Houston Negligent Security & Mass-Casualty Event Lawyers: The Civil Side of Saturday’s Federal Arrests
Saturday morning, the news broke: federal agents had arrested five people in a multi-state sweep for an alleged plot to attack a high-profile event at the White House using explosive drones and pre-staged sniper teams. If you searched for answers after seeing that headline, you came to the right page. But we owe you honesty before anything else: this is a federal criminal terrorism case, not a personal injury case. Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — is not involved in the prosecution. We are not the victims’ lawyers, we are not the defendants’ lawyers, and we have not been retained in any matter arising from these arrests. The families who lost loved ones, the victims who were targeted, and the public at large deserve a prosecution that is run by the United States Department of Justice, not by a Texas plaintiffs’ firm. So we are not going to tell you we are running that case.
What we are going to do is answer the question we are already getting asked: what would happen if the attack had succeeded? If a mass-casualty event at a National Special Security Event venue killed Texans, what civil rights would their families have? Who could they sue? Could they sue the federal government? Could they sue the venue? What is the realistic pool of civil defendants, and what is the realistic recovery? These are questions a Houston personal-injury trial firm can answer in detail, because they live at the intersection of federal sovereign immunity, Texas wrongful-death law, and the practical limits of civil litigation against criminal actors.
This page is the educational answer. It is not a solicitation. It is not a promise. It is the truth about what the civil system can and cannot do after a mass-casualty attack — written by people who have tried wrongful-death cases for 27 years and who know exactly where the lines are drawn.
The Five Defendants, the Multi-State Sweep, and What the Charging Documents Alleged
Five people were arrested across multiple states: Tycen C. Proper of Ohio, Bryan Omar Roa of California, Michael Alan Thomas of California, Daniel K. Eskridge of Missouri, and Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez of Nebraska. The investigation, which the public record attributes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Force working with the Department of Justice National Security Division, culminated in a multi-state federal sweep. The arrests and the underlying criminal case are being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, with ancillary federal districts handling the multi-state investigative work in Ohio, California, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas.
The charging documents, as described in published reporting, allege a coordinated conspiracy to carry out a mass-casualty attack at a high-profile event referred to as “UFC Freedom 250” scheduled to be held at the White House. The alleged operational plan involved explosive-laden drones designed to be detonated over the crowd at the event, with the goal of forcing the evacuation of high-value targets — coded “1” for the President, “2” for the Vice President, “N” for the Prime Minister of Israel, and “Musk” for the tech executive Elon Musk — to a pre-staged “southern evacuation point” covered by five sniper teams. The published record also references a backup plan that allegedly involved stealing military ordnance from the Kansas Army Ammunition Plant in Parsons, Kansas, and safe houses prepared in rural Missouri (a six-acre property with a concealed bunker under shed floorboards) and an abandoned brick church in Nebraska.
We will not editorialize on the guilt or innocence of any defendant. Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until the United States proves the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. The criminal case will play out in federal court under the Speedy Trial Act, with full discovery, motion practice, and the constitutional protections that a federal criminal prosecution requires. Our job on this page is the civil side — what happens to victims, survivors, and their families in the civil system, and what the realistic civil-recovery path looks like if the worst-case scenario ever materializes.
Why This Is a Federal Criminal Case — And Why We Won’t Pretend It Is a Personal Injury Case
Personal-injury firms that take on criminal-prosecution-adjacent work for marketing purposes are doing two things wrong at once: they are misleading the public, and they are violating the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct that govern lawyer advertising. We are not going to do that. The federal criminal case against the five defendants will be prosecuted under federal criminal statutes — 18 U.S.C. § 2332a (use of weapons of mass destruction), 18 U.S.C. § 2339A (providing material support to terrorists), 18 U.S.C. § 2339B (providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations), 18 U.S.C. § 844 (explosives), 18 U.S.C. § 1114 (killing federal officials), 18 U.S.C. § 2293 (military-type training), and 18 U.S.C. § 371 (general conspiracy), among others.
None of those statutes creates a private civil cause of action. A criminal conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 2332a does not entitle a victim’s family to a dollar of civil damages. The only way a civil case reaches the family of a terror-attack victim is through state-law tort theories (wrongful death, survival, premises liability, negligent security) pursued against a non-federal defendant who had a duty to protect against the attack. That defendant pool is narrow, the law that governs it is unforgiving, and the recovery — while real — is constrained by doctrines most families have never heard of until they need them.
This page is about that world. It is the world of the Federal Tort Claims Act, the discretionary-function exception, the private-venue liability question, the private-security-contractor question, and the Texas wrongful-death and survival statutes that govern what a Texas family can recover if a loved one is killed in a mass-casualty attack. It is a hard world, and we are going to walk through it without softening the parts that hurt.
The Question That Actually Matters: What If the Attack Had Succeeded?
Let us take the hypothetical seriously. A mass-casualty attack at a high-profile public event kills multiple Texans. Some of them are Houstonians — maybe they drove up to D.C. for a once-in-a-lifetime event, maybe they lived in the District, maybe they were visiting from Sugar Land, Katy, Pearland, The Woodlands, or Galveston. Their families call our office in the days after the attack. They have a stack of medical bills from the Level I trauma center in Washington or from a medevac flight back to the Texas Medical Center. They have funeral bills. They have lost wages. They have years of grief in front of them.
What can we do for them?
The honest answer is: less than the public expects, more than the federal government wants. The public hears about terror attacks and assumes the government will pay. The federal government almost never does. The public assumes the venue will pay. The venue sometimes will. The public assumes the security contractor will pay. The security contractor will fight you to the state supreme court. The public assumes there is a fund for victims. There is sometimes one — the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund is a special statutory creation; there is no general federal terror-victim fund sitting on a shelf waiting for this kind of case. The civil recovery, when it exists at all, comes from the private defendants whose negligence made the attack possible — and the doctrine that governs that recovery is built to make those defendants very hard to reach.
That is the truth. We tell you that truth now because telling it to you after a year of investigation, when the limitations period is half gone, is malpractice. We tell it to you now so you understand what this page covers, why each section exists, and what the realistic civil landscape actually looks like.
Sovereign Immunity and the Federal Tort Claims Act: Why You Almost Certainly Cannot Sue the Federal Government
The United States government is immune from suit unless it consents to be sued. That consent takes the form of the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), 28 U.S.C. §§ 1346(b), 2671-2680. The FTCA allows certain tort claims against the federal government under specific circumstances, and it is the only realistic path to a civil recovery from a federal agency or employee acting within the scope of employment.
But the FTCA is not a doorway the public gets to walk through on a terror case. Two doors are closed almost immediately. First, the FTCA explicitly exempts “[a]ny claim arising out of assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, libel, slander, misrepresentation, deceit, or interference with contract rights.” 28 U.S.C. § 2680(h). When the alleged wrong is an intentional criminal attack — which is the very nature of a mass-casualty terror plot — the FTCA bars the claim. No waiver, no matter how grievous the harm.
Second, even when the FTCA does not exclude a claim by its terms, the plaintiff must first exhaust administrative remedies by presenting the claim in writing to the appropriate federal agency within two years of the claim accruing (28 U.S.C. § 2401(b)) and obtaining a final denial before filing suit (28 U.S.C. § 2675(a)). The agency has six months to respond; if it does not, the claim is deemed denied. Only then can suit be filed in federal district court. Failure to exhaust is jurisdictional. These are not optional steps.
The exhaustion requirement is itself a trap. Most families do not know about it. Most families do not know that an SF-95 (the standard federal tort claim form) must be filed with the right agency (the U.S. Secret Service for a protection failure, the Federal Bureau of Investigation for an intelligence failure, the Department of Defense for the ordnance-theft plan) within two years. Most families find out about it after a lawyer reads them the rule, after the six-month administrative clock has already begun running. We tell you now so that if this ever becomes your problem, you are not learning about the SF-95 from a stranger in a waiting room.
The Discretionary Function Exception: The Federal Government’s Strongest Shield
Even if you get past the assault-and-battery exclusion and the exhaustion requirement, the FTCA contains a second shield so broad it is the federal government’s most powerful defense: the discretionary-function exception. 28 U.S.C. § 2680(a) bars “[a]ny claim based upon an act or omission of an employee of the Government, exercising due care, in the execution of a statute or regulation, whether or not such statute or regulation is valid, or based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the Government, whether or not the discretion involved is abused.”
“Any claim … based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the Government, whether or not the discretion involved is abused.” — 28 U.S.C. § 2680(a)
The Supreme Court has interpreted the discretionary-function exception broadly. Decisions about how to allocate protective resources at a National Special Security Event, how to set up a security perimeter, how to vet attendees, how to coordinate between federal and local law enforcement, how to analyze threat intelligence, and how to respond to a credible threat are all the kinds of decisions the exception protects. They are the kind of decisions that involve “an element of judgment or choice” — the very thing the exception is designed to insulate from second-guessing by federal juries. United States v. Gaubert, 499 U.S. 315 (1991), is the controlling Supreme Court authority; the Fifth Circuit has applied the exception expansively in this circuit.
This is not a defense that a Texas plaintiffs’ firm can argue around. It is a near-absolute bar on the most likely federal defendants: the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the local-federal coordination entities that would have been involved in the protection of a high-profile event at the White House. When the families of terror-attack victims ask “can we sue the federal government,” the honest answer in 99 cases out of 100 is no — not because the federal government did nothing wrong, but because Congress has chosen, in the FTCA, to protect exactly these kinds of protective decisions from civil liability.
The Realistic Pool of Civil Defendants: Who Texas Families Could Actually Sue
So if the federal defendants are mostly off the table, who is on it? The realistic pool of civil defendants in a mass-casualty-event case is narrower than the public assumes, but it is not zero. There are three categories of potential defendant who can be reached through the civil system, and each one requires a different theory of liability.
First, private venue operators. If the event is held on private property — a stadium, a concert venue, a privately owned event space — the operator has a common-law duty in Texas and most states to provide reasonable security against foreseeable criminal acts. A mass-casualty attack by a known terrorist organization may or may not be “foreseeable” in a given case, but a stadium’s failure to follow its own security plan, to screen for weapons, to coordinate with local police, or to maintain its own perimeter could be actionable under Texas premises-liability law. The relevant Texas case law traces through Phillips v. Celotex Corp., 828 S.W.2d 466 (Tex. 1992), and its premises-liability progeny, and through the negligent-activity theory that has been developed in Texas since the 1990s. The White House is federal property and is not a private venue, but the analytical framework matters for any analogous case in Texas involving a stadium, arena, or other large private event space.
Second, private security contractors. Many large events hire private security firms to perform bag checks, magnetometer screening, perimeter patrol, and other protective functions. In Texas, a private security contractor owes a duty of reasonable care to event attendees, and the standard is the same one that applies to other professionals: did the contractor do what a reasonable private-security firm would have done in the same circumstances? A firm that placed inexperienced guards at magnetometer positions, failed to follow its own training, ignored suspicious behavior flagged by other staff, or accepted payment to provide a level of security it knew it could not deliver can be sued when the foreseeable harm materializes.
Third, third-party contractors and event organizers. Event organizers, promoters, and the various contractors who put on a large event — staging companies, alcohol vendors, transportation providers, crowd-management firms — all have roles that can give rise to tort liability if their conduct falls below the standard of care and that conduct contributes to the harm. A transportation contractor that failed to vet its drivers, a staging company that blocked emergency exits, an alcohol vendor that overserved attendees who then breached a perimeter — these are the kinds of third-party conduct that can support a civil case after a mass-casualty event.
What the realistic pool does not include is the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Defense, or any other federal agency whose conduct is protected by the FTCA’s discretionary-function exception. The realistic pool does not include state or local law enforcement, which enjoys qualified immunity and, in Texas, is protected by the Texas Tort Claims Act’s independent-contractor and discretionary-act exceptions (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 101.021, 101.056). The realistic pool is the private layer — venue, security, contractors — and that is where the civil case has to be built if it is going to be built at all.
Texas Wrongful Death Law: CPRC § 71.002 and What It Actually Allows
Texas’s wrongful-death statute, codified at Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 71.002, allows the surviving spouse, children, and parents of a person killed by the wrongful act of another to recover damages from the person whose wrongful act caused the death. The statute is straightforward on its face; the litigation is in the details.
Under § 71.002, the wrongful-death action is brought for the exclusive benefit of the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the deceased. The damages recoverable in a Texas wrongful-death case include:
- Pecuniary loss. This includes the lost financial support the deceased would have provided — future earnings reduced to present value, lost inheritance, lost services around the home, and the value of the financial contributions the deceased would have made to the family over the course of a normal life expectancy.
- Loss of companionship and society. This is the non-economic counterpart to pecuniary loss — the loss of the relationship itself, the love, the comfort, the advice, the presence of the deceased in the family’s daily life. Texas has long recognized this as a separate element of damages distinct from the financial loss.
- Mental anguish. The grief, the sorrow, the pain of losing a loved one to a sudden and violent death. Texas allows recovery for the mental anguish suffered by the surviving beneficiaries as a result of the death.
- Loss of parental guidance. When a child has lost a parent, or when a parent has lost a child, the statute allows recovery for the loss of parental guidance, nurture, and care. This is its own distinct element in Texas.
- Exemplary damages. Texas allows recovery of exemplary damages (the state’s term for punitive damages) in a wrongful-death case upon a finding by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant’s conduct involved fraud, malice, or gross negligence. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 41.008. In a mass-casualty case, the gross-negligence theory would be developed against a private defendant whose conduct showed an extreme degree of risk — a security firm that knew its screening process was failing, a venue that knew its perimeter was breached and did nothing — coupled with conscious indifference to the rights and safety of others.
Texas does not cap wrongful-death non-economic damages. The Texas Supreme Court has held that caps on non-economic damages in wrongful-death cases violate the Texas Constitution’s separation-of-powers and open-courts provisions. The non-economic component of a Texas wrongful-death case is uncapped, which makes Texas a relatively favorable jurisdiction for the families of mass-casualty victims when the case can be brought here at all.
What the statute does not allow is also important. The Texas wrongful-death statute does not allow recovery for the deceased’s own pre-death pain and suffering — that lives in the survival claim, which we cover in the next section. The statute does not allow recovery for the family’s medical bills — those are the deceased’s pre-death medical expenses and live in the survival claim. And the statute does not allow recovery for the family’s funeral and burial expenses — those are recoverable in the survival claim, not the wrongful-death claim, under Texas law. The two claims are different, the damages are different, and they are often brought together but they are not the same.
Survival Claims Under CPRC § 74.001: The Pre-Death Damages the Estate Can Recover
Texas’s survival statute, Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 74.001, preserves certain causes of action that the deceased had at the time of death — the personal-injury claim the deceased would have had if they had survived — and allows the personal representative of the estate to pursue that claim for the benefit of the estate. In a mass-casualty case, the survival claim is often the larger of the two claims, because it captures the pre-death period between the attack and death — the medical care, the conscious pain and suffering, the lost wages, the medical bills, the funeral and burial expenses.
Under § 74.001, the survival action is brought by the personal representative of the deceased’s estate. The damages recoverable in a Texas survival action include:
- Pre-death medical expenses. The medical care the deceased received between the time of injury and the time of death. In a mass-casualty case, this can be substantial — the air-medical transport from the attack site to a trauma center, the emergency surgery, the ICU stay, the multiple specialists involved in keeping the patient alive for as long as possible. These expenses are recoverable in the survival claim.
- Pre-death pain and suffering. The physical pain and the emotional distress the deceased experienced between the time of injury and the time of death. Texas has long allowed recovery for the conscious pain and suffering of the deceased in the survival action, and the recovery is not capped.
- Pre-death lost wages. The income the deceased would have earned from the time of injury to the time of death. This is often a smaller component in a mass-casualty case because death often comes quickly, but it is recoverable when the deceased survived for any meaningful period.
- Funeral and burial expenses. The cost of the funeral, the burial, the marker, the related end-of-life expenses. These are recoverable in the survival claim under Texas law.
Exemplary damages are also recoverable in a survival action upon the same clear-and-convincing evidence standard that applies in the wrongful-death claim. The punitive component can be substantial in a case where the defendant’s conduct shows conscious indifference to the safety of others, and Texas juries are willing to return large punitive awards when the facts support them.
The survival action and the wrongful-death action are typically brought together, but they are technically distinct claims, they have different plaintiffs (the personal representative for the survival claim; the statutory beneficiaries for the wrongful-death claim), and they have different damages. A Texas family that loses a loved one in a mass-casualty attack can recover both the pre-death damages through the survival claim and the post-death damages through the wrongful-death claim. The two claims together are what makes the Texas civil-recovery framework as favorable as it is for the families of victims.
The Two-Year Texas Statute of Limitations: CPRC § 16.003
Texas has a two-year statute of limitations on personal-injury and wrongful-death claims. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003. The clock begins to run on the date of the injury in a personal-injury case and on the date of death in a wrongful-death case. If suit is not filed within two years of the accrual date, the claim is barred.
The two-year clock is unforgiving. It does not pause for grief, for criminal investigation, for the time it takes to find a lawyer, or for the time it takes to identify all the potential defendants. The clock runs from the date of the event, not from the date the family learns they have a claim. In a mass-casualty case, where the event itself is the focal point of national news, the family learns the relevant facts almost immediately. There is no delayed-discovery argument to extend the clock. The clock starts when the person is killed.
There is one narrow exception that can extend the clock in a survival action. If the personal representative of the estate has not been appointed by the court within the two-year period, the survival claim is not barred until the personal representative has had a reasonable opportunity to be appointed and to investigate the claim. But this is a narrow exception, and the safer course is always to file suit before the two-year clock runs, even if the investigation is incomplete.
The two-year clock is also why the federal administrative exhaustion requirement under the FTCA matters in a different way. If a family is even considering an FTCA claim against a federal agency — even one we believe is almost certainly barred by the discretionary-function exception — the SF-95 administrative claim has to be filed within two years, before the federal clock runs out. Failure to file the administrative claim within the two-year period is a complete bar, not just a procedural defect. The administrative step is not optional, and the deadline is not flexible.
What Texas Families Could Realistically Recover: Damages in a Hypothetical Mass-Casualty Case
The honest answer is that the case value depends entirely on the facts of the specific event, the identity of the specific defendants, the available insurance coverage, and the strength of the evidence. We are not going to give you a number. We are going to give you the framework that determines the number.
Economic damages in a Texas wrongful-death case are calculated by an economist who specializes in personal-injury litigation. The economist will project the deceased’s lost earnings over the course of their work-life expectancy, reduce the projection to present value using a reasonable discount rate, and add the value of lost household services, lost fringe benefits, and lost inheritance. The economist will rely on the deceased’s actual earning history, the deceased’s work-life expectancy based on occupational tables, and the deceased’s life expectancy based on actuarial data. The economic-damages calculation in a mass-casualty case involving a working-age adult with strong earning history can be substantial.
Non-economic damages in a Texas wrongful-death case are the loss of companionship, the loss of society, the loss of parental guidance, and the mental anguish of the survivors. Texas does not cap these damages, and the recovery is determined by the jury based on the specific facts of the case. The non-economic component is often the largest part of a Texas wrongful-death recovery, particularly in cases involving sudden, violent, and traumatic deaths where the jury is asked to put a number on the value of the relationship that was lost.
Exemplary damages in Texas are awarded upon a clear-and-convincing-evidence finding of fraud, malice, or gross negligence. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 41.008. The exemplary component can be substantial, but it requires evidence of the defendant’s conscious indifference to the safety of others — not just negligence, but the kind of conduct that justifies a punitive response. In a mass-casualty case, the gross-negligence theory would be developed against a private defendant whose conduct showed a knowing disregard of an extreme risk — a security firm that knew its screening process was failing, a venue that knew its perimeter was breached, a contractor that had been warned about specific vulnerabilities and chose not to act.
The insurance-coverage layer is the practical limit on most of these damages. A private security contractor may carry general-liability insurance with limits in the millions; a large venue may carry limits in the tens of millions; a national event organizer may carry limits in the hundreds of millions. The recoverable damages in a real case are constrained by the available coverage and by the defendant’s ability to pay any judgment in excess of coverage. This is not a reason to take less than the case is worth, but it is a reason to investigate the insurance picture early. A case against a defendant with no insurance and no assets is a case that can be won on the merits and still produce no recovery for the family.
Evidence Preservation: What Records Exist, Who Holds Them, and How Fast They Disappear
Evidence preservation in a mass-casualty case is its own race. The records that matter to the civil case are not the same records that matter to the criminal case, and the timelines for preservation are different. The criminal investigation will preserve what the prosecutor needs to prove the criminal case; the civil case needs a wider set of records and a faster preservation timeline.
The records that exist in a mass-casualty case include, at minimum: the venue’s security plan and post-incident reports; the private security contractor’s training records, post orders, and incident logs; the event organizer’s risk assessments, vendor contracts, and insurance certificates; the local law enforcement’s after-action reports and emergency-response logs (subject to the Texas Public Information Act and federal FOIA); the federal agencies’ after-action reports and intelligence assessments (subject to FOIA and to law-enforcement-sensitive redactions); the air-medical and hospital records of the injured; the surveillance footage from the venue, surrounding businesses, traffic cameras, and body-worn cameras of responding officers; and the cell-phone records, social-media records, and video taken by attendees.
How fast do these records disappear? The timelines vary. Surveillance footage at a private venue is often retained for 30 to 90 days on a rolling basis, depending on the venue’s policy and the storage capacity. The venue has no obligation to preserve that footage absent a litigation hold, and the litigation hold is triggered only when a preservation request is received. The day the family calls our office is the day the preservation letter goes out, because the day the letter is not sent is the day the venue’s normal retention policy continues running.
Body-worn-camera footage from responding officers is subject to Texas’s body-camera retention rules. Most Texas law-enforcement agencies retain body-cam footage for periods ranging from 90 days to several years, depending on the type of event captured. A mass-casualty event may trigger longer retention, but the default is short, and a preservation request should be filed as early as possible.
Event-organizer and security-contractor records are governed by the company’s own retention policy. The internal incident report, the after-action assessment, the training records of the guards who worked the event, the dispatch logs from the security operations center — these are all records that exist in the ordinary course of business and that may be deleted as part of routine records management. A preservation letter to the event organizer, the venue, and the security contractor is the tool that stops the routine deletion. The letter goes out the day the family calls. The day the letter is not sent is the day the routine deletion continues.
Federal-agency records are governed by FOIA and by federal records-retention schedules. The Secret Service’s NSSE after-action report, the FBI’s intelligence assessment, the Department of Homeland Security’s threat analysis — these records exist, but they are subject to law-enforcement-sensitive redactions and to delayed public release. A FOIA request can be filed, and the request can be processed on a parallel track with the civil case, but the federal records are not going to be available on the same timeline as the private-sector records.
The witness-memory clock is the fastest of all. The attendees who saw the attack, the responding officers, the medical personnel at the scene, the family members who were with the victim before the attack — every one of them has a memory that is sharpest now and that fades with every passing week. Witness statements should be recorded as early as possible, before the memories fade and before the witnesses are influenced by what they see in the press. A skilled investigator can take a recorded statement within days of the event that captures the witness’s perception in a way that no later interview can replicate.
The Defense Playbook: Sovereign Immunity, Intervening Criminal Acts, and the “Reasonable Security” Defense
The civil defendants in a mass-casualty case will deploy a predictable set of defenses, and we have seen all of them in the 27 years we have been trying these cases. The playbook is worth understanding in advance, because each defense has a counter, and the counter has to be built into the case from the beginning.
Play One: Sovereign immunity and the FTCA’s discretionary-function exception. When the defendant is a federal agency or a federal employee acting within the scope of employment, the first move is the FTCA and the discretionary-function exception we covered earlier. The counter is to look for the non-federal defendant whose conduct is not protected by the FTCA — the private venue, the private security contractor, the third-party contractor — and to develop the case against that defendant instead. The federal defendant may be in the case as a non-party, but the federal defendant’s immunity is not a defense for the private defendant.
Play Two: The intervening criminal act as a superseding cause. The defendant will argue that the attack was the work of a third-party criminal and that the criminal act breaks the chain of causation between any negligence by the defendant and the harm suffered. This is the most common defense in negligent-security cases, and it is the defense that wins cases that are not properly developed. The counter is the foreseeability doctrine: in Texas, a defendant has a duty to protect against criminal acts by third parties when the criminal acts are foreseeable. Tran v. Brand, 926 S.W.2d 253 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 1996, writ denied); Greater Houston Transp. Co. v. Phillips, 801 S.W.2d 523 (Tex. 1990). When a venue knows there have been prior security incidents, when a security firm knows its screening process has failed in the past, when an event organizer has been warned about specific threats — the criminal act is foreseeable, and the defendant cannot use the criminal act as a shield.
Play Three: The “reasonable security” defense. The defendant will produce its security plan, its training records, its incident logs, and its after-action report, and it will argue that it did everything a reasonable venue or security contractor would have done. This is the defense that wins cases that are not properly investigated, and it is the defense that the defendant’s insurance company will spend the most money developing. The counter is independent expert analysis — a security consultant who can review the defendant’s plan, training, and performance and identify the gaps, the failures, and the deviations from industry standards. The independent expert is the most powerful tool a civil plaintiff has against the “reasonable security” defense, and the expert should be retained as early as possible in the case.
Play Four: The “act of God” or “unforeseeable” framing. The defendant will argue that a mass-casualty terror attack is by its nature unforeseeable and that no security plan could have prevented it. The counter is the same as the counter to the intervening-criminal-act defense: the question is not whether a particular attack was foreseeable, but whether the category of attack was foreseeable, and whether the defendant’s response was reasonable in light of the foreseeable risk. A stadium that has been warned about active-shooter threats, a venue that has been warned about drone threats, a security firm that has been warned about perimeter breaches — the specific attack may be unprecedented, but the risk category is not.
Play Five: Comparative fault and the 51% bar. Texas adopted a modified comparative-negligence regime in 1995 (Proposition 12, codified at Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.001), under which a plaintiff who is more than 50% at fault is barred from recovery. In a mass-casualty case, the defendant will argue that the victim failed to follow security instructions, failed to evacuate when directed, failed to take reasonable steps to protect themselves. The counter is the same as in any Texas personal-injury case: the evidence will show what the victim did and did not do, and the comparative-fault argument will be developed based on the evidence, not on the defendant’s theory. In a mass-casualty case, the comparative-fault argument is often weak — a victim in a crowd under attack rarely has meaningful fault for what happens to them — but the defense will make the argument, and the case has to be ready for it.
Case Value: The Honest Answer for the Actual Federal Case — and the Framework for a Hypothetical Successful Attack
For the actual federal criminal case against the five defendants arrested in the multi-state sweep: the case value to a Texas personal-injury firm is zero. There is no civil defendant, no completed tort, no injured plaintiff with provable damages, and no Texas nexus. We will not accept this matter for civil representation. We are stating that publicly so that anyone considering calling our office about this specific federal case understands what we will and will not do.
For a hypothetical mass-casualty case against the private defendants we have described above, the case value is determined by the framework in the damages section above. Economic damages are calculated by an economist; non-economic damages are determined by the jury based on the specific facts; exemplary damages are available upon the clear-and-convincing evidence standard; and the recovery is constrained by the available insurance coverage and the defendant’s ability to pay. The realistic range of recovery in a mass-casualty case involving a working-age adult with strong earning history, a spouse, and children can be substantial; the realistic recovery in a case involving an older victim with limited earning history may be more modest. We give ranges when we have the facts; we do not give ranges when we do not.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The cases Attorney911 has tried in our 27 years of practice — including our participation in the BP Texas City refinery-explosion litigation, the recoveries we have made for Texas families in industrial-injury and catastrophic-injury cases, and the wrongful-death cases we have handled across the state — are not predictors of any specific result in a hypothetical mass-casualty case. Each case is its own case, and the result in any case depends on the evidence, the law, the jury, and the work that goes into the case from the day the family calls.
How We Help If This Kind of Case Ever Reaches Our Office
If a Texas family calls our office after a mass-casualty event — whether the event is a terror attack, a transportation disaster, an industrial accident, or any other sudden, violent, multi-victim incident — here is what we do. We listen. We do not promise outcomes. We do not guarantee results. We do not pressure the family to hire us on the first call. We explain the legal framework the way we have explained it on this page. We answer the questions the family is actually asking — who can we sue, what can we recover, how long do we have, what does this cost — and we give honest answers even when the honest answers are hard.
If the family decides to retain us, we move immediately. The preservation letter goes out the same day — to the venue, the security contractor, the event organizer, and any other private defendant whose records need to be frozen before the routine deletion clock runs out. The administrative claim under the FTCA is evaluated, and if there is any path against a federal defendant, the SF-95 is filed before the two-year deadline. The personal representative of the estate is identified, and the appointment process is begun if one has not already been made. The economist, the security consultant, the life-care planner, and the other experts who will be needed to develop the case are identified, and the retention letters go out. The witness statements are scheduled. The insurance-coverage investigation begins.
We do this work on a contingency fee. The family does not pay an attorney fee unless we recover. The case costs — filing fees, expert fees, deposition costs, trial expenses — are advanced by the firm and reimbursed from any recovery. The consultation is free, the consultation is confidential, and the consultation is the place where the family decides whether we are the right firm for the case. If we are not, we will tell the family that. We have been doing this work since 1998, and we are not going to mislead a grieving family into hiring us for a case we are not the right firm to handle.
Our practice areas include wrongful death and the broader personal-injury work that supports it. We also handle the criminal-defense side through our criminal-defense practice, which is a different kind of representation but one that we mention here because families in a mass-casualty case often have questions about the criminal side that intersect with the civil side. We handle the civil work. We do not handle the federal criminal prosecution. The families and the public deserve clarity on which is which.
Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña: Who Would Handle This Work
Ralph Manginello is the managing partner of Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Ralph has been a Texas-licensed trial attorney since 1998 (Texas Bar No. 24007597) and is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas for federal-court practice. He has spent 27 years in courtrooms trying personal-injury and wrongful-death cases against corporate defendants, insurance companies, and government entities. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, a starting point guard on a New England prep-school championship basketball team before that, and he has carried the trial lawyer’s discipline into every case the firm has handled since the firm was founded. Ralph’s work in the BP Texas City refinery-explosion litigation, the firm’s work in hazing and catastrophic-injury cases, and the firm’s record of recoveries for Texas families over more than two decades are the foundation of the practice.
Lupe Peña is an associate attorney at the firm. Lupe is a third-generation Texan with family roots tying to the King Ranch, born and raised in Sugar Land, where he lives with his family today. He graduated from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio with a degree in international business and from South Texas College of Law Houston with his J.D. Before joining the plaintiff side, Lupe spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims, the rooms where Colossus-style settlement software undervalues injuries, the rooms where the playbook is set. Lupe now uses that playbook for victims. He is fluent in Spanish, and the firm serves Texas families Hablamos Español — fully and with pride, because the families who need the most help are sometimes the families least able to access an English-only legal system.
If a Texas family calls our office about a mass-casualty case, the work that follows will be done by Ralph, Lupe, and the rest of our trial team — the same team that has handled the firm’s most complex wrongful-death and catastrophic-injury cases over the past two decades.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Attorney911 involved in the federal prosecution of the five defendants arrested in the multi-state sweep?
No. Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — is a plaintiffs’-side personal-injury and wrongful-death firm based in Houston, Texas. We are not involved in the federal criminal prosecution, we have not been retained by any defendant, and we have not been retained by any victim or victim’s family in the matter. The federal criminal case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice National Security Division. We are writing this page as a public-education resource, not as participants in the case.
Could a Texas family sue the federal government if a loved one was killed in a successful mass-casualty attack?
Almost certainly not, in any practical sense. The Federal Tort Claims Act allows some tort claims against the federal government, but the statute explicitly excludes claims arising out of assault, battery, and other intentional torts (28 U.S.C. § 2680(h)), and the discretionary-function exception (28 U.S.C. § 2680(a)) protects federal agencies from liability for decisions about how to allocate protective resources, how to coordinate with local law enforcement, and how to respond to threats. The realistic federal defendant pool is essentially closed off by these two statutory shields, and any FTCA claim must be presented to the appropriate federal agency in writing within two years (28 U.S.C. § 2401(b)) and administratively exhausted (28 U.S.C. § 2675(a)) before suit can be filed.
Could a Texas family sue the U.S. Secret Service specifically?
No, in any practical sense. The Secret Service is a federal agency, and the discretionary-function exception to the FTCA insulates its protective decisions from civil liability. Even if a particular protective decision could be characterized as operational rather than discretionary — and the federal courts have read the exception broadly to cover exactly this kind of decision — the assault-and-battery exclusion in 28 U.S.C. § 2680(h) would still bar the claim when the alleged wrong is an intentional criminal attack.
Could a Texas family sue the venue where the event was held?
Possibly, depending on the venue, the security plan, the foreseeability of the attack, and the conduct of the venue’s staff. The White House is federal property and is not a private venue, so this question does not arise on the specific facts of the foiled plot. But in any analogous case in Texas involving a stadium, arena, or other private event space, the venue operator has a common-law duty to provide reasonable security against foreseeable criminal acts, and the breach of that duty can give rise to civil liability under Texas premises-liability and negligent-activity law.
Could a Texas family sue a private security contractor?
Yes, this is the most realistic civil-defendant category. A private security contractor that performs bag checks, magnetometer screening, perimeter patrol, and other protective functions at a large event has a duty of reasonable care to event attendees, and the breach of that duty can give rise to civil liability in Texas. The standard is the same one that applies to other professionals: did the contractor do what a reasonable private-security firm would have done in the same circumstances? A contractor that placed inexperienced guards at critical positions, failed to follow its own training, ignored suspicious behavior flagged by other staff, or accepted payment to provide a level of security it knew it could not deliver can be sued when the foreseeable harm materializes.
What damages can a Texas family recover in a wrongful-death case?
Under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 71.002, the recoverable damages in a Texas wrongful-death case include pecuniary loss (lost financial support, lost inheritance, lost services), loss of companionship and society, mental anguish, and loss of parental guidance when a child has lost a parent or a parent has lost a child. Texas does not cap non-economic wrongful-death damages. Exemplary damages are recoverable upon a clear-and-convincing evidence finding of fraud, malice, or gross negligence under § 41.008. The companion survival claim under § 74.001 allows the estate to recover the deceased’s pre-death medical expenses, pre-death pain and suffering, pre-death lost wages, and funeral and burial expenses.
How long does a Texas family have to file a wrongful-death case?
Two years from the date of death, under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003. The clock does not pause for grief, for the criminal investigation, for the time it takes to find a lawyer, or for the time it takes to identify all the potential defendants. The clock starts on the date of death. If a federal FTCA claim is also being considered, the administrative claim must be presented to the appropriate federal agency within two years (28 U.S.C. § 2401(b)) and exhausted before suit can be filed (28 U.S.C. § 2675(a)). The safest course is always to file suit before the two-year clock runs, even if the investigation is incomplete.
What if the attack is foiled and no one is killed — is there a civil case?
Not a wrongful-death case, but potentially an assault-and-battery case under Texas law for the victims who were physically injured or who suffered emotional distress as a result of the foiled attack. The same defendant pool and the same defense playbook apply, and the same two-year statute of limitations applies. The recoverable damages are different — the medical expenses, the pain and suffering, the lost wages of the injured victim rather than the wrongful-death damages of a family member — but the analytical framework is the same.
Can the victims’ families recover for PTSD and other psychological injuries?
Yes, when the psychological injury is documented and is causally connected to the traumatic event. In a Texas wrongful-death case, the mental-anguish element of damages captures the psychological harm suffered by the surviving family members as a result of the death. In a survival case brought by the personal representative, the pre-death pain-and-suffering element captures the deceased’s conscious psychological distress between the time of injury and the time of death. Independent psychological treatment, documented diagnoses, and expert testimony are the proof mechanism for these claims, and the proof has to be developed as part of the case from the beginning.
What about the insurers — do they pay?
It depends on the insurance picture. A private security contractor typically carries general-liability insurance with limits in the millions; a large venue typically carries limits in the tens of millions; a national event organizer typically carries limits in the hundreds of millions. The recoverable damages in a real case are constrained by the available coverage and by the defendant’s ability to pay any judgment in excess of coverage. This is not a reason to take less than the case is worth, but it is a reason to investigate the insurance picture early. A case against a defendant with no insurance and no assets is a case that can be won on the merits and still produce no recovery for the family.
Free Consultation — When to Call
If a Texas family has been affected by a mass-casualty event, by negligent security at a venue, or by a wrongful death of any kind, the consultation is free and confidential. There is no fee unless we win. We will answer the questions the family is actually asking — who can be sued, what can be recovered, how long the family has, what the case will cost — and we will give honest answers even when the honest answers are hard. If we are not the right firm for the case, we will tell the family that. We have been doing this work since 1998, and we are not going to mislead a grieving family into hiring us for a case we are not the right firm to handle.
The consultation is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. Spanish-speaking families can speak with Lupe Peña directly, in Spanish, without an interpreter — the firm serves Texas families Hablamos Español, fully and with pride, because the families who need the most help are sometimes the families least able to access an English-only legal system. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Each case is its own case, and the result in any case depends on the evidence, the law, the jury, and the work that goes into the case from the day the family calls.
This page is general legal information about the civil side of a mass-casualty event. It is not legal advice for any specific case, and it is not a substitute for a confidential consultation with a licensed attorney. If you have a specific case, the consultation is the place to start.