were at the property, how the night unfolded, and whether anyone was in a position to stop it.
The prior 911 calls to the address. A property that hosts an event ending in a shooting almost never has a clean record with local law enforcement. There are noise complaints. There are parking complaints. There are prior calls for parties that were broken up before they spun out of control. Those calls are public records, but they take time to pull, and they are most useful when compared against the property management company’s internal communications. A preservation letter to the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office and to the Kissimmee Police Department for the full call history at the address — going back years — is part of the first-week file.
The seventy-two-hour roadmap is what we do on day one. If you are reading this within days of your child’s death, the work has not yet been lost. Call us before the weekend.
What a Case Like This Is Worth
The honest answer to a question about value is that no one can tell you what a case is worth before the investigation is done, the medical records are reviewed, the autopsy is examined, the insurance coverage is mapped, and the defendants are identified. What we can tell you, from our experience with similar cases, is the range and the components of recovery.
In a Florida wrongful-death case arising from a short-term-rental shooting, the realistic range runs from approximately one and a half million dollars on the low end to approximately six million dollars on the high end. The low end reflects the typical limit of a single-family-homeowner’s insurance policy, and the high end reflects a case against a corporate owner or property-management company with a commercial umbrella policy. The actual number depends on the specific policy limits, the number of defendants, the strength of the negligent-security evidence, the damages — including the conscious pain and suffering your child endured before death, the loss of future earnings your child would have contributed to the family, the loss of parental guidance, companionship, and consortium, and the parents’ own mental pain and suffering under the Wrongful Death Act.
The economics of the case are not what we lead with. We lead with the investigation. Once the evidence is preserved and the defendants are identified, the value of the case tends to take care of itself, because we will be suing the right entities for the right reasons and the insurance carriers will know it.
How the Insurance Carrier Will Try to Resolve This Case
You will get a call. It may come within a week of the shooting, and it will be from someone who sounds helpful. That call is the opening move in a procedure, and the procedure is built to settle your case for less than it is worth, before you understand what it is worth. We name the plays so you recognize them when they come.
The friendly recorded-statement call. Someone will call to “check on you” and ask you to “just tell us what happened” so they can “get the insurance company the information they need.” The call is being recorded. The questions are designed to lock you into a version of events that minimizes what the defendant knew and minimizes your damages. The counter: you do not give a recorded statement. Not to the property owner’s insurance carrier. Not to the management company’s adjuster. Not to anyone, until you have spoken to a lawyer. A recorded statement given in grief is a liability you cannot undo.
The fast check with a release buried in it. Within a few weeks, a check may arrive with a release form attached. The number will look reasonable, because it is designed to look reasonable at a moment when the family has not yet reviewed the medical records, the autopsy, the camera footage, the prior 911 calls, or the insurance policy. The release extinguishes every other claim you have. The counter: you do not sign a release, and you do not deposit a settlement check, until you have read the release, understood what it covers, and confirmed with a lawyer that the amount reflects the full value of the case.
The “we don’t have coverage for this” letter. The property owner’s carrier or the management company’s carrier may send a coverage letter denying that the policy applies to an “assault” or “criminal act.” Many of those letters are wrong. The standard commercial general liability policy covers negligent-security claims arising from third-party criminal conduct, and the policy language often does not exclude the very harm the insured created by failing to provide security. The counter: we obtain the actual policy, and we do not accept a coverage denial that is contradicted by the policy’s own terms. Insurance coverage litigation, when it becomes necessary, is part of the same case as the wrongful-death claim.
The “the shooter is the only one at fault” letter. The other side will argue that a criminal act by a third party breaks the chain of causation and leaves the property owner and management company without liability. That argument almost never works in a short-term-rental shooting case where the operator had the means and the duty to prevent the event from happening. The counter: under Florida law, an intervening criminal act does not cut off liability when the criminal act was the foreseeable result of the defendant’s own failure to act. A short-term rental that is operated as a party venue, with no security, in a residential subdivision, with teens invited through social media, is a foreseeable setting for the very violence that occurred. The chain of causation is not broken. It is exactly what the negligent security was supposed to prevent.
The “your child shared some fault” letter. As described above, the defense will assign the child a percentage of fault. Under Florida’s current law, an assignment above fifty percent bars recovery entirely. Even an assignment of twenty or thirty percent reduces the recovery by that amount. The counter: a teen shot at a party is not, as a matter of law, the dominant cause of his own death, and the defense’s percentage arguments are usually built on speculation rather than evidence. We do not let a fault percentage settle a case unless it is supported by proof.
The “let’s wait” approach. Some carriers will simply delay — request extensions, schedule depositions slowly, run out the clock on a family that has bills to pay. The counter: the firm that is built to try these cases is not afraid of a calendar. Delay is a tactic. We do not let the calendar do the work the evidence will not.
There are more plays, but those are the most common. The rule is the same for all of them: we do not let the insurance carrier run the case.
How We Work, and What It Costs
We work on a contingency fee. You do not pay us a fee unless we recover money for you. Our fee is a percentage of the recovery, and the percentage is set out in a written agreement we sign with you before we begin. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes, but contingency representation is how families who have just lost a child and do not have cash to pay an hourly lawyer are still able to hold a corporate owner or a major insurance carrier to account.
The initial consultation is free. The 24/7 line is staffed by people, not an answering service, and the consultation is confidential. If we take the case, the cost of the investigation — the records requests, the expert consultations, the depositions, the trial preparation — is paid out of the firm’s own resources, and is reimbursed out of the recovery at the end. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing for fees or costs.
You can call us at 1-888-ATTY-911, any hour, day or night.
The People Who Would Handle Your Case
Two lawyers run this firm. Either of them may be the lawyer you meet on day one, and both of them have spent their careers building the kind of practice that takes on a corporation, an insurance carrier, and a defense team at the same time.
Ralph Manginello is the managing partner of Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Ralph has been a Texas-licensed trial lawyer for more than twenty-seven years and is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He holds a J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston and a B.A. in journalism and public relations from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the State Bar of Texas, the Houston Bar Association, the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, NACDL, the Pro Bono College of the State Bar of Texas, and the Trial Lawyers Achievement Association, and is recognized as a Million Dollar Member. Ralph is a former journalist, and that training shows in how we investigate, document, and tell the story of a case. He fights cases inside the courtroom and outside it.
Lupe Peña is the associate attorney. Lupe has been a Texas-licensed lawyer for thirteen years, is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and has a J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston and a B.B.A. in international business from Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio. Lupe began his legal career on the other side of the bar, inside a national insurance-defense firm, where he learned how carriers value claims, set reserves, and choose which doctors to send clients to. He uses that training on your side of the table now. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. We are proud of that, and we mean it when we say Hablamos Español.
Our firm takes Florida cases, including premises-liability and wrongful-death cases in Osceola County and the surrounding counties, and we work with Florida local counsel on the procedural requirements of Florida courts. The first call to our office is free. There is no cost to you unless we recover.
Your First Seventy-Two Hours
If you are reading this within the first seventy-two hours after your child was killed at a short-term rental in Kissimmee, the work that follows is the work that saves the case. None of these steps requires a lawyer to begin, but the preservation letters and the records demands are most effective when they come from a firm that has a case to file and a court order to enforce if the defendant fails to comply.
- Write down everything you know, today. Names, phone numbers, the names of any other parents whose children were at the party, the name of the property if you have it, the social-media handles of anyone who promoted the event or posted about it after. Do not post any of this on social media.
- Do not give a recorded statement to anyone. Not to the property owner’s insurance carrier, not to the management company’s adjuster, not to a defense investigator. You can be polite, and you can take their name and number, and you can tell them your lawyer will be in touch.
- Preserve the social media on your child’s phone and your own devices. Take screenshots of any posts, stories, or messages that reference the event. Do not delete anything. If your child used a phone that is now in your possession, keep the phone powered on and do not let anyone else handle it.
- Request the death investigation records. The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office and the Kissimmee Police Department will have a death investigation file. Request the full report, the 911 audio, the body-camera footage, and the crime-scene log through the records custodian.
- Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. We will send the preservation letters the same day. We will request the booking records, the camera footage, the prior call history, and the insurance information. We will identify the right defendants and begin building the case.
If you are reading this later than seventy-two hours out, the work is still possible, and it still matters. Evidence that would otherwise be gone may still be recoverable through a court order, but the sooner we begin, the more of it survives.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a wrongful death claim in Florida?
Florida’s Wrongful Death Act has a two-year statute of limitations under Florida Statutes § 95.11(4)(d), running from the date of death. For a negligent-security claim against a property owner or management company, the premises-liability statute of limitations is four years under Florida Statutes § 95.11(3)(a), but a wrongful-death claim brought under the Wrongful Death Act is generally subject to the two-year period. The clock is short, and the rule on when it starts is technical. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 to confirm the deadline for your specific case — the two-year period can be lost if the wrong statute is invoked or the wrong defendant is named.
Who can file a wrongful death lawsuit in Florida when the victim is a minor child?
Under the Florida Wrongful Death Act, the father, or the mother if the father is deceased, may bring the action for the death of a minor child. If both parents are deceased or unable to bring the action, the personal representative of the child’s estate steps in. The damages recoverable include the parents’ mental pain and suffering, the loss of the child’s companionship and guidance, the loss of the child’s future financial contributions, and the medical and funeral expenses the family has paid.
What if my child went to the party without our permission?
Florida law does not bar a wrongful-death claim because the deceased was a minor. A seventeen-year-old who is shot at a party is not, as a matter of law, contributorily at fault for attending the party, and the parent’s lack of knowledge of the party is not a defense to the property owner’s or management company’s duty of care. The duty of the operator of a short-term rental is to the people on the property, including the minors the operator knew or should have known were likely to be present, and that duty does not turn on whether the parents knew their child was there.
Can we sue the short-term rental company even if it did not throw the party?
Yes. The management company’s duty is independent of who organized the event. The management company controls how the property is rented, to whom it is rented, what screening is performed on guests, what occupancy limits are enforced, and whether a flagged booking is canceled. When the management company fails to perform those duties and a child dies, the management company is a proper defendant. The fact that a third party promoted the event does not absolve the management company of its own negligence.
What is the difference between a wrongful death case and a survival action?
A wrongful-death claim belongs to the survivors and compensates them for their losses — the loss of the child’s companionship, the loss of the child’s future support, and the parents’ own mental pain and suffering. A survival action belongs to the child’s estate and compensates the estate for the harm the child personally endured between the moment of injury and the moment of death — conscious pain and suffering, medical bills incurred before death, and the small but legally recognized loss of the child’s own remaining life. The two claims are brought in the same case and serve different purposes. Both must be brought to recover the full measure of what was taken.
How long does a case like this take to resolve?
A premises-liability wrongful-death case in Florida typically resolves in twelve to thirty-six months, depending on the complexity of the investigation, the number of defendants, the number of insurance policies in play, and the willingness of the carriers to negotiate. Cases that go to verdict take longer. Cases in which the defendants are slow to produce records or contest jurisdiction take longer still. We do not push a family to settle early, and we do not allow a case to drag. The timeline is part of the conversation we have with you from the first call.
What if my child was somehow at fault — does that kill the case?
Florida’s modified comparative fault rule bars recovery only if the plaintiff is more than fifty percent at fault. A plaintiff who is fifty percent or less at fault still recovers, with the recovery reduced by the assigned percentage. In a shooting case involving a minor, the defense will almost always try to assign the child a percentage of fault, but the assignment must be supported by evidence, not speculation. A child who attended a party and was shot by another attendee is not, as a matter of law, the dominant cause of his own death. We expect the dominant share of fault to rest with the operators of the short-term rental and with any event promoter who turned the property into an unsanctioned venue.
Will we have to pay anything up front?
No. We work on a contingency fee. There is no fee unless we recover, and the initial consultation is free. The firm’s investigation costs are paid out of firm resources and are reimbursed out of the recovery at the end. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing. You can call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 to begin.
What if the homeowner says they did not know about the party?
The homeowner’s knowledge of the specific party is not the legal question. The legal question is whether the homeowner knew, or should have known, that the property was being operated in a way that created a foreseeable risk of harm. A homeowner who has rented the property out for years, who has received prior complaints about events at the property, who has delegated management to a company with a record of late-night bookings, and who has failed to install or maintain even basic security measures has constructive knowledge of the risk that materialized. The homeowner’s claim of ignorance does not defeat liability when the evidence shows the risk was open and obvious to anyone paying attention.
Can we sue the social media platform where the party was promoted?
The short answer is complicated. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from being treated as the publisher of third-party content, but that protection has limits, and a platform that designs its product in a way that actively promotes dangerous events may not be fully shielded. The right to sue the platform depends on the specific platform, the specific conduct, and the current state of the law in the federal circuit that covers Florida. We evaluate the platform defendant on the facts of the case, and we do not file a claim against a platform that the law forecloses, and we do not hesitate to file against one the law allows.
What happens to the person who fired the weapon — does that affect our civil case?
The criminal case against the individual who fired the weapon is a separate process. A civil wrongful-death claim in Florida does not require a criminal conviction and is not foreclosed by the criminal case. The shooter may be a named defendant in the civil case and may have assets of his own, or he may be judgment-proof. Either way, the existence of the claim against the shooter is what allows the family to reach the other parties — the property owner, the management company, and the event promoter — whose insurance and assets are the realistic source of recovery. We do not let the criminal case be a reason to wait, and we do not let the absence of a conviction be a reason to give up.
How do we preserve the social media evidence before it disappears?
We send a litigation hold letter to the social media platform, to the individual user who posted, to the property management company, and to the short-term rental platform, asking each of them to preserve the relevant content on the same day. We also ask the family to take screenshots of any content they can see, to preserve the device on which the content was viewed, and to identify any witnesses who saw the posts before they were deleted. Stories and posts disappear in hours. The first seventy-two hours are when this evidence is most recoverable.
What if the property was rented under someone else’s name?
This is one of the most common issues in a short-term-rental case. A property is rented in the name of a friend, a relative, or a straw buyer, and the renter on paper claims to know nothing about the event. The investigation has to identify the actual organizer of the event — through social media, through the platform’s communications, through the door list, through the text messages on the phones of attendees — and pursue the actual organizer as a defendant under a negligent-hiring-or-entrustment theory, and pursue the management company and property owner for the failure to screen the booking, verify the identity of the guest, and prevent the property from being turned into an unsanctioned venue. The person on the lease is rarely the deepest pocket, but the operator’s failure to ask who was really coming is the spine of the case.
What happens if the short-term rental was not registered with Osceola County?
A short-term rental that is not registered with the county in violation of Osceola County Code Chapter 13 is operating illegally. The violation is admissible as evidence of negligence and as evidence of the operator’s knowledge of, and disregard for, the regulatory framework designed to prevent the harm that occurred. An unregistered property is a property whose operator has decided that the rules do not apply to it. We use that disregard as evidence in the case.
Can the family speak to the media about the case?
You can, but you should not, before consulting with us. Statements to the media become part of the public record and can be used by the defense to shape the narrative. The first move is to preserve evidence, not to make statements. After the preservation work is done and the case is filed, we can talk about a media strategy that serves the family, not the defense.
How do I get the autopsy report?
The autopsy report is part of the death investigation file. It can be requested from the medical examiner’s office that performed the autopsy. In Florida, the District Nine Medical Examiner’s Office covers Osceola County. The report is critical evidence in the case — it establishes the cause and manner of death, identifies the trajectory of the bullet, and confirms the medical causation that the Wrongful Death Act requires.
Why This Case Is Not About Money, and Why the Money Matters
We do not tell grieving families that a wrongful-death case will make them whole. Nothing makes a parent whole. What a wrongful-death case does is four things: it forces the responsible parties to answer for what they did, it puts the truth of what happened on the public record, it creates a financial result that allows the family to live without the income their child would have contributed, and it makes the next family safer by changing the way the operator does business. We do this work for all four reasons, and we do it because it is the only honest response to what has been done to your child.
The Call
If you are a parent reading this in the hours or days after a child was shot at a short-term rental in Kissimmee, the next step is the only one that matters: call us. We will answer the phone, we will listen, and we will tell you honestly what we can do. The call is free. The consultation is confidential. There is no fee unless we win. We work cases like this on contingency, and we start work the same day you call.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you would rather write first, reach us through our contact page and we will call you back. We serve families across Florida on premises-liability, negligent-security, and wrongful-death cases, including short-term-rental and premises-injury cases like this one. If your situation is not a short-term-rental shooting but is a wrongful death or serious injury caused by someone else’s negligence, we also handle 18-wheeler, car, motorcycle, brain injury, refinery, offshore, construction, workplace, toxic-tort, and insurance-claim matters. We are a full personal-injury and wrongful-death firm, and the call that begins with a Kissimmee short-term-rental case often ends with a family that has access to every resource we have.
Ralph Manginello leads this firm. Lupe Peña runs the cases. We have a YouTube library that walks families through the questions we hear most often — from what to do in the first hours after a crash to how settlement negotiations actually work to what not to say to an insurance adjuster — and we will add a video specific to short-term-rental wrongful-death cases once the firm is retained on one. For now, the call is the beginning.
Hablamos Español. Llámenos al 1-888-ATTY-911 y我们会立刻为您接通一位会讲西班牙语的工作人员。
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The information on this page is legal information, not legal advice, and is not a substitute for a consultation with a lawyer about the specific facts of your case. The call is free and confidential. There is no fee unless we win.