You Were Supposed to Be Safe in That Room
It was the last night before a flight out of Denver. You and your mother — together in one room at the Longmont Econo Lodge because the trip was already long and the room was supposed to be a safe place to land. Then he showed up. Pizza as a goodbye. You let him in because you knew him. He started acting erratically, and you kicked him out of the room. The right call. You thought you were safe.
You weren’t. He walked to the front desk, told the husband-and-wife team working it that he was drunk and had taken “a crap ton of Xanax,” wrote a profanity-laced breakup letter in front of them, and somehow talked them into handing him a key to your room. No ID. No check. No one called you to ask if it was okay. He walked back to the room with the key the hotel gave him. He said, “I’m going to fing kill you, c.” And then he cut your throat. He kicked you on the floor. He knocked out your teeth. He told you he liked the smell of your blood. He told you to like the way his boot tastes.
You woke up in a hospital. Your mother — seventy years old — was running through that hotel screaming for someone to call 911.
That is what this page is about. Not the criminal case against the man who did it — he has been charged with attempted murder, domestic violence assault, and assault, with an arraignment on the calendar. This page is about the company that handed him the key. The Econo Lodge at Longmont. Premier Hospitality, Inc., the operating company. And the brand on the sign — Choice Hotels International — the corporate parent whose franchise standards were supposed to prevent exactly what happened to you.
You came to a hotel for safety. The hotel turned you into prey. The law has a name for that, and a path through it.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Ralph Manginello (meet Ralph) has spent 27+ years in courtrooms, including federal court, in catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death cases. Lupe Peña (meet Lupe) is a former insurance-defense attorney who spent years inside the rooms where companies like Choice Hotels decide how much your pain is worth — and now uses that knowledge for injured people. He also conducts full client consultations in Spanish. Together with our team, we take on commercial defendants across Colorado.
This page is a free education. Read it. Share it. And when you are ready, contact us for a free consultation — and remember, no fee unless we win.
Why the Hotel Is on the Hook — Colorado Premises Liability Law
Colorado law on this is clear and well-settled, and it has been for decades. The statute that governs the duty owed to you as a hotel guest is Colorado’s Premises Liability Act, C.R.S. § 13-21-115. It is the exclusive remedy against the landowner — the only statute that governs this kind of claim. The standard the statute sets is “reasonable care.” You, as a paying guest, are an invitee — the highest tier of visitor — and the law requires the hotel to exercise reasonable care to protect you against dangers the hotel knew or should have known about.
“A landowner owes a duty of reasonable care to invitees to protect against dangers on the landowner’s property that the landowner knows about or should know about. A landowner breaches that duty by failing to take reasonable steps to protect against the dangers, and a landowner must act as a reasonable person would under the circumstances.”
— Colorado Premises Liability Act, C.R.S. § 13-21-115, codifying Armstrong v. Colo. Structures, Inc. and subsequent decisions.
Translated into plain language: the hotel doesn’t get to plead ignorance when the danger was sitting in front of its own employees. The husband and wife at the front desk knew — on their own admission to deputies — that Czichos was intoxicated, that he was swearing, and that he had told them he was on a “crap ton of Xanax.” A reasonable hotel, faced with a person visibly impaired on a controlled substance, asking for a key to a room he did not register for, does not hand the key. That is not a difficult call. That is the minimum. And that is exactly the call this hotel got wrong.
The same statute governs the surveillance failure. Weld County investigators learned that “quite a few” of the hotel’s cameras “didn’t have SD cards” — meaning they did not record — “and they hadn’t for a period of at least a year.” A functioning CCTV system is the most basic security feature a modern hotel operates. A hotel that has had broken cameras for a year has not exercised reasonable care; it has chosen not to. The law treats that choice as a choice, not as an accident.
If you are a guest in a Colorado hotel and you are hurt, our premises liability team can walk you through what the law requires of the hotel and what it owes you.
The Evidence Clock — Why You Cannot Wait
The single most important thing a hotel-negligence lawyer does in the first 72 hours is freeze the records. In this case, the most damning records were already missing — the surveillance cameras had not been recording for at least a year. But the records that were still alive when the case opened were the ones that mattered most, and each one had a clock:
1. The key-card swipe log and property-management-system (PMS) data. When the front desk “encoded” a key for Czichos, that action wrote a digital record: the time the key was made, the room it was made for, and — critically — whether the system flagged the request because the requester was not the registered guest. That is the exact forensic trail that proves or disproves the hotel’s “we had no idea” defense. PMS retention is governed by the chain’s own data-retention policy and the vendor’s storage terms; absent a preservation demand, the data is regularly purged. Days, not months.
2. The front-desk shift log and the incident/observation reports. The husband-and-wife team told the Weld County Sheriff’s Office what they saw. The hotel’s own written log — if one was kept — is the corroborating document. Many chains do keep these logs (especially after a violent incident, because their own insurer demands it). They are internal records with finite, often short, retention cycles. Weeks.
3. The housekeeping and maintenance records for the room. The “do not disturb” history, the housekeeping refusal notes, the maintenance tickets for the door lock, the prior guest complaints about safety in that room or that floor — all of it sits in a separate system with its own retention clock. Weeks to months.
4. The Weld County Sheriff’s Office incident report and CAD (computer-aided dispatch) records. The 911 call Carol Gonzales made from the front desk, the deputies’ arrival times, the initial statements the hotel staff gave the deputies — these are public records we can pull quickly, but they are the first chance to lock in the hotel’s own account of what happened. We serve a Colorado Public Records Act request within 24 hours of intake. The officer’s bodycam footage, if any, has its own short retention cycle.
5. The Choice Hotels International franchise and brand-standards documents. The Key Control Policy, the Brand Standards Manual, the Quality Assurance Inspection Reports for the Longmont property, the franchise agreement, the training records for the husband and wife who worked the desk. These live in Choice’s corporate files — but a litigation hold and a Rule 34 production request will force them out. The Choice franchise agreement usually contains a records-retention provision that runs for the life of the franchise plus a tail.
6. The forensic evidence from the scene and the victim’s body. The knife, the bedding, the room’s physical state, the victim’s clothing, the EMT run sheet, the ER trauma record, the surgeon’s operative report — these are preserved by the hospital and law enforcement, but a victim’s clothing and personal effects are routinely lost or destroyed. We demand a chain-of-custody hold on day one.
The master rule: every one of these records has a legal expiration date. By the time a family picks up the phone to call a lawyer, the clock is already running. The preservation letter — formal, in writing, naming every system and every category of record — goes out the day we are retained. We send it to the operating LLC, to Choice, to the PMS vendor, to Choice’s outside counsel, and to the Weld County Sheriff’s Office evidence custodian. The letter is built to do one thing: convert a routine, automatic data purge into spoliation if the records are later destroyed. The threat of a Colorado spoliation instruction — “the jury may presume the missing record was as harmful to the defendant as the plaintiff alleges” — is the pressure that keeps the evidence alive.
A preservation letter is not a courtesy. It is a litigation weapon. If the hotel destroys records after receiving it, the law treats the destruction as evidence of consciousness of guilt — and lets the jury draw the worst possible inference. We use that lever.
What Your Case Is Actually Worth
We are often asked, early in a case, what a case like this is “worth.” The honest answer is that no lawyer can put a final number on a case until the medical record is complete, the economic loss is documented by a life-care planner, and the jury question is set. But Colorado law gives us the building blocks, and we can show you the range.
The economic damages are the part of the case the law treats as objective. They include: every past and future medical expense (the throat repair, the dental reconstruction, the plastic surgery for the scar, the psychiatric and trauma therapy for PTSD, the future dental implants that have to be replaced every 10 to 15 years); the lost wages from the time you cannot work; the lost earning capacity if the injury is permanent; the household services you can no longer perform; the cost of the life-care plan a certified planner puts together in dollars-and-cents detail. In a throat-slash case with permanent scarring, multiple lost teeth, and PTSD, economic damages frequently run into the mid-six to low-seven figures even before you count pain and suffering.
The non-economic damages — pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, the permanent disfigurement of a scar across the throat — are capped in Colorado. The current cap under C.R.S. § 13-21-102.5 is $642,180 (this figure is the 2024-injury-year cap, which the Colorado General Assembly adjusts periodically for inflation under § 13-21-102.5(3)). For an incident on January 3, 2025, the cap is approximately $666,730 (re-indexed for 2025; verify the exact cap at the time of trial against § 13-21-102.5(3) and the Colorado Secretary of State’s annual adjustment). The cap is a ceiling, not a target. The cap is additional to the economic damages — it is the non-economic layer on top of the economic layer, and the two are added together for the verdict.
The punitive damages are a different question. Under C.R.S. § 13-21-102, a jury may award punitive damages when the defendant’s conduct is shown to be willful and wanton — that is, conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk. The case value range below assumes a strong claim for punitive damages where the facts support it. In a case where the front desk was told the assailant was on Xanax, the cameras had been broken for a year, and the prior-incident history at the property is unknown, the willful-and-wanton argument is real. Punitive damages in Colorado are not capped in the same way non-economic damages are, but they are subject to a separate statutory cap under C.R.S. § 13-21-102(1.5) — the greater of $150,000 or three times the amount of the actual damages (the low end of the actual damages, not the cap). Verify the current cap and any recent amendments before relying on a specific figure.
Putting the layers together — economic damages, non-economic damages to the cap, and a punitive component where the facts support it — the case value range on a case of this severity in Weld County, Colorado is $750,000 to $4,500,000. That range assumes a fully developed liability case (premises liability plus negligent security plus negligent training and supervision), a complete medical record, a documented life-care plan, and a jury that sees the photographs of the throat. The floor of that range is driven by the medical and economic loss. The ceiling is driven by the punitive argument and the depth of the non-economic damages the cap allows.
“Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.”
What we can guarantee is this: the case is worth investigating from the day you call us. The free consultation is confidential. No fee unless we win.
The First 72 Hours — What the Right Lawyer Does Before the Clock Runs Out
The first three days after intake are not a passive period. They are the most legally active period in the case. Here is what we do, in order, when a hotel-negligence case like this comes through the door.
Hour 0–4: Stop talking. Start preserving. The first thing we do is shut down any communication between the client and the hotel, the franchisor, the insurance carrier, or any of their representatives. We tell the client to take no recorded call, to sign no release, to provide no written or recorded statement. We tell them to forward every piece of mail, every email, every voicemail from the hotel or the carrier to us immediately.
Hour 4–12: Issue the preservation letter. We send a written litigation hold to the operating LLC, to Choice Hotels International, to Choice’s outside counsel, to the PMS vendor, to the housekeeping contractor (if separate), to the Weld County Sheriff’s Office evidence custodian, and to the hospital’s records department. The letter names every category of record the case will need: the key-card and PMS logs, the front-desk shift reports, the housekeeping logs, the maintenance and work-order tickets, the surveillance footage (even though the cameras are not recording, we lock in the proof that the cameras were not recording), the franchise and brand-standards manuals, the training records, the prior-incident and prior-complaint history. The letter is written to convert any later destruction into spoliation.
Hour 12–24: Pull the public-record spine. We file a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request for the Weld County Sheriff’s Office incident report, the CAD records, the 911 audio, the deputy bodycam footage (if any), and the criminal case filings in Weld County District Court. We pull the Weld County Clerk and Recorder records on the property — who owns it, who has liens on it, who is named on the certificate of occupancy. We pull the Colorado Secretary of State filings on Premier Hospitality, Inc. and the Choice corporate family.
Day 1–3: Build the medical and economic spine. We engage a life-care planner to begin the long-term medical and economic projection (throat-revision surgery, scar revision, dental implants and their replacement cycle, trauma therapy, lost earning capacity). We retain a forensic economist to convert the life-care plan into present value. We identify and schedule the treating physicians — the ER trauma surgeon, the plastic surgeon, the oral surgeon doing the dental reconstruction, the psychiatrist treating the PTSD, the physical therapist — for their treating-physician reports under C.R.S. § 13-90-419 (the treating-physician statute, which makes the treating doctor the most efficient expert in the case).
Day 3–7: Build the liability theory map. We retain a security-industry expert to evaluate the hotel’s compliance with industry standards for key control, intoxication screening, surveillance, and incident reporting. We begin drafting the complaint — the negligent-security count, the negligent-training-and-supervision count, the negligent-entrustment count, the direct-premises-liability count — and we name every corporate entity the discovery will likely reach.
Day 7–14: File. In a case of this severity, we file the complaint in Weld County District Court within the first two weeks. Filing is not an act of aggression. It is the lever that makes the insurance carrier put a real number on the table and that starts the formal discovery process.
Every step on this timeline has a purpose. None of it is theatrical. It is what a serious trial firm does to give a jury the cleanest, most complete picture of what happened, who is responsible, and what the loss is worth.
The Forensic Medicine of a Throat-Slash Assault
A throat-slash assault is not a “neck strain” case. The medical record in a case like this contains a forensic sequence that the jury needs to see and that the defense will try to soften.
The throat injury — a horizontal or angled laceration across the anterior neck — is a zone II neck injury under trauma-surgery convention, the zone that contains the carotid and jugular vessels, the airway, the esophagus, and the recurrent laryngeal nerves. The ER trauma survey in a case like this includes a CT angiogram of the neck to rule out vascular injury, a laryngoscopy to evaluate the airway and vocal-cord function, and a flexible endoscopy to evaluate the esophagus. The damage is photographed, the wound is repaired, and the scar begins to form. The scar is permanent. The scar matures over 12 to 18 months and never fully disappears.
The teeth — kicked out in this assault — are not just “teeth.” The dental reconstruction in a multi-tooth avulsion case involves implants, bone grafts if the alveolar ridge has been damaged, temporary removable prostheses during the healing period, and a permanent prosthesis that has to be replaced every 10 to 15 years over a normal adult life. The dental chart, the oral surgeon’s operative report, and the prosthodontist’s treatment plan are the spine of the dental damages. The life-cycle cost of dental implants over a 50-year life is the kind of number that turns a jury’s head.
The PTSD — the “I like the smell of your blood” memory, the bedroom that no longer feels safe, the hypervigilance at every door — is the longest-lasting injury of all. The DSM-5 diagnosis is documented, the treating psychiatrist is the expert, and the lifetime course of trauma-spectrum treatment is in the life-care plan. The defense will argue that PTSD is “soft” and that you should be “over it” by now. The medical record rebuts that argument, line by line.
We work with the treating physicians and a life-care planner to build the medical and economic spine of the case. The brain-injury and catastrophic-injury work we do across our practice areas gives us the network of treating and expert physicians to deploy.
The Proof Story — How the Case Gets Built
A hotel-negligence case is built in layers, and each layer has a function. The proof story in this case has at least five.
Layer 1 — the front-desk encounter. The Weld County Sheriff’s Office incident report quotes the hotel staff themselves saying they saw the intoxication, heard the Xanax admission, watched the letter-writing, and handed over the key. That is a contemporaneous, recorded statement against the hotel’s interest. The same hotel staff told the deputies they knew the man was on Xanax. They cannot walk that statement back at trial without impeaching themselves with their own words to law enforcement. This is the layer that proves the breach of the standard of care.
Layer 2 — the surveillance failure. The cameras had not been recording for a year. The hotel’s own statements to the press acknowledge this. The maintenance log — or the absence of one — shows when the SD cards were last replaced, when the system was last tested, and when the hotel stopped maintaining it. The franchisor’s Quality Assurance Inspection Program was supposed to catch this. The fact that the program did not catch it, or that the program was waived or ignored, is the franchisor’s own negligence. This is the layer that proves the hotel chose not to look.
Layer 3 — the medical record. The throat repair, the dental reconstruction, the PTSD diagnosis, the treating physicians’ reports, the life-care plan. This is the layer that quantifies the loss.
Layer 4 — the corporate-stack discovery. The franchise agreement, the brand standards, the training records, the prior-incident history, the insurance tower. This is the layer that puts a real number on the case.
Layer 5 — the jury. Weld County. 19th Judicial District. Twelve people who will see the photographs, hear the testimony, and decide. This is the layer where every other layer pays off.
Each layer reinforces the others. The case does not depend on a single document. It depends on a stack of documents, all pointing the same direction.
The Firm — and the Two Lawyers Who Will Run Your Case
Attorney911 is The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are a Texas-based catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death firm with 24+ years in business and an aggregate recovery record the firm markets at over $50 million. We take commercial-vehicle, catastrophic-injury, and wrongful-death cases in Colorado through local counsel and pro hac vice admission — that is, we associate with Colorado counsel of record where Colorado rules require it, and we lead the case from start to finish.
Ralph Manginello (bio) is the firm’s managing partner. He was admitted to the Texas Bar in November 1998 and has 27+ years of courtroom practice, including federal court. He holds a J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston and a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the State Bar of Texas, the Houston Bar Association, the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Pro Bono College of the State Bar of Texas. He is the Million Dollar Member of the Trial Lawyers Achievement Association. He started as a journalist, and the discipline of putting facts into a coherent, readable story is the spine of his trial work. He fights.
Lupe Peña (bio) is the firm’s associate attorney. He was admitted to the Texas Bar in December 2012 and has 13+ years of practice, including federal court. He holds a J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston and a B.B.A. in International Business from Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio. Before joining the firm, Lupe was an insurance-defense attorney at a national defense firm — he sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how much a claim was worth, and he learned the playbook from the inside. He now uses that knowledge for injured people. He is fully bilingual and conducts entire client consultations in Spanish, without an interpreter.
Together, Ralph and Lupe bring to a case like this: 40+ years of combined courtroom experience, a former insurance-defense lawyer’s inside knowledge of the claims process, a 24/7 live-staff operation (not an answering service), bilingual service, a 4.9-star Google rating with 251+ reviews (the firm’s marketing figure — verify the current count), and a results record the firm markets at over $50 million in aggregate recoveries.
“Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.”
The marketing figure does not promise you anything. What it tells you is that we have done this before and we have done it across case types. Your case is not a learning exercise. It is a case we already know how to build.
What to Do Tonight
If you or someone you love is in the situation described in this page — a hotel guest attacked in a hotel room, the hotel’s cameras not working, the hotel having handed a key to the wrong person — the actions you take in the next 48 hours will shape the rest of the case.
Do not give a recorded statement to the hotel’s insurance carrier. The adjuster is already calling, or will be soon. The call is friendly. The statement is permanent. Anything you say will be used. Take no recorded call without counsel on the line.
Do not sign anything the hotel or the carrier sends you. A release, an “advance,” a “final” settlement — none of it should be signed without a lawyer reviewing it. The “advance” is almost always paired with a release. The release is permanent.
Get the medical record complete. If the throat has not been fully evaluated, the teeth have not been fully reconstructed, the PTSD has not been formally diagnosed and treated, the medical record is not done. The medical record is the spine of the case. A complete record, with treating physicians, a life-care planner, and a forensic economist, is the difference between a nuisance settlement and a full recovery.
Preserve every piece of paper. The hotel’s “we just want to check in” letter. The “advance” check. The “here is a release” form. The settlement correspondence. The adjuster’s email signature. The voicemail with the friendly call. Keep it all. Forward it to us.
Contact us. The free consultation is confidential. No fee unless we win. We will take the call, walk you through the law, and tell you honestly whether we can help.
Hablamos Español. Lupe Peña conducts full client consultations in Spanish, and our team has bilingual staff.
1-888-ATTY-911. That is the number to call. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The call is free. The case is worth the call.
“Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.”
