Laredo, June 16, 2026: When a Business Jet Came Down on Loop 20
If you are reading this, you are probably not a journalist and not a researcher. You are someone whose life was just touched by what happened just before 10 p.m. on Tuesday night — a member of your family was on the plane, or you were on Loop 20 yourself, or you got a phone call you will never forget. We are sorry. We have sat at enough kitchen tables in the days after a death to know what the next hours will hold: calls you cannot return, paperwork no one warned you about, an insurance adjuster who will sound gentle and is not. This page is for you.
What we know is this. A Cessna Citation Latitude, registration N523QS, operated by NetJets Aviation — the world’s largest fractional-jet company and a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary — struck Texas State Highway Loop 20, the Bob Bullock Loop that encircles Laredo, and caught fire. One of the six people on board was killed. The other five were taken to area hospitals, where most were later released. A car on the highway was struck; its occupants were taken to a hospital with what the Laredo Police Department described as non-critical injuries. Five police officers were treated for smoke inhalation and cleared by 2:45 a.m. Parts of the aircraft and pools of jet fuel remained on the roadway into Wednesday morning, closing Loop 20 in both directions for hours.
The person who died has been identified as Joshua Baer, 50, the founder and chief executive of Austin-based startup accelerator Capital Factory and a former member of the Texas Tribune board from 2015 to 2017. The plane had departed San José del Cabo on the southern tip of Baja California Sur, bound for Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. For reasons not yet publicly disclosed, it diverted to Laredo International Airport. At about 9:55 p.m., one of the pilots radioed the Laredo Airport tower that the Cessna was having “mechanical issues” and requested an emergency landing. Five minutes later, Laredo PD began receiving 911 calls about a plane crash on Loop 20.
Within hours, the National Transportation Safety Board had launched what will become a formal investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived on scene. NetJets corporate representatives were on the ground. Laredo PD secured the scene and began witness interviews. By Wednesday morning, the public narrative had taken its first shape — a successful Austin businessman, a fractional jet owned by America’s most famous holding company, a road that carried ordinary traffic that Tuesday night. The legal narrative, the one that will determine what the families actually receive, is just beginning. We work on that one.
What follows is the truth of the days ahead, as we know it: who will be named, what the federal investigation will and will not tell you, what Texas law requires, what the international treaty on this flight changes, what evidence is about to disappear, and what the carrier and its insurers are already doing while the families grieve. We have written it the way we would speak across your kitchen table — gently, but without softening the fight. The first conversation costs nothing. There is no fee unless we win. We serve families throughout Texas, including here in Webb County, in English and Spanish. Hablamos Español.
What We Know — and What the Public Record Will Tell You First
The public facts in the first seventy-two hours are limited on purpose. The NTSB controls the wreckage under federal law — 49 U.S.C. § 1131 gives the agency exclusive authority over the investigation of every civil aviation accident in the United States — and the agency’s first duty is to secure the Flight Data Recorder (the “black box” that captures dozens of aircraft parameters in the seconds before impact) and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (the conversations, radio calls, and cockpit aural warnings). The first factual report from the NTSB usually takes six to twelve months. The final probable-cause report often takes a year or more.
What we already know, from the Laredo Police Department and the FAA’s initial statement, is the skeleton: a Part 135 air-carrier flight (the more demanding federal rules that govern on-demand charter and fractional operators, as opposed to the looser Part 91 private rules) departed Mexico, declared mechanical issues, attempted a diversion to Laredo, and came down on the highway rather than at the airport. The car on Loop 20 was struck. Fire followed. Eyewitnesses — including a Laredo police officer who was heading home after his shift — rushed to the aircraft. Two bystanders tried to break through the cockpit window with a sledgehammer and a shovel.
That last detail matters. The first responders in this story were not NetJets, not the NTSB, not the FBI — they were a Webb County police officer and ordinary Texans on a South Texas highway who ran toward a burning jet. Laredo Police Investigator Jose Baeza told reporters that there was “almost no delay in response” and that “the community and the heroism of many people who were simply on the same road” was the reason the casualty count stopped at one. We will remember that, because it is the truth, and because the families should know it.
What we do not know, and what no one outside the cockpit voice recorder can tell you yet, is the actual cause. “Mechanical issues” is what a pilot said on the radio at the worst moment of his or her life — it is the beginning of an investigation, not the conclusion. The NTSB will examine the engines, the fuel system, the flight controls, the maintenance records, the pilots’ rest and training, the weather, and the aircraft’s weight and balance. That work is just beginning, and it will not be rushed.
The Six People on Board — and the Lives Below
Joshua Baer was 50. For more than two decades he ran Capital Factory, the Austin-based accelerator that helped build a generation of Texas startups. He served on the Texas Tribune board from 2015 to 2017. He is being mourned by the business community he built, the journalists he advised, and the family he left behind. We will not speak for them. They will speak for themselves, in their own time.
Five other people were on board. Most were taken to local hospitals and most were later released, which suggests that initial injuries, while real, were not the catastrophic injuries aviation crashes can produce. Some were family and friends returning from a trip to San José del Cabo. Their names have not been released, and we will not speculate about who they are. But each of them, and each of their families, now holds legal rights that begin to accrue this week — medical records to preserve, statements to give carefully, and choices about specialists and treatment that will affect the value of their claims for years.
And then there is the ground. The plane struck a car on Loop 20. The car’s occupants were taken to a hospital with what police described as non-critical injuries — but the medical term “non-critical” can hide a great deal: a traumatic brain injury that does not show on an initial CT, a seat-belt chest injury that walks out of the emergency room and collapses the next day, the slow-developing PTSD that follows a near-miss with a jet engine. If you were that driver, or that passenger, or the family member of one, you are a victim in this case too — with a claim against the same defendants, and with the same federal and state law behind you.
Five Laredo police officers were treated for smoke inhalation and cleared at 2:45 a.m. They were first responders, not victims in the technical sense, but the trauma of what they saw is real, and Texas law provides pathways for the families of first responders who are injured in the line of duty. If you are a Webb County officer’s family and the lingering effects are showing up now, that is not weakness, and the law has a place for you.
Who May Be Legally Liable: The Defendant Map
The public tends to think of an airline crash as one defendant — the airline. A fractional-jet crash is more like an eighteen-wheeler wreck: there is a name on the side of the aircraft, and behind that name there is a tower of corporations, contracts, and insurance policies. The case we will build for the Baer family, the surviving passengers, and the ground victims will name multiple defendants, and we will name them now — not to predict the outcome, but to map the terrain the families are about to walk.
NetJets Aviation, Inc., the direct operator. NetJets operated the flight under 14 CFR Part 135 and is vicariously liable, as a matter of law, for the negligence of its W-2 employee pilots and crew acting within the scope of their employment. If the pilots made a bad fuel calculation, misread a weather report, mishandled a checklist, or botched the emergency approach, NetJets is on the hook for that error. If the company pressured them to fly when they should not have, NetJets is on the hook for that too. Vicarious liability is the bedrock of the case; everything else builds on it.
NetJets Inc. and the Berkshire Hathaway affiliates. NetJets Aviation sits inside a larger corporate family. The parent and sister entities — NetJets Inc., NetJets Aviation Holdings, and ultimately Berkshire Hathaway — can be reached under single-business-enterprise, alter-ego, or direct-participation theories when the facts show that fleet management, scheduling, training, or maintenance oversight flowed from above the operating certificate. This is not a “deep pocket” theory; it is a “who actually made the decision” theory, and it is how we get to the highest layer of insurance available.
The Pilot-in-Command and the First Officer. Pilots are personally liable for their own negligence, and their negligence is not always identical to the company’s. Cockpit-liability insurance typically covers them, but naming them individually preserves the ability to ask, under oath, what each of them did and did not do in the minutes before the crash. We file these claims carefully, because pilots are people and because the truth of the cockpit is most often recovered through their cooperation, not their public humiliation.
Textron Aviation Inc., the manufacturer of the Citation Latitude. If the investigation reveals a design, manufacturing, or systems defect — a fuel-system anomaly, a flight-control failure, an avionics misread — Textron is a defendant under both negligence and strict products-liability law. The General Aviation Revitalization Act (GARA, 49 U.S.C. § 40101 note) gives manufacturers an 18-year statute of repose on product claims, so the age of the airframe is a threshold question. If the plane is younger than eighteen, the product door is open. If it is older, we will need the maintenance records to find a different path through.
The maintenance organization. NetJets runs its own quality-maintenance program, but parts of that program are contracted out. If a deferred maintenance item, a missed inspection, or a faulty repair contributed to the crash, the maintenance provider — whether in-house or contracted — is a separate defendant with separate insurance.
Laredo International Airport and the City of Laredo. Limited but real. If a runway-light failure, an ARFF (Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting) delay, or an air-traffic-control error contributed to the post-diversion crash sequence, the City of Laredo can be a defendant. A claim against a Texas municipality must follow the Texas Tort Claims Act (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 101.001 et seq.), and that statute carries its own traps: a written notice to the city secretary within six months of the incident under § 101.101(a), and an overall two-year suit deadline. Government defendants in Texas require earlier action, not later — that is a clock we start the day you call.
Unknown third parties. If a ground vehicle, a pedestrian, or a piece of roadway infrastructure somehow contributed to the sequence, those parties are defendants too. We will not speculate; we will preserve.
NetJets Aviation: The Defendant at the Center
NetJets is not a small company. It is the world’s largest operator of fractional-jet ownership and jet-card aircraft, a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with a fleet of more than 750 aircraft under a single fractional-registration block. The Citation Latitude involved in this crash is a model NetJets flies in significant numbers. N523QS is a known NetJets tail. The company’s brand sits on the side of the fuselage; its pilots are W-2 employees; its operations center drove the diversion decision; its maintenance program signed off on the airframe.
That matters because of three things a sophisticated defendant brings to a fight. First, NetJets has a captive outside counsel — the law firm it keeps on retainer for crashes like this one — and that firm is on the phone before the wreckage is cold. Second, NetJets carries substantial hull and liability insurance, with operator-liability limits that typically run from $100 million to $1 billion depending on the policy tier and any federal Aviation Insurance Program backstop. A single-fatality case with five survivor claims and a ground victim is well within the carrier’s policy capacity, which means we are fighting for the upper limits of the tower, not a token settlement. Third, NetJets is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, which is to say that the deep pocket is, in Warren Buffett’s famous phrase, “the one with the money.” When we name NetJets, we are naming the largest industrial insurance-buying machine in the world.
NetJets’ safety record is generally good by industry standards, and we will say so where the facts support it. But scale and safety are not the same. With 750-plus aircraft, hundreds of thousands of flight hours per year, and pilots in every corner of the country, the absolute number of incidents is non-zero, and NetJets has been named in multiple wrongful-death and serious-injury actions over the past two decades. We expect them to defend this case hard. That is the company’s culture. It is also why we are here.
The NTSB Investigation: What Families Need to Know Right Now
The National Transportation Safety Board is not on your side. The NTSB is not on NetJets’ side. The NTSB is a federal investigative agency whose job is to find out why the plane crashed, not who is legally responsible — and that distinction is the most important thing for the families to understand in the first thirty days.
“The NTSB will lead the investigation and provide future updates.” — Federal Aviation Administration, statement on the Laredo crash, June 17, 2026
The NTSB’s authority comes from 49 U.S.C. § 1131 and 49 C.F.R. Part 831. The agency takes physical custody of the wreckage, the Flight Data Recorder, and the Cockpit Voice Recorder. It interviews witnesses under its own protocol. It assigns a “party process” — a formal structure by which the operator, the manufacturer, the pilots’ union, the FAA, and certain qualified representatives participate in the factual investigation. The factual report, when it issues, becomes the foundation for everything that follows in civil litigation. The NTSB’s probable-cause finding is not binding on a Texas jury, but it is the single most authoritative document in any aviation case, and both sides will use it.
Here is what families need to do about it:
- Apply for party status through the NTSB’s Office of Aviation Safety within the agency’s filing window, which typically opens 30 to 90 days after the accident. The most common posture for passenger families is “Party Subject to Other Representatives,” which gives the family’s counsel access to factual documents and the right to propose areas of investigation. We handle this application for you.
- Do not give a recorded statement to the NTSB, to NetJets, or to any insurer without counsel present. The NTSB is federal, the NetJets interview is corporate, and the two have different protections. Statements taken now can be quoted against survivors for years.
- Preserve your own evidence: the texts you received that night, the photos, the voicemails, the medical records from the first hospital, the names of witnesses. The NTSB will not collect these for you, and they are the connective tissue of a personal-injury case.
- Understand the timeline: a preliminary factual report usually issues in 6 to 12 months; a final probable-cause report can take 12 to 24 months. The civil case moves on a different clock (the Texas two-year statute of limitations) and the NTSB’s pace is not your deadline.
What the NTSB will not do is assign a dollar figure to a life. That is the jury’s job, in a Webb County courtroom if venue holds, and it is the work we do.
Texas Wrongful Death and Survival Law: The Statute, the Caps, and What Has Changed
Texas is a modified comparative-negligence state. Under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.001, a plaintiff who is more than 50 percent at fault is barred from recovery entirely; a plaintiff who is 50 percent or less at fault recovers reduced by his or her percentage. This rule matters in aviation cases because defendants will work to assign some slice of fault to the pilots, the maintenance crew, or even the passengers themselves. We are ready for that fight.
Wrongful death in Texas is governed by the Wrongful Death Act, Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 71.002:
“A person is liable for damages arising from an injury that causes an individual’s death if the injury was caused by the person’s or his agent’s or employee’s wrongful act, neglect, carelessness, unskillfulness, or default.”
The action may be brought by the surviving spouse, the children, or the parents of the deceased. Damages flow through the statutory beneficiaries under § 71.004, and the recovery is for the benefit of those beneficiaries — not the estate. The action is brought in the name of the deceased, on behalf of the beneficiaries, and the jury awards what it determines to be just.
The deadline is unforgiving. Under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003, both wrongful death and survival actions must be filed within two years of the death. Two years is not a long time when a federal investigation is also running, and the clock does not pause for the NTSB. If the family misses the deadline, the case is over — not reduced, not limited, over.
What the family can recover, in plain terms: economic damages (lost earnings, lost earning capacity, lost household services, lost inheritance, and funeral and burial expenses, all uncapped); non-economic damages (mental anguish, loss of companionship and society, pain and suffering, loss of consortium); and, in a survival action brought for the benefit of the estate, the conscious pain and suffering the decedent experienced between the injury and the death.
What about the damage caps? Here is the honest state of the law in June 2026. For years, Texas capped non-economic damages in wrongful-death cases under former § 74.301, with a $750,000-per-claimant ceiling. In LeCroy v. Carrier, the Texas Supreme Court held those caps facially unconstitutional. The legislature responded with Senate Bill 30 in 2025, which reinstated modified caps — but the current status of those caps is in flux as constitutional challenges work their way through the courts. The point for a family reading this page: do not let anyone tell you that the value of your case is fixed by a statute number. The cap question is live, and we will pursue full damages regardless of where the litigation lands on the cap issue.
The Montreal Convention: Why the Mexican Origin Changes Everything
Because this flight departed San José del Cabo, Mexico, and was bound for Austin-Bergstrom in the United States, it is “international carriage” within the meaning of the Montreal Convention of 1999 — the treaty that governs the liability of air carriers for passenger death and injury on flights that cross international borders. The treaty is binding federal law in the United States, and it gives the families a tool that a domestic-only case does not have.
Under the Montreal Convention, the carrier is strictly liable for proven damages up to 128,821 Special Drawing Rights (the IMF’s basket currency; roughly $170,000 to $175,000 in current dollars) without any showing of negligence. Above that floor, the carrier is liable for full damages unless it can prove the accident was not due to its own negligence — and that burden is on NetJets, not on the family. The two-year limitation period for Montreal Convention claims runs from the date of arrival, the date on which the aircraft ought to have arrived, or the date on which the carriage stopped, depending on the facts.
Why this matters in plain language: a domestic-only case often begins with the argument “prove we were negligent.” A Montreal Convention case begins with the argument “the death happened on our aircraft, pay.” The two-year clock is also more flexible than the Texas clock in some respects, which gives the family a second, parallel legal pathway in addition to the Texas wrongful-death claim. We pursue both.
The Mexican origin also creates a records problem. San José del Cabo’s fixed-base operator, its fueling records, its passenger manifest, and any foreign-object or contamination issues all sit in Mexico. We send preservation requests now, while the records are still on site, because Mexican records retention is shorter and harder to recover than American.
The Evidence Clock: What Must Be Captured, and How Fast It Disappears
The first week of an aviation case is the most important week, because the evidence that will decide the case is most fragile at the start. Here is the inventory of what exists, who holds it, and how fast it can legally disappear.
Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR). The two recorders are the heart of the case. The NTSB will secure them within 24 to 72 hours, and the agency will not release transcripts until the factual report is well along. We file a Party-Coordinator application to obtain access as soon as the NTSB opens the application window. Without the FDR and CVR, the rest of the case is opinion. With them, the case is on the record.
Air Traffic Control (ATC) recordings and radar data. ATC facilities typically retain recordings for 30 to 60 days; some retain radar data longer. We send preservation letters to the Laredo approach and departure control, to Houston Center (which would have handled the en-route handoff if the flight was on a published airway), and — through the State Department channels where necessary — to SENEAM and AFAC, the Mexican en-route centers. The pilot’s 9:55 p.m. radio call to the Laredo tower is the first entry in the case timeline, and the rest of the tape tells us what came before and after it.
NetJets flight-release, dispatch, and weather-briefing records. This is the file that documents the go/no-go decision in San José del Cabo, the authorization for the diversion, and the actual weather and NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions, the real-time advisories about runway closures, equipment outages, and hazards) information the crew had in front of them. A corporate-records preservation letter must be sent within seven days to invoke spoliation — the legal doctrine that allows a jury to assume destroyed evidence would have been unfavorable to the party that destroyed it. After the letter is on the record, anything that goes missing is a jury instruction against NetJets.
Pilot and First Officer records. Qualifications, training, rest and duty time, medical certificates, and prior incident reports. Foundation for any negligent-entrustment or retention claim. We send the litigation hold within fourteen days — the window before routine record purges can erase the trail.
NetJets Quality Maintenance and inspection records for N523QS. Airworthiness at the time of the accident, deferred maintenance items, recurring squawks, compliance with Airworthiness Directives. Same fourteen-to-thirty-day purge risk. The maintenance record is where a product case against Textron either lives or dies.
FlightRadar24 and ADS-B archived track. The publicly available flight-tracking data is already online, but it is associated with personal accounts that can be modified or closed. We capture the data within forty-eight hours and authenticate it for trial use.
Laredo Police Department bodycam, dashcam, and 911 audio. First-on-scene observations, witness statements, fire and fuel conditions. Texas’s Public Information Act gives us a ten-business-day response window, but we file the request the day you call so the clock starts now.
Loop 20 TxDOT traffic cameras and adjacent-business surveillance. Visual documentation of the crash, the ground impact, the fuel spill, and any ground victims. Most commercial surveillance systems overwrite in 7 to 30 days. We send preservation letters to TxDOT and to every business with a camera pointed at Loop 20 within forty-eight hours, before the systems roll over.
Hospital records for the five survivors. Establishes injury severity, causation, and damages baseline. We engage the survivors or their families for medical authorizations within thirty days.
San José del Cabo FBO and fueling records. Pre-flight weight and balance, fuel load, passenger manifest, any foreign-object or contamination issues. Mexican records require an early preservation request — high flight risk of loss.
Every one of these preservation letters goes out the day you call. The clock does not wait for grief, and neither does the defense.
The NetJets Playbook: Six Moves They Will Run in the First Ninety Days
We have spent enough time on the other side of this fight — specifically, Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he joined us, in the rooms where the playbook is written — to tell you exactly what NetJets and its insurers will do in the first ninety days. We name the plays, and we name the counter to each one.
Play 1: The friendly “checking in” call. Within a week, a NetJets corporate-representative or claims adjuster will reach out to the survivors and the Baer family, sometimes by phone, sometimes in person. The call will be warm. The call will be offered as concern. The call will, almost always, include a request for a recorded statement “while the details are fresh.” The counter: you do not give a recorded statement to anyone — not NetJets, not its insurer, not a third-party administrator — without counsel. The statement is being built to be quoted against you later, in a room you are not in, by a lawyer whose client has more money than yours. Our intake line at attorney911.com/contact is the place that call goes instead.
Play 2: The “we just need to verify benefits” intake form. A form will arrive — by email or by mail — that asks for the survivors’ Social Security numbers, the family medical history, the names of every treating physician, the details of the trip. The form will say it is for “benefits coordination.” It is for benefits coordination — their benefits coordination, against you. The counter: nothing gets filled out by a family member until counsel has reviewed it. We have seen these forms used to lock in statements, waive rights, and limit the company’s exposure before the family understands what it has signed.
Play 3: The NTSB cooperation show. NetJets will publicly and loudly cooperate with the NTSB — turning over documents, accepting party status, issuing press releases. The cooperation is real, and the company’s safety culture is not the issue. But the cooperation is also the public-facing mask of a parallel defense strategy: every document NetJets turns over to the NTSB is a document NetJets has reviewed, sanitized where it can, and timed so that the public release favors the company. The counter: we obtain the NTSB’s factual record independently through the party process, and we depose the NetJets corporate representative under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 202 before the NTSB’s pace can swallow the case clock.
Play 4: The low first offer. Within the first six months, NetJets’ insurer will float a number — typically a fraction of the policy’s actual value — and frame it as a “good-faith” offer. The number is built to look generous against a Texas two-year deadline and a grieving family. The counter: we do not respond to early offers. The full value of the case is not knowable until the NTSB’s factual report is in hand, the medical records are complete, the lost-earning-capacity expert has run the numbers, and the policy limits are confirmed. A quick check that arrives before the MRI results is not a settlement; it is a release.
Play 5: The forum-non-conveniens motion. NetJets is incorporated in Ohio, headquartered in Ohio, and has its principal place of business in Ohio. The defense will move to transfer venue to Travis County (closer to NetJets’ lawyers’ offices) or to federal court in the Southern District of Ohio (closer to NetJets’ headquarters). The counter: the crash happened in Webb County, on a Texas state highway, killing a Texas resident, injuring Texans, and the witnesses are in Laredo. Webb County is the right venue, and we will fight for it. (For a deeper look at what to do when the defense tries to move the fight, see our guide to what not to say to an insurance adjuster — the same principle of refusing to give the other side an early advantage applies.)
Play 6: The comparative-fault wedge. Because Texas has a 51% bar, NetJets’ lawyers will work to assign any percentage they can to the pilots, to the maintenance provider, to Textron, or — most cynically — to the passengers themselves. “Why were they on a fractional jet at ten o’clock at night?” “Did the family pressure them to take the flight?” “Did the passengers know the weather was bad?” The counter: Texas law does not allow the carrier to shift fault to its own employees or to a manufacturer’s defect, and the passengers had no role in the aircraft’s operation. The Texas Supreme Court has been clear: a defendant is liable for the full damages caused by the combined negligence of all tortfeasors, not just its own share. We hold that line.
The Money: Insurance Limits and the Ladder of Recovery
NetJets carries substantial liability insurance. The operator’s primary policy limits typically run from $100 million to $1 billion, with the federal Aviation Insurance Program providing a backstop for certain losses above the carrier’s commercial coverage. Those are the numbers that matter to a Texas family trying to understand what the case is worth.
The ladder of recovery, in plain terms, runs like this. The pilot’s individual coverage and the maintenance organization’s coverage come first, as the narrowest towers. Above them sits NetJets’ primary liability policy — the layer the case is actually fought in. Above the primary sits the excess and umbrella coverage that NetJets maintains as a Fortune-100-owned aviation operation. Above the umbrella sits, in some scenarios, the federal Aviation Insurance Program backstop, which can attach when the loss is catastrophic. And above all of it sits the net worth of Berkshire Hathaway itself — which is not a defendant, but which is the reason every excess carrier in the tower will take this case seriously.
What this means for a family with a wrongful-death claim, a survivor with a serious-injury claim, and a ground victim with a separate claim: the recovery is policy-coordinated, not policy-fought-over. The way to maximize aggregate recovery is to coordinate the cases — to share experts, to align theories, to present a unified factual record to a single jury. We do that. We do not let the carrier pick off the survivors one at a time with low offers designed to drive a wedge between families who should be allies. (For more on how settlements get built — and how the case value gets determined — see our guide to car accident settlements, which walks the same principles from the ground up.)
One more thing about the money, and we will be direct about it. Our fees are contingency: no fee unless we win. The consultation is free, and we advance the costs of the investigation — the experts, the records, the depositions, the trial prep — out of our own pocket. You pay nothing up front, and you pay nothing at all if we do not recover for you. The math is explained in plain English on our contingency-fee walkthrough, and we will walk it through with you again on the first call.
How a Case Like This Is Actually Built
Here is how a NetJets case moves from a Tuesday night on Loop 20 to a Webb County jury, step by step, in the order we run it. We are not guessing; this is the work we do.
Week one. NTSB party-coordinator application. Preservation letters to NetJets, to the pilots, to the maintenance organization, to the manufacturer, to the Laredo PD, to TxDOT, to the Laredo Airport tower, to Houston Center, to the Mexican en-route centers. FlightRadar24 and ADS-B capture. Witness identification begins. Hospital records authorizations requested. The clock for every piece of evidence above starts now.
Months one through three. Aviation-specific expert retention: a Citation Latitude type-rated pilot, an air-traffic-control expert, a fuel-systems expert, a human-factors expert, a meteorologist, and — for the wrongful-death claimant — a forensic pathologist to address the cause-and-manner of death. Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 202 pre-suit petition filed to take depositions and obtain documentary discovery before the two-year clock runs. (For an overview of what those depositions look like, see our offshore-accident guide — the deposition mechanics in an aviation case are very similar to those in a maritime case, where the same firm has decades of experience.)
Months three through twelve. NTSB preliminary factual report. Discovery: pilot records, maintenance records, dispatch records, training records, weather records, weight-and-balance data, fuel records, witness statements, prior incident reports. Independent investigation: wreckage examination, where the NTSB’s party process allows; record review by our retained experts; depositions of key NetJets personnel under Rule 202.
Months twelve through eighteen. Expert reports exchanged. Depositions of the defense experts. Mediation preparation. A Stowers-style policy-limits demand letter to NetJets’ primary carrier (the aviation analog of the Texas Stowers doctrine, which puts an insurer on risk for failing to settle within policy limits when a reasonable offer is on the table) is typically the right move in the window when the facts are clear and the experts are aligned.
Months eighteen through twenty-four. Mediation, usually scheduled in the window after the NTSB probable-cause finding but before the trial-disclosure costs spike. If mediation does not resolve the case, trial preparation. Voir dire in Webb County, with attention to educating the panel on corporate-defendant bias and on the realities of an international flight.
That is the timeline. It is long. It is expensive. We pay for all of it. The family pays nothing up front, and the recovery, when it comes, is the net of costs and fees, with the percentages spelled out in the engagement letter before we sign it.
The First Thirty Days: A Roadmap for Families
If your family is in this case, here is what we ask you to do in the next thirty days, and what we will do alongside you. None of this is advice for a specific case — it is the standard playbook for an aviation case at its earliest stage, and we share it freely so that no family is operating in the dark.
- Today. Save every text, voicemail, photo, social-media message, and email that touches the flight, the crash, the hospital, or the response. The defense will ask for these in discovery, and the original versions are more powerful than summaries.
- This week. Do not give a recorded statement to NetJets, to its insurer, to a third-party administrator, or to the NTSB without counsel. Call us first. The consultation is free.
- This week. Identify the witnesses you already know — the people who saw the plane, the people who helped at the scene, the first responders. Get their names and contact information now, before they scatter.
- This week. Begin choosing the right medical specialists. If you are a survivor, the first seventy-two hours of treatment decisions shape the rest of the case. A burn injury that is treated at a verified burn center (and the closest one to Laredo is in Lubbock) recovers differently than a burn treated at a community hospital. A brain injury that is documented with baseline neuropsychological testing at thirty days is provable in a way that a clean CT scan at three days is not. We pay for expert medical navigation out of pocket if your insurance will not.
- Within thirty days. The NTSB party-coordinator application goes in. The Texas Rule 202 petition gets filed. The first set of preservation letters has already gone out the day you called.
The hardest part of the first thirty days is the gap between the public information and the private reality. The press will be writing about what happened. The NTSB will be quiet. NetJets will be polite and careful. The families will be alone with a grief that has no protocol. We do not fix that. We do, however, walk into it with you, and we do not leave.
Damages: What the Families May Recover
For the Baer family, the recoverable damages under Texas law include the economic losses that flow from a 50-year-old man at the peak of his earning power: the lifetime earnings of a Capital Factory CEO, the household services his family relied on, the inheritance his beneficiaries will not receive, the funeral and burial expenses the family has already incurred. The non-economic damages — the mental anguish of a family that will not see him again, the loss of his companionship and society — are equally real and, under the current state of Texas law, recoverable in full subject to the cap litigation we are pursuing.
For the five survivors, the recoverable damages include past and future medical expenses, lost wages, diminished earning capacity, physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and any disfigurement or physical impairment. If any survivor sustained a traumatic brain injury, a spinal cord injury, burns, or an amputation — injuries that we have seen at seven-figure values in our own practice — the case is in the catastrophic-injury lane, and the damages model looks very different. (For an overview of how brain-injury cases are valued and proven, see our definitive guide to brain injury lawsuits.)
For the ground victim, the recoverable damages include the medical and economic losses tied to the car strike, plus the mental anguish of being hit by a business jet on a Tuesday-night commute. The ground case is its own lawsuit, against the same defendants, with its own damages model, and we handle it on the same coordination framework as the rest.
For all of the families, a survival action may be available for the conscious pain and suffering the decedent experienced between the injury and the death. Whether that claim is brought, and in what amount, depends on the medical evidence of pre-death conscious suffering — a question the NTSB’s factual report and the autopsy will help answer.
Punitive damages are available in Texas only on a showing of gross negligence, malice, or conscious indifference, and they are statutorily capped. We do not promise punitive damages; we do not need to. The compensatory damages in a NetJets case are already substantial, and the policy limits are the ceiling the carrier actually has to write a check against.
Why Our Firm: Ralph Manginello, Lupe Peña, and 27+ Years in Texas Courtrooms
The firm is Ralph Manginello. He has practiced since 1998, was admitted to the State Bar of Texas that year, and is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas — the federal trial bench where complex commercial cases, including aviation cases, are heard. Before he was a lawyer he was a journalist, and before that a championship point guard on the 1989 New England Prep School basketball team at Cheshire Academy — an athlete’s instinct for the read and a storyteller’s instinct for the truth are the two things he brings into a courtroom. He has recovered more than $50 million for Texas families since 1998, and he has been a part of the BP Texas City refinery explosion litigation, one of the largest industrial-mass-tort dockets in the state’s history. He hosts the Attorney 911 Podcast and produces more than 290 educational videos on YouTube, because he believes the law belongs to the people it serves.
The firm’s insider is Lupe Peña, a third-generation Texan with family ties to the King Ranch, raised in Sugar Land, where he lives with his family today. Lupe graduated from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and from South Texas College of Law Houston. He spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters, software, and corporate counsel decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like the ones in this case — before he crossed to the plaintiff side. He is fluent in Spanish, admitted to federal court, and now uses the playbook he learned from the inside to dismantle it from the outside. Hablamos Español is not a tagline on our page; it is a service Lupe delivers in court and at the kitchen table.
We handle cases throughout Texas, including the South Texas border, the Permian Basin, the Gulf Coast, and every county in between. Houston, Austin, and Beaumont are our home bases, but the firm’s reach is the state. We work with local co-counsel when the venue and the witnesses make that the right call, and we handle the full case from our offices when they do not.
We have fought in the BP Texas City refinery explosion litigation. We have filed and pursued a hazing lawsuit that resulted in a fraternity chapter surrendering its charter. We have recovered millions in trucking wrongful-death cases, brain-injury settlements, and amputation cases. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes, but the record speaks to what we do, day in and day out, when Texas families need someone who has done it before.
For more on the firm’s practice areas, including aviation, wrongful death, catastrophic injury, and offshore work, see our wrongful-death practice and the broader practice-area overview. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. We answer the phone 24/7 at 1-888-ATTY-911.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is liable when a private jet crashes in Texas?
Potentially several parties: the operating carrier (here, NetJets Aviation, Inc.) under respondeat superior for the negligence of its employee pilots; the parent and affiliated entities (NetJets Inc., Berkshire Hathaway affiliates) under single-business-enterprise or direct-participation theories; the pilots individually; the aircraft manufacturer (Textron Aviation) if a design or systems defect contributed; the maintenance organization if a maintenance failure contributed; and, in limited circumstances, the airport or municipality if air-traffic-control or runway-side errors contributed. We name every potentially liable defendant in the original petition, and we let the discovery sort out who actually pays.
What is the NTSB party process, and how does my family get involved?
The NTSB’s party process is the formal structure by which qualified representatives — typically counsel for the operator, the manufacturer, the pilots’ union, and certain family representatives — participate in the federal investigation. The Party-Coordinator application is filed with the NTSB’s Office of Aviation Safety, usually in the 30-to-90-day window after the accident. The most common posture for passenger families is “Party Subject to Other Representatives,” which gives the family’s counsel access to factual documents and the right to propose areas of investigation. We file this application for the family as part of the first-week work.
How long do I have to file a wrongful death lawsuit in Texas?
Two years from the date of death, under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003. The clock does not pause for the NTSB investigation, and it does not pause for settlement discussions. If the family misses the two-year deadline, the case is over. The Montreal Convention provides a separate two-year limitation period for international-carriage claims, and we pursue both. The earliest practical step is to consult a lawyer within the first month so the preservation, the NTSB application, and the Rule 202 petition are all in motion well before the deadline.
Why does the Mexican origin of the flight matter?
Because the flight departed Mexico, it falls under the Montreal Convention of 1999, the international treaty that governs passenger liability on flights that cross borders. The Convention makes the carrier strictly liable for damages up to 128,821 Special Drawing Rights (roughly $170,000 to $175,000 in current dollars) without any showing of negligence, and the carrier bears the burden of proof above that floor. It also imposes a two-year limitation period that runs alongside the Texas statute. The Mexican origin also affects records preservation, because San José del Cabo’s fixed-base-operator records, fueling records, and passenger manifest sit in Mexico and require early preservation requests.
How much is a wrongful-death case against NetJets worth?
Honest answer: it depends on the facts of the specific case, and any firm that gives you a number before investigation is guessing. As a range, single-fatality wrongful-death cases against deep-pocketed Part 135 operators with Montreal Convention applicability typically resolve in the $5 million to $25 million range, depending on the decedent’s age, income, and dependents. For a 50-year-old chief executive of an established Texas company, the economic-damages calculation alone is substantial. The case value is built, not guessed — from the NTSB factual record, the medical and economic evidence, the policy limits, and the jury’s verdict in Webb County.
What if I was a ground victim on Loop 20?
You have a direct claim against NetJets, against the pilots, potentially against Textron, and potentially against the City of Laredo if air-traffic or airport-operations factors contributed. Your claim is separate from the passengers’ and the Baer family’s, and it is coordinated through the same preservation and discovery framework. The medical decisions you make in the first seventy-two hours — what specialists you see, what imaging is done, what symptoms you report — are the foundation of the case. We will pay for expert medical navigation out of pocket if your insurance will not.
What if my family member was a passenger who survived?
The five survivors are victims in the legal sense, and their claims are independent of the Baer family’s wrongful-death claim. The damages include past and future medical expenses, lost wages, diminished earning capacity, physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and any disfigurement or physical impairment. The carriers will try to settle the survivor cases early, at low numbers, to anchor the wrongful-death case value down. We coordinate the survivor claims with the wrongful-death claim to prevent that wedge. PTSD is a real risk in this case, and our guide to PTSD claims after a vehicle accident walks through how the invisible injury is proven.
Will the NTSB report help or hurt my case?
It will do both, depending on the findings. The NTSB’s factual report is the most authoritative document in any aviation case, and it carries enormous weight with a jury. A finding of pilot error, mechanical failure, fuel miscalculation, or training deficiency strengthens the family’s case. A finding of pilot error combined with contributory crew action can complicate the comparative-fault analysis under Texas’s 51% bar. Either way, the report is a tool we use, not a verdict we surrender to. The Texas civil jury is the final arbiter of liability and damages, not the NTSB.
How long does a NetJets aviation case take?
From the day of the crash to the day of mediation, the realistic timeline is 18 to 24 months; to a jury verdict, 24 to 36 months. The NTSB’s pace drives the front end; the carrier’s defense strategy drives the middle; the trial calendar in Webb County drives the back. We push the pace at every stage where pushing helps, and we wait where waiting helps. There is no prize for the fastest settlement; there is only the right settlement, at the right time, for the right number.
What should I NOT say to NetJets or its insurance carrier?
Do not give a recorded statement. Do not sign a medical-authorization form without counsel review. Do not fill out a “benefits coordination” intake form. Do not discuss fault, even casually. Do not post on social media about the crash, the family, the investigation, or the case. Do not let an adjuster come to your home. Every one of these moves is a piece of evidence the carrier will use to discount your claim. Our guide to what not to say to an insurance adjuster walks the full list.
What does it cost to hire your firm?
Nothing up front. We work on contingency: no fee unless we win. We advance the costs of the investigation, the experts, the depositions, and the trial preparation out of our own pocket. The percentages and the cost structure are spelled out in the engagement letter before we sign it, in plain English. The consultation is free, the call is 24/7, and you reach a real person every time at 1-888-ATTY-911. (For a fuller walk-through, see our contingency-fee explainer and our straight answer on whether personal-injury lawyers are worth it.)
The information on this page is legal information, not legal advice for a specific case. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. If your family was affected by the Laredo crash, the consultation is free and confidential. We serve families throughout Texas, including Webb County, in English and Spanish. Hablamos Español. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 any time, day or night.