Midland Mass Shooting on Business 20: Your Legal Rights as a Victim or Family Member
If you are reading this page, you or someone you love was on or near Business 20 in Midland when the shooting happened. You may be sitting in a hospital room right now, or standing in a kitchen trying to explain to children why their parent is not coming home the same person who left that morning. You may be one of the nearly a dozen people who walked away with a bullet wound and are now being told, by an insurance adjuster who sounds very friendly, that you should “just get better first and call us later.”
That call is not a courtesy. It is a clock. And the evidence that would prove what actually happened — who failed to protect you, what the property owner knew about the danger on that corridor, whether the security measures that should have been in place were in place — is disappearing right now, in some cases within days. We are going to tell you everything we know about how a case like this is built under Texas law, what your rights actually are, and what is happening on the other side of the table while you are trying to heal. None of this is legal advice for your specific case — it is legal information from a Texas trial firm that has spent over 27 years in courtrooms, and the call to talk about your situation is free.
What Happened in Midland Along the Business 20 Corridor
A mass shooting unfolded along the Business 20 corridor in Midland, Texas — a major commercial arterial that runs through the heart of the Permian Basin’s oil country. The suspected shooter is dead. At least one victim is dead. Nearly a dozen other people were injured, some seriously enough to require hospitalization, surgical intervention, and what will be, for many, a long road of physical and psychological recovery. Law enforcement responded to an active-shooter call. The public was advised to avoid the area. The scale of casualties — one fatality plus approximately ten to eleven injured — meets the standard federal definition of a mass-casualty shooting event.
The specific details of where the shooting began, how it moved along the corridor, where each victim was struck, and the circumstances of the shooter’s death are still emerging from the full investigative record. What we know with certainty is this: a person opened fire on or near a public commercial corridor lined with retail establishments, restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and energy-industry offices, and when it was over, one person was dead and approximately eleven others were bleeding, broken, or traumatized. The Midland-Odessa metropolitan area has lived through this before — the 2019 shooting spree along the I-20 corridor that killed seven and injured twenty-five between the two cities — which means regional law enforcement has trained for this protocol, but it also means this corridor has a tragic, documented history of mass-casualty gun violence that no business along it can claim was unforeseeable.
The Two Roads: Criminal Justice and Civil Justice
Here is the first thing most families do not understand: the criminal investigation and the civil case are two entirely separate processes that run on different clocks, seek different outcomes, and are controlled by different people. The criminal investigation is run by law enforcement — Midland Police Department, the Midland County Sheriff’s Office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and whatever federal agencies may assist. Its goal is to determine what happened, establish the criminal timeline, and — if the shooter were alive — prosecute. Because the shooter is dead, the criminal investigation will focus on reconstructing the event, identifying all victims, and closing the case file.
The civil case is something else entirely. It is brought by the victims and their families, through their own lawyers, against parties who may bear legal responsibility for failing to prevent foreseeable harm. The criminal case asks “what happened and who is guilty.” The civil case asks “who owed a duty to protect people on this corridor, did they meet that duty, and what is the cost of the harm that followed.” These two cases do not depend on each other. You do not need to wait for the criminal investigation to finish before pursuing civil claims. In fact, waiting is dangerous — because the evidence the civil case needs is dying on a clock that the criminal investigation does not stop.
A civil case is not about punishing the shooter. The shooter is dead. A civil case is about accountability — identifying every person, company, or institution whose choices or failures contributed to the conditions that allowed this harm to happen, and holding them financially responsible for the full cost of what was taken from you.
Who Can Be Held Responsible Beyond the Shooter
When a mass shooting happens, the public conversation focuses on the shooter. The legal conversation is different. The shooter’s estate is technically a defendant — you can name the estate to preserve claims and establish the intentional-tort predicate — but a deceased shooter’s estate is almost always judgment-proof, meaning there are no meaningful assets to recover. The real civil case, the one that can actually compensate families for catastrophic injuries and loss of life, looks beyond the shooter to the entities that controlled the premises where the shooting occurred and may have failed to take reasonable measures to protect against foreseeable criminal violence.
Here is who the investigation examines:
Commercial property owners along the Business 20 corridor. Texas premises liability law imposes duties on landowners based on the status of the person on the property. People who are lawfully present at a commercial establishment — customers, guests, patrons, employees — are “invitees” under Texas law, and they are owed the highest duty of care. That duty includes reasonable protection from known or foreseeable dangers on the property, including the foreseeable criminal acts of third parties. If the shooting occurred on or adjacent to a commercial premises — a parking lot, a storefront, a restaurant patio, a hotel entrance, a gas station forecourt — the owner of that premises may bear legal responsibility if they knew or should have known of the crime risk and failed to implement reasonable security measures.
Any contracted security company at the incident location. If a business along the corridor retained a private security company to provide guards, patrols, monitoring, or response, that security company may be directly liable if it failed to provide the security measures it was contracted to provide, or if the measures it provided fell below the professional standard of care for the industry. Security companies in Texas are regulated under the Department of Public Safety’s private-security licensing framework, and their guard licensing records, post orders, and operational contracts are discoverable evidence.
The shooter’s employer, if the incident was workplace-connected. If the shooter was an employee or former employee of a business at the location, and if the shooter had documented violent propensities, prior threats, disciplinary history, or a criminal record that posed a foreseeable risk, the employer may be liable for negligent hiring, negligent retention, or negligent supervision. The employer’s own personnel file, disciplinary records, and internal communications may show that the danger was known and nothing was done.
The property management company. If a property management company was contractually responsible for maintaining the premises — including security infrastructure like lighting, cameras, access control, and patrols — it may bear direct liability for failures in that maintenance.
The threshold strategic question in this case, and in any mass shooting civil case, is identifying the precise location where each victim was shot and mapping that location to a commercial premises that owed a duty to protect invitees. That single determination governs whether a solvent defendant exists and whether the case has meaningful value. If the shooting occurred entirely on a public roadway with no connected commercial premises, third-party recovery may be limited. If it occurred on or near a commercial property with inadequate security and a history of prior crime, the case can be substantial. This is why a prompt, aggressive investigation is the only way to determine what claims exist.
Negligent Security and Premises Liability Under Texas Law
Texas negligent security law is built on a common-law foundation, not a prescriptive statute. There is no federal regulation that dictates how many security cameras a retail store must have, or how many guards a hotel must station, or how bright a parking lot must be lit. Instead, Texas courts apply premises liability doctrine — a body of judge-made law that asks, in essence: did the property owner act as a reasonable person would in protecting the people it invited onto its property?
The duty is calibrated to the plaintiff’s status. Under Texas premises liability doctrine, a landowner’s duty changes depending on why the person is on the property. Trespassers are owed minimal duty. Licensees — people present for their own purposes or as social guests — are owed a duty to warn of known dangers. But invitees — people present for a commercial purpose that benefits the landowner — are owed the highest duty: the duty to use reasonable care to protect them from foreseeable dangers, including the criminal acts of third parties.
Under Texas premises liability law, a landowner who owes a duty to an invitee must take reasonable measures to protect against foreseeable criminal acts of third parties when the landowner knows or has reason to know of an unreasonable risk of harm.
That word — “foreseeable” — is the single most contested concept in every negligent security case in Texas. It is the battleground element that will determine whether your case survives summary judgment and reaches a jury, or whether it is dismissed before trial. We address it directly in the next section because everything else in the case flows from it.
If you want to understand how these principles apply to commercial properties where guests are harmed, our premises liability and negligent security practice page explains the framework in more depth.
The Foreseeability Battleground: What Texas Courts Require
Foreseeability is the engine of every negligent security claim. The defense in any premises liability shooting case will argue the same thing: the shooting was an unforeseeable, random act of criminal violence that no property owner could have predicted or prevented. That argument is the first thing the defense files, usually as a motion for summary judgment, and it is the first thing we have to defeat.
How do you defeat it? With evidence of prior criminal activity at or near the premises. The law does not require that the property owner have predicted this specific shooting by this specific shooter. It requires that the property owner knew or should have known that criminal violence was a risk on the property — that the conditions existed for this kind of harm — and failed to take reasonable security measures in response.
The evidence that proves foreseeability includes:
Police calls for service at the address. Every time police are dispatched to a location — for a fight, a robbery, an assault, a weapons call, a disturbance — a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) record is created. These records are obtainable through Texas public-information requests. A pattern of prior police calls at or near the shooting location is the backbone of a foreseeability showing. If the same parking lot had been the scene of multiple prior violent incidents, the owner cannot credibly claim that violence there was unforeseeable.
Prior incident reports and security complaints. Businesses often maintain their own internal incident logs — records of fights, thefts, aggressive patrons, or security concerns reported by staff or customers. These logs may not be retained for long, which is why a preservation demand has to go out immediately.
Online reviews mentioning safety concerns. Customer reviews on Google, Yelp, or other platforms mentioning unsafe conditions, inadequate lighting, lack of security, or criminal activity at the property are evidence that the danger was visible to the public — and therefore should have been visible to the owner.
The premises owner’s own security assessments. Many commercial properties commission security assessments or audits — formal reports by security consultants evaluating the property’s vulnerability to crime. If an assessment identified a risk that was never addressed, that document is devastating evidence.
The crime profile of the surrounding area. A crime-data analyst can map and quantify criminal activity in the vicinity of the premises over a defined period, establishing that the area was known to carry a heightened risk of violent crime.
The Midland-Odessa corridor’s documented history. The 2019 mass shooting spree along the I-20 corridor between Midland and Odessa killed seven and injured twenty-five. That event is part of the public record of this region. No commercial property owner along this corridor can credibly claim that mass-casualty violence was an unimaginable, unforeseeable event in a community that had already lived through one.
In Texas courts, foreseeability is not a bright-line test — it is a question of degree, often left to the jury. The more prior crime evidence you can present, the stronger the foreseeability showing, and the harder it is for the defense to get the case dismissed before trial. This is why the discovery phase of a negligent security case is so aggressive — the case lives or dies on what the prior-crime record shows, and the defense will fight to keep that record out.
Evidence That Is Disappearing Right Now
This is the section that matters most in the first two weeks after a mass shooting. Every piece of evidence that could prove what happened, who failed to protect victims, and what the property owner knew about the danger is on a clock. Some of it is already gone.
Surveillance and CCTV footage from businesses along Business 20. This is the single most critical and most perishable category of evidence. Most commercial DVR and NVR systems overwrite on rolling cycles — commonly 7 to 30 days, sometimes shorter. The footage that shows the shooter’s movements, the timeline of the attack, whether any security personnel were present and how they responded, and whether security cameras were operational and positioned to cover the vulnerable area is being written over right now. Unless a preservation letter has been sent to every business in the incident zone, that footage will be legally erased. A preservation letter is a formal written demand that the recipient preserve specified evidence and not destroy or alter it. Once the letter is on file, the recipient’s destruction of the identified evidence becomes spoliation — which can trigger court sanctions, adverse-inference instructions (where the jury is told they may assume the destroyed evidence was unfavorable to the party who destroyed it), and in some circumstances separate liability.
Police body-worn camera and dash-cam footage. Midland PD, Midland County Sheriff’s Office, and DPS responders all generate body-cam and dash-cam footage during an active-shooter response. This footage documents the scene as first found, spontaneous witness statements at the scene, the sequence of events including the shooter’s death, and whether any prior calls about the shooter or the location existed. This footage is subject to Texas public-information requests, but agencies typically resist release during an active criminal investigation. A preservation request and open-records demand should issue immediately.
911 call recordings and computer-aided dispatch logs. These establish the timeline of the shooting, when the first emergency calls came in, police response times, and whether prior calls or complaints about the location, the shooter, or suspicious activity were logged. Retention schedules vary by agency, and some systems auto-delete within 30 to 90 days unless specifically preserved.
Security plans, post orders, guard licensing records, and security contracts. If any business along the corridor employed a security company, the contract between the business and the security company, the post orders (written instructions telling guards what to do and when), the guard licensing records (verified through Texas DPS private-security regulations), and the security company’s operational records all establish what security was supposed to be in place and what was actually provided. Security companies may purge operational records within 30 to 90 days.
Prior incident reports, police calls for service, and security complaints. This is the foreseeability engine — prior criminal activity at or near the premises. Businesses may not retain old incident logs. Police calls-for-service data for the address can be obtained through open-records requests but requires processing time. This evidence must be requested early.
Witness statements and contact information. People who saw the shooting — victims, bystanders, first responders, employees at nearby businesses — have firsthand accounts of the shooting sequence, the security conditions at the time, whether any warnings or suspicious behavior preceded the attack, and whether security measures existed or failed. Memories degrade. Witnesses disperse. A coordinated witness canvass should begin immediately with trained investigators.
Here is what the generalist misses: a preservation letter is not a single document sent to a single address. In a mass shooting along a commercial corridor, it is a coordinated campaign — letters to every business whose camera might have captured the approach, the event, or the aftermath; letters to the security company (if one exists); letters to the property management company; open-records requests to every responding law-enforcement agency. The fastest-dying evidence — the CCTV footage — drives the urgency. Every day that passes without a preservation letter is a day closer to legal erasure.
The Injuries: Gunshot Wounds, Trauma, and the Long Road After
A mass shooting produces a spectrum of physical and psychological injuries that are, in many cases, permanent and lifelong. We want you to understand what the full scope of harm looks like, because the insurance adjuster’s first offer will be built on the narrowest possible reading of your injuries — the immediate medical bills and nothing else.
Gunshot wounds. The mechanism of a gunshot injury depends on the weapon, the caliber, the distance, and the trajectory. A bullet does not simply pierce — it creates a temporary cavity in tissue that stretches and tears organs, blood vessels, and bone far beyond the bullet’s path. High-velocity rounds can cause damage several times the diameter of the projectile itself. Gunshot wounds to the abdomen may require multiple surgeries — initial damage control, subsequent reconstruction, and sometimes colostomy or permanent alteration of digestive function. Gunshot wounds to the extremities may involve vascular injury requiring repair, compartment syndrome requiring fasciotomy, nerve damage that may be permanent, and in the worst cases, amputation. Gunshot wounds to the chest may involve lung collapse, cardiac injury, and great-vessel damage. Gunshot wounds to the spine may produce partial or complete paralysis — paraplegia or tetraplegia — depending on the level of injury.
The lifetime cost of catastrophic gunshot injuries. For a spinal cord injury resulting in paraplegia, the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center projects lifetime healthcare costs in the millions of dollars — and that figure excludes lost wages, which the same data puts at roughly $95,000 per year on average. For a traumatic brain injury from a gunshot wound to the head, the lifetime cost of care, rehabilitation, and lost earning capacity can run into the millions. For an amputation, the largest study of limb-threatening injuries found the lifetime cost of amputation runs more than half a million dollars more than limb reconstruction — because a prosthesis is not bought once; it is replaced every three to five years for the rest of a person’s life. These are not numbers a lawyer invented — they are published research figures from federal injury registries and peer-reviewed medical literature, and a certified life-care planner and forensic economist build the specific number for your case from them.
Post-traumatic stress disorder and psychological injury. This is the injury that the insurance company will try hardest to minimize, and it is often the most enduring. Mass shooting survivors frequently suffer severe PTSD, acute anxiety disorders, depression, and other psychiatric injuries that require long-term mental health treatment. The diagnostic standard is not a lawyer’s opinion — it is a formal eight-part clinical checklist in the DSM-5, and a board-certified forensic psychiatrist documents the diagnosis with validated instruments. Studies of trauma have found that rape — the most psychologically damaging event researchers have measured — produces PTSD in nearly half of women who experience it. A mass shooting, where people are killed and maimed around you, where you fear for your life, where you watch others die, is among the most PTSD-producing experiences a human being can survive. These psychological injuries are real, they are diagnosable, they are compensable under Texas law, and they are often the most costly damage element over a lifetime because they require years — sometimes decades — of treatment.
The injury you can see and the injury you cannot. A bullet wound leaves a scar. A surgeon can photograph it. A jury can see it. But the PTSD that wakes a survivor at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, the anxiety that makes a trip to the grocery store feel like crossing a battlefield, the depression that steals the ability to work or be present with family — those injuries are invisible, and the defense exploits that invisibility. The defense will point to a clean scan, a normal exam, a survivor who “looks fine.” The medicine answers that: a traumatic brain injury can come with a perfectly normal CT scan, because the damage is microscopic tearing of nerve fibers that standard imaging was never designed to see. PTSD has no X-ray, but it has a clinical checklist, validated instruments, and board-certified specialists who document it in records that withstand cross-examination. These injuries are proven with neuropsychological testing, advanced imaging, and the testimony of people who knew the person before.
What Compensation Is Available Under Texas Law
Texas law provides two distinct categories of legal claims after a fatal injury, and understanding both is essential because they compensate different losses and belong to different beneficiaries.
Wrongful death claims. The Texas Wrongful Death Act authorizes a claim by the surviving spouse, children, and parents of a person whose death was caused by the wrongful act, neglect, carelessness, unskillfulness, or default of another. This claim compensates the family for what they lost: the decedent’s future earning capacity, the loss of care and companionship, mental anguish, and funeral expenses. The beneficiaries are defined by statute — spouse, children, and parents — and a person outside that class generally cannot recover, no matter how close the relationship.
Survival claims. The parallel survival statute permits the estate of the deceased person to recover damages the decedent personally sustained between injury and death — including medical expenses, conscious pain and suffering, and mental anguish experienced prior to death. This claim belongs to the estate, not to the family directly, and the damages flow through the estate’s distribution.
For surviving victims, the compensation architecture includes:
Economic damages. Past and future medical expenses — hospitalization, surgery, rehabilitation, medication, durable medical equipment, and ongoing treatment. Lost wages and lost earning capacity — the income you have already lost and the income you will never earn because your injuries prevent you from returning to the work you did before. Household services — the value of the work you did at home that now has to be paid for, measured by federal time-use data and market replacement wages. A life-care planner builds the future-cost stream; a forensic economist reduces it to present value.
Non-economic damages. Physical pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, physical impairment, and the loss of the life you had before. Texas does not impose a general statutory cap on non-economic damages outside of medical malpractice claims, which means a jury can award what the harm is actually worth — not a number limited by an arbitrary ceiling.
Punitive damages. Texas allows exemplary (punitive) damages upon a showing of gross negligence by a third-party defendant. These are subject to the statutory cap framework under Chapter 41 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. Against the deceased shooter’s estate, punitive damages are theoretically available but practically unrecoverable given the estate’s likely insolvency. Against a commercial defendant who exhibited conscious indifference to a known danger — who knew the property was dangerous and did nothing — punitive damages are a real and powerful tool.
The binary reality of case value. We need to be honest with you about what these cases are worth, because the range is enormous and it depends on facts that only an investigation can establish. If the only available defendant is the deceased shooter’s estate — which is likely judgment-proof with minimal recoverable assets — the practical recovery may be negligible, and the case value could be near zero. If the investigation identifies a solvent commercial property owner with adequate liability insurance who failed to implement reasonable security measures against a foreseeable danger, the aggregate value across all victims can reach eight figures — $5 million to $50 million or more, with individual wrongful death claims valued at $2 million to $15 million depending on the decedent’s age, earning capacity, and dependents, and individual injury claims valued at $100,000 to $5 million per victim depending on injury severity, permanency, psychological impact, and medical treatment trajectory. The difference between these two outcomes is the investigation. This is why a prompt investigation is the only way to determine whether viable claims exist.
For a deeper look at how wrongful death claims work under Texas law, including the survival action and the beneficiaries who may recover, our wrongful death claim practice page walks through the framework.
The Insurance Adjuster’s Playbook
Within days of a mass shooting, insurance adjusters and their representatives begin contacting victims and families. They sound sympathetic. They move fast. Everything they do is designed to close your claim for the smallest possible amount before you understand what it is actually worth. Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — he sat in the rooms where these decisions were made — and now he uses that knowledge for injured clients. Here is the playbook, and here is the counter to each play.
Play 1: The “just checking in” recorded statement. Someone friendly will call to ask how you are doing and whether you would be willing to “just tell us what happened” on a recording. This call is engineered to get you to say things that can be quoted against you later — to minimize your injuries (“I’m feeling okay”), to place yourself at fault (“I was walking near the edge of the lot”), or to lock in a narrative before you know the full scope of your injuries. The counter: do not give a recorded statement without counsel. You are not required to. Your first conversation with an adjuster should be through a lawyer who knows what questions are designed to do.
Play 2: The fast settlement check with a release buried under it. A check may arrive quickly — sometimes within weeks — with a release document that, if signed, extinguishes all of your claims forever. This check will arrive before your medical results are in, before you know whether your injuries are permanent, before you know whether you need future surgery, and before any investigation has identified the commercial defendants who may be responsible. The counter: never sign a release from an insurance company without having it reviewed by a lawyer. The first check is always a fraction of what the case is worth. That is its purpose.
Play 3: The “you were partly at fault” argument. The adjuster may suggest that you were in a place you should not have been, or that you should have been more aware of your surroundings, or that you failed to take evasive action. Texas follows a modified comparative negligence system with a 51% bar — if you are found to be more than 51% at fault, you are barred from recovery, and any fault assigned to you reduces your recovery proportionally. In a mass shooting context, victim comparative fault is typically negligible, but the adjuster will still try to pin percentage points on you because every point is money. The counter: do not accept any characterization of your own conduct without legal advice. You were a victim of a criminal act, not a participant in your own injury.
Play 4: The social-media and surveillance watch. The insurance company may monitor your social media accounts and, in some cases, conduct physical surveillance. A photograph of you smiling at a family event — even if you were in excruciating pain five minutes later — can be used to argue your injuries are not as serious as you claim. The counter: assume you are being watched. Set your social media to private. Do not post about your injuries, your activities, or your case. Do not discuss your case with anyone except your lawyer and your doctors.
Play 5: The “pre-existing condition” argument. If you had any prior medical history — depression, anxiety, a prior injury, a chronic condition — the defense will argue that your current symptoms are caused by that pre-existing condition, not by the shooting. The counter: the eggshell-plaintiff doctrine, which is a durable common-law principle across U.S. jurisdictions, holds that a defendant takes the victim as found. A pre-existing vulnerability that made the harm worse does not reduce the defendant’s liability — it can enlarge damages.
Play 6: The “we need more time” delay aimed at the statute of limitations. The adjuster may string negotiations along, expressing interest in settlement, requesting more documentation, and being generally agreeable — all while the statute-of-limitations clock runs. In Texas, that clock is two years from the date of injury for both personal injury and wrongful death claims. If the clock runs out, your case is dead, no matter how strong it was. The counter: know your deadline. Do not let an adjuster’s friendliness cost you your right to sue.
How a Case Like This Is Actually Built
We want you to understand the process, because understanding it is what gives you the power to make good decisions. Here is how a mass shooting civil case is actually built, from the first day to the last.
Week one: preservation and investigation. The first action is a coordinated preservation-letter campaign — letters to every business along the incident zone whose cameras might have captured the event, letters to any security company or property management company, and open-records requests to every responding law-enforcement agency. Simultaneously, trained investigators begin a witness canvass — identifying and interviewing people who saw the shooting, documenting security conditions, and recording observations before memories degrade and witnesses disperse. The police calls-for-service data for the address and surrounding area is requested through public-records channels, because that data takes processing time and is the engine of the foreseeability case.
Weeks two through eight: medical documentation and expert retention. While the preservation and investigation work proceeds, the medical record is being built. Every treating physician, every specialist, every imaging study, every therapy session is documented. For catastrophic injuries — spinal cord, brain, amputation — a life-care planner is retained to build the future-cost projection: every surgery, every medication, every piece of equipment, every caregiver hour, projected across the injured person’s expected lifespan. A forensic economist reduces that stream to present value. For psychological injuries, a board-certified forensic psychiatrist documents the PTSD diagnosis with validated clinical instruments.
Months two through six: discovery. If a lawsuit is filed, the discovery phase begins. Written interrogatories go to the defendants. Document requests demand the security plans, post orders, guard schedules, prior incident reports, maintenance records, corporate communications about security, and the franchise or management agreements that reveal the corporate structure. Depositions follow — the property owner, the security company’s management, the employees who were on duty, the corporate representatives who made decisions about security budgets. This is where the corporate choices that caused the harm are exposed under oath.
The expert phase. A board-certified security consultant opines on what industry-standard security measures were required and what was actually provided. A crime-data analyst maps and quantifies prior criminal activity near the premises. Treating physicians and forensic psychiatrists document the physical and psychological injury trajectories for each victim. For the damages presentation, the life-care planner and forensic economist build the lifetime cost figure.
Mediation and trial. Mediation is likely to be court-ordered in a multi-victim case, and it may be the most practical resolution path. A Texas Stowers-style demand — a settlement offer within or below the policy limits that creates bad-faith exposure for the insurer if it refuses — should be evaluated against any identified commercial general liability policy. If the insurer refuses a reasonable, within-limits settlement offer and a subsequent verdict exceeds the policy limits, the insurer may be liable for the full verdict amount, not just the policy limit. This is one of the most powerful leverage tools in Texas insurance law. If mediation does not resolve the case, it proceeds to trial — and in Midland County, the jury that decides what a life was worth will be twelve people from the reader’s own community, drawn heavily from the oilfield and energy-sector workforce that defines this region.
The venue reality. Midland County juries tend to be conservative. The jury pool is heavily composed of oilfield and energy-sector workers — people who value personal responsibility, who may be skeptical of lawsuits, and who may have strong views about gun rights and the line between personal and corporate accountability for criminal acts. The defense will hammer the theme that the shooter alone is responsible, that no business can prevent a determined attacker, and that holding a property owner accountable for a third party’s criminal act is unfair. Voir dire — the jury-selection process — must carefully explore these attitudes. This is not a venue where a plaintiff-side premises liability case is easy. It is a venue where the case has to be exceptionally well-built, where the foreseeability evidence has to be overwhelming, and where the security failures have to be undeniable. We tell you this honestly because you deserve to know the terrain, not because the case is hopeless. It is not hopeless. It is hard, and it requires a firm that knows how to try a case in a conservative venue.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do and What Not to Do
If you or a family member were involved in the Midland shooting, here is what the first 72 hours should look like from a legal perspective.
Medical care comes first. If you were injured and have not been seen by a doctor, go now. Some gunshot injuries — and many traumatic brain injuries — do not present with obvious symptoms immediately. A “mild” traumatic brain injury can come with a perfectly normal CT scan, and roughly one in seven people with a mild brain injury still has symptoms three months later: headaches, memory gaps, personality changes. You may see it across the dinner table before any scan sees it. Let a doctor document what happened to you, in a medical record, while it is happening. If you were discharged and new symptoms appear — numbness, weakness, severe headache, vision changes, psychological symptoms — go back. The gap between the injury and the first medical documentation is a gap the defense will exploit.
Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance company. Not the shooter’s estate’s insurer, not a property owner’s insurer, not anyone. You are not required to. Anything you say can and will be used to minimize your claim. If an adjuster calls, take their name and number and say you will call back — then call a lawyer first.
Do not sign anything. No release, no authorization, no waiver, no settlement agreement. Not from an insurance company, not from a property owner, not from anyone offering you money in exchange for your signature. Every document matters. Every signature can extinguish a right.
Do not post on social media. Do not post about the shooting, your injuries, your activities, your location, or your emotional state. Assume the insurance company is monitoring your accounts. A photograph of you at a family event can be used to argue your injuries are not serious, even if you were in pain when it was taken.
Document everything. Take photographs of your injuries. Keep every medical record, every discharge instruction, every prescription, every therapy note. Write down — in a notebook, not on a phone — what you remember about the shooting, the security conditions you observed, the lighting, whether you saw any security personnel, whether anything felt wrong before the shooting started. Memory degrades. A written contemporaneous account is evidence.
Identify witnesses. If you know people who were there, get their names and contact information. If you spoke to anyone in the immediate aftermath, write down who they were and what was said. Witnesses disperse. Their accounts become harder to obtain every day.
Call a lawyer. The call is free. The consultation is free. You pay nothing unless we win your case. And the day you call is the day the evidence-preservation clock starts working for you instead of against you. We can be reached at 1-888-ATTY-911 — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You will speak to a live person, not an answering service.
Why This Firm
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We have been in courtrooms in Texas since July of 2001 — over 24 years — and our managing partner, Ralph Manginello, has been licensed to practice law in Texas since November of 1998, over 27 years. Ralph is a journalist who became a lawyer, and he approaches every case with a reporter’s instinct for the story the evidence tells and a trial lawyer’s instinct for the story a jury needs to hear. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, including the Bankruptcy Court, and he is currently lead counsel in the active $10 million Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston hazing lawsuit in Harris County. You can read more about Ralph Manginello here.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney, licensed in Texas since 2012, and he is the advantage that comes from having sat on the other side of the table. Before he joined this firm, Lupe spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims from people exactly like the ones reading this page. He knows how claims are valued from the inside, how IME doctors are selected, how surveillance is deployed, and how delay tactics work. Now he uses that knowledge for injured clients. Lupe is fluent in Spanish — he conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter — and he is a third-generation Texan with family roots to the King Ranch. You can read more about Lupe Peña here.
Our fee is contingency. We charge 33.33% before trial and 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. We have live staff available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — not an answering service. Our aggregate recoveries exceed $50 million, and our clients have given us a 4.9-star rating across more than 251 Google reviews.
We have written about the legal issues surrounding mass shooting litigation because the principles that govern negligent security, premises liability, and victim compensation in mass-casualty events are durable legal doctrine that applies whenever a business fails to protect people from foreseeable violence.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue if the shooter is dead?
Yes. The shooter’s estate can be named as a defendant to preserve claims and establish the intentional-tort predicate, but the estate is likely judgment-proof with minimal recoverable assets. The real civil case looks beyond the shooter to the entities that controlled the premises where the shooting occurred and may have failed to take reasonable security measures against foreseeable criminal violence. A commercial property owner, a security company, a property management company, or the shooter’s employer (if workplace-connected) may all bear legal responsibility. Whether these claims exist depends on where each victim was shot and what security conditions were present — questions only an investigation can answer.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit in Texas?
Texas applies a two-year statute of limitations for both personal injury and wrongful death claims. For wrongful death, the two-year clock runs from the date of death. For personal injury, it generally runs from the date of injury. There are limited tolling provisions that may apply for minors or in certain circumstances, but you should never assume an extension applies without consulting a lawyer. The practical danger is not the two-year deadline itself — it is that the evidence you need to prove your case is disappearing within days and weeks, not years. The statute of limitations is the outer boundary; the evidence clock is the urgent one.
Do I have to wait for the criminal investigation to finish before pursuing a civil case?
No. The criminal investigation and the civil case are separate processes running on separate timelines. The criminal investigation is controlled by law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office. The civil case is controlled by you and your lawyer. You do not need to wait for the criminal investigation to conclude, and in fact waiting is dangerous because the evidence the civil case needs — particularly surveillance footage, witness statements, and security records — is disappearing on its own clock that the criminal investigation does not stop.
What is negligent security?
Negligent security is a claim that a property owner failed to take reasonable measures to protect people lawfully on the property from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties. Under Texas premises liability law, a landowner owes the highest duty of care to “invitees” — people present for a commercial purpose that benefits the landowner. That duty includes taking reasonable steps to protect against dangers the owner knew or should have known about, including criminal violence. The central question is foreseeability — whether the owner knew or should have known that crime was a risk on the property and failed to implement reasonable security measures (lighting, cameras, guards, access control, patrols) in response.
What if I was just a bystander and was not directly shot?
You may still have a claim. Texas law recognizes claims for emotional distress and psychological injury in certain circumstances, particularly for people who were in the zone of physical danger during a violent event. PTSD and other psychiatric injuries from witnessing a mass shooting are real, diagnosable, and compensable. The specific elements required depend on your exact relationship to the event — whether you were in the zone of danger, whether you suffered physical impact, whether you witnessed the harm to a close family member. A lawyer can evaluate whether your specific circumstances support a claim.
How much is my case worth?
The honest answer is: it depends on facts that only an investigation can establish. If no solvent third-party defendant is identified and only the shooter’s estate is available, the case may be practically unrecoverable. If viable negligent security claims are established against well-insured commercial property owners along the Business 20 corridor, individual wrongful death claims may be valued at $2 million to $15 million, and individual injury claims at $100,000 to $5 million per victim, depending on injury severity, permanency, psychological impact, and medical treatment trajectory. The aggregate value across all victims can reach $5 million to $50 million or more. The extraordinary range reflects the binary nature of negligent security case value — it turns on whether foreseeability and inadequate security are provable against an insured commercial defendant. No lawyer can tell you what your specific case is worth without reviewing the facts, the medical records, and the evidence. Any lawyer who gives you a dollar figure on the first call is not telling you the truth.
Will the criminal case affect my civil case?
The criminal case and the civil case are separate, but the criminal investigation may produce evidence that is useful in the civil case — police reports, ballistics analysis, autopsy records, and witness statements. However, you do not control the criminal investigation, and law enforcement agencies may resist releasing evidence while the investigation is ongoing. A preservation demand and open-records request can help ensure that evidence is preserved and ultimately obtainable. The civil case builds its own evidence through its own investigation, its own experts, and its own discovery process — independent of whatever the criminal investigation produces.
I do not think I can afford a lawyer. What do I do?
You can afford us. Our fee is contingency — we are paid a percentage of what we recover, and we are paid only if we win. You pay nothing out of pocket. The consultation is free. The investigation is funded by the firm. If there is no recovery, you owe us nothing. This is how contingency works: the lawyer takes the risk, and the client gets access to the justice system regardless of their ability to pay hourly fees. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 — the call is free, and you will speak to a live person 24 hours a day.
What if the shooting happened on a public road, not on commercial property?
This is the threshold question that determines whether a solvent defendant exists. If the shooting occurred entirely on a public roadway with no connection to any commercial premises, third-party recovery may be limited, and the case may collapse to a near-zero value against a judgment-proof shooter’s estate. If the shooting occurred on or adjacent to a commercial property — in a parking lot, on a storefront sidewalk, near a business entrance — the owner of that premises may owe a duty to protect invitees. The investigation’s first job is to establish exactly where each victim was struck and whether that location is connected to a commercial premises with a duty and with insurance. Not every mass shooting supports a civil claim, and we will tell you honestly if yours does not. But the only way to know is to investigate.
What resources are available for victims right now?
The Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund, administered by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas, may provide financial assistance for medical bills, counseling, funeral expenses, and other costs for victims of violent crime. This is a state-administered program separate from any civil lawsuit. Counseling services and victim support organizations are also available. If you need immediate assistance with medical costs or counseling, these resources may help while a civil case is being evaluated. We can help connect you with these resources regardless of whether you pursue legal action.
If You or Your Family Were There
If you were on Business 20 in Midland when the shooting started, or if someone you love was, you are living through something that no one should have to live through. The physical injuries may be healing or may be permanent. The psychological injuries may be just beginning. The financial pressure — medical bills, lost wages, the cost of a life rearranged by violence — is real and mounting. And somewhere, an insurance adjuster is preparing a settlement offer that is a fraction of what your case is worth.
You do not have to face this alone. The call to 1-888-ATTY-911 is free. The consultation is free. You pay nothing unless we win. We serve families in English and in Spanish — Hablamos Español — because Lupe Peña conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter, and your family deserves to understand every word of what is happening in the language you pray in.
The evidence is disappearing. The clock is running. And the day you call is the day the clock starts working for you. Contact us — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You will speak to a live person. We will listen. And then we will tell you the truth about what we can do.
1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win.