Midland, Texas Mass Shooting: What Victims and Families Need to Know About Their Civil Rights
If you are reading this at 2 a.m. from a hospital waiting room in Midland — or from a kitchen table where a chair is now empty — we are writing directly to you. A Friday morning in Midland became the worst day of your family’s life. One person is gone. Ten more were carried to area hospitals with gunshot wounds. The man DPS identified as the shooter, 45-year-old Victor Mata Villarreal of Odessa, was found dead inside a vacant building after a standoff. The criminal investigation is real and it is ongoing — but the criminal investigation is not the only path, and it is not the path that pays for your family’s future. What we do on this page is give you the complete picture of your civil rights under Texas law, told the way a senior trial attorney would tell it sitting across your kitchen table — because that is exactly what we are.
We are Attorney911, The Manginello Law Firm. We take Texas cases. We have been in courtrooms for over 27 years. And the first thing we want you to know is this: the evidence that decides whether anyone beyond the shooter can be held accountable for what happened to your family is disappearing right now — on a clock measured in days, not months. The cameras that recorded the scene, the security logs, the police call histories for the location, the witness memories — every one of those has a shelf life, and the shelf life started the moment the shooting stopped. That is why the most important paragraph on this entire page may be the one about preservation letters. But before we get there, you deserve answers to the questions you actually have.
Can I Sue After a Mass Shooting If the Shooter Is Dead?
Yes — and the answer has two parts that most people never hear. When the shooter is deceased, the criminal case effectively ends. But the civil case is a completely separate proceeding, on its own timeline, and it can pursue accountability from parties beyond the person who pulled the trigger. Under Texas law, the estate of a deceased shooter can be sued — but in practice, the shooter’s estate often carries minimal assets, and homeowners’ or umbrella insurance policies frequently exclude intentional acts. That means the estate is usually a thin target.
The real civil case — the one that can actually fund a family’s future — lives in a different theory entirely: premises liability and negligent security. Texas law requires property owners and operators to protect people lawfully on their premises from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties. The question is not whether the shooter was a criminal. The question is whether the property where this happened had a history of similar danger, whether security was adequate for what a reasonable owner should have anticipated, and whether the owner knew or should have known that this kind of harm was possible. That is the case that can reach a well-insured commercial defendant. That is the case that can produce a recovery measured in the millions, not the remnants of a dead man’s estate.
What Happened in Midland: The Confirmed Facts
On a Friday morning in Midland, Texas, Victor Mata Villarreal, a 45-year-old resident of Odessa, opened fire. One person was killed. Ten others were injured. Multiple victims were transported to area hospitals for treatment. After the shooting, Villarreal barricaded himself inside a vacant building. Following a standoff with law enforcement, he was found dead inside that building. The Texas Department of Public Safety is leading the investigation, with local, state, and federal authorities processing evidence and reviewing the circumstances. Ector County officials issued a public statement of solidarity with the Midland community.
Those are the facts that have been confirmed in public reporting. What has not yet been publicly identified is the specific premises or venue where the shooting occurred, the relationship — if any — between the shooter and the victims, and the full timeline of how the shooter arrived at the location, entered it, and carried out the attack. Those gaps are not empty space. They are the exact territory a civil case has to map, and the mapping starts with evidence that is degrading right now.
The statement from Ector County captured something real about this place that matters to your case:
“The bond between Midland and Odessa runs deep. In moments like these, we are reminded that West Texas is stronger when we stand together.”
That bond is not just sentiment. In a courtroom in Midland County, it is the jury pool. The people who will decide what your family’s loss is worth are the neighbors who felt this shooting in their own community — and West Texas juries have historically understood community, accountability, and the duty to protect people on your property in ways that matter.
The Civil Case the News Does Not Explain
When the news covers a mass shooting, the coverage focuses on the criminal investigation, the community response, and the grief. What it almost never explains is that a separate, independent civil justice system exists — one that does not depend on the criminal case, does not wait for the criminal case, and can hold accountable parties the criminal system never reaches.
Here is the core framework. Under Texas premises liability law, a property owner or operator owes a duty to people who are on the property as invitees — customers, employees, business visitors, even members of the public on commercial premises. That duty includes protecting them from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties. The battleground in every mass shooting civil case is the word foreseeable. A property owner is not an insurer of every person on the premises against every possible crime. But when the location had prior incidents of violence, when the crime pattern in the area was known, when security measures were inadequate for what a reasonable owner should have anticipated — the law says the owner had a duty to do more, and the failure to do more is negligence.
This is not a theory we invented. It is the established doctrine that governs premises liability across Texas, derived from common law and codified in the framework of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. The specific case law and its application to mass shooting scenarios is something we build from the ground up in every case — because every premises is different, every security history is different, and every foreseeability analysis turns on the specific facts of the specific location. If you want to understand how this doctrine applies to your family’s situation, our premises liability practice page walks through the framework in detail.
Who Can Be Held Accountable: The Defendant Map
In a mass shooting civil case, the defendant map is not obvious — and the most visible party is often not the most important one. Here is the full map, as the law sees it:
The estate of the shooter. The estate of Victor Mata Villarreal can be named as a defendant. But the estate likely carries minimal assets, and any homeowners’ or umbrella insurance policies the shooter carried almost certainly contain exclusions for intentional acts. Insurance policies are designed to cover accidents and negligence — not deliberate shootings. The estate is a named defendant, but it is rarely the source of meaningful recovery.
The property owner or manager of the premises where the shooting occurred. This is where the real civil case lives. The owner and operator of the property where the shooting took place owe a duty to protect invitees from foreseeable criminal acts. If the property is a commercial venue — a retail location, a workplace, a parking facility, an entertainment venue — the owner likely carries commercial general liability insurance with coverage that can be measured in the millions. The question is whether the security measures on the property were adequate and whether the danger was foreseeable.
The owner or operator of the vacant building where the shooter barricaded. A vacant building that was improperly secured may have facilitated the shooter’s ability to fortify a position and prolong the threat. If the building was not properly maintained, secured, or monitored, the owner may face a claim for negligent maintenance of a dangerous condition. Property records are durable, but maintenance contractor records and inspection logs may not be.
Any contracted security firm responsible for the location. If a security company was retained to protect the premises, it can be liable for negligent security — failure to provide adequate personnel, surveillance, or response protocols. The security firm’s contract, its staffing records, its patrol logs, and its training materials are all discoverable.
The employer or entity controlling the premises, if the shooting was workplace-related. If the shooting occurred at a workplace, the entity controlling the premises owed a duty of care to employees and business invitees. This may interplay with Texas workers’ compensation law, creating a dual-track situation where workers’ comp covers medical expenses but a third-party premises claim can reach the full measure of damages.
The critical first step in any mass shooting civil case is identifying the exact premises, confirming the ownership and control structure, and mapping every entity that owed a duty to the people who were shot. That work begins with property records, lease agreements, corporate filings, and insurance declarations — and it begins with a preservation letter that freezes the evidence before it disappears.
Texas Law: Foreseeability and the Duty to Protect
Texas premises liability law does not require property owners to be omniscient. It requires them to be reasonable. The duty to protect invitees from third-party criminal acts attaches when the criminal act was foreseeable — and foreseeability is assessed through a multi-factor analysis that turns on the specific facts of the specific location.
The factors Texas courts consider include: prior similar incidents at the property (the strongest evidence — prior assaults, prior shootings, prior weapons calls, prior police responses to the location); the crime pattern in the surrounding area (is the property in a high-crime corridor? what does the police call history for the address show?); the nature of the business (some businesses attract higher risks of violence than others); the adequacy of existing security measures (were there cameras? were they working? was there a guard? was there access control?); and whether the criminal act was reasonably anticipatable given all of these factors.
This is the make-or-break battleground. If the property had no prior incidents of violence, no history of crime, and no reason to anticipate a shooting, the foreseeability element is difficult — and the case against the property owner may not survive. But if the property had prior police calls, prior incidents, inadequate security, or ignored warnings, the foreseeability element can be established — and the case against a well-insured commercial property owner can be among the highest-value plaintiff matter types in the legal market.
Texas premises liability law requires property owners to protect invitees from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties, with foreseeability assessed through factors including prior similar incidents, proximity in time and location, and whether the criminal act was reasonably anticipatable.
That is the doctrine. The application is where the fight lives — and the fight is won or lost on evidence that is degrading right now.
Texas also follows a modified comparative negligence rule with a 51% bar. This means a plaintiff cannot recover if they are found 51% or more at fault. In a mass shooting context, this rule matters in a specific way: the shooter’s fault is enormous, but the shooter is deceased. The shooter’s estate’s fault does not necessarily impute to the premises defendants. Each defendant is evaluated on its own conduct — did the property owner breach its own duty of care? If the jury finds the property owner was, say, 30% at fault for failing to provide adequate security and the shooter’s estate was 70% at fault, the plaintiff can recover from the property owner for its 30% share. The comparative fault analysis is technical and case-specific, and it is one of the reasons you need a trial attorney who has actually worked through it — not a generalist who files a complaint and hopes.
Punitive damages may be available under Texas law if the property owner had actual awareness of a dangerous condition and consciously disregarded it. This is the gross negligence standard, and it is governed by Texas’s punitive damages framework. Punitive damages are subject to caps under Texas tort reform provisions, but the caps reach non-economic damages and leave the economic stream — medical bills, lost wages, future care costs — untouched. The availability of punitive damages turns on whether the property owner knew about the danger and chose to ignore it, which is exactly what the prior-incident evidence is designed to prove.
For families who have lost a loved one, Texas wrongful death law allows surviving spouses, children, and parents to recover for mental anguish, lost earning capacity, loss of companionship and society, and funeral expenses. A separate survival action captures the decedent’s pain and suffering prior to death. The wrongful death claim page on our site explains this framework in detail.
The statute of limitations for both wrongful death and personal injury claims in Texas is generally two years from the date of the incident. Two years sounds like a long time when you are standing in a hospital hallway. It is not. The criminal investigation may take months. The DPS file may not be complete for a year. Medical treatment for the survivors will be ongoing. And the evidence — the video, the logs, the witness memories — is dying on a clock measured in days and weeks, not years. The two-year deadline is the outer limit. The evidence deadline is the one that matters, and it is already running.
The Evidence Clock: What Exists, Who Holds It, and How Fast It Dies
This is the section that matters most to your family right now. Every piece of evidence that can prove foreseeability, establish inadequate security, or reconstruct what happened is on a clock — and on most of these clocks, the time is very short.
Premises surveillance footage and CCTV recordings. The shooting location and surrounding properties likely have surveillance cameras. That footage shows the shooter’s movements, the duration of the incident, whether security was present or absent, and whether security measures were operational. This is the single most critical evidence in the case — and most commercial CCTV systems overwrite on a rolling cycle of 7 to 30 days. After that, the footage is gone. Not archived. Not retrievable. Gone. The only thing that stops the overwrite is a formal preservation letter demanding the footage be saved. That letter needs to go out immediately — to the property owner, to any security company, and to any entity that controls the camera system.
DPS investigative file. The Texas Department of Public Safety is the lead investigative agency. Its file will include crime scene processing, ballistics analysis, witness statements, and timeline reconstruction. This file is the core factual foundation for all civil claims. Law enforcement investigations may take months, but civil counsel should file open-records requests early and coordinate with the investigation to ensure civil discovery does not interfere with the criminal case. The DPS file is durable — but access to it requires timely action.
Prior incident reports, police calls, and security logs for the shooting location. This is the foreseeability engine. Prior similar incidents are the strongest evidence supporting negligent security claims and punitive damages. Police call logs and internal security reports may be purged or archived on short retention cycles. These records need to be demanded through preservation letters and public records requests immediately. The Midland Police Department and the Midland County Sheriff’s Office maintain call-for-service records, and those records are pullable through Texas public information requests — but retention policies vary by agency, and some records are archived or destroyed on timelines that can be shorter than you would expect.
Vacant building ownership records, maintenance logs, and security measures. The vacant building where the shooter barricaded himself is a potential defendant in its own right. Property records are durable — they live in county deed records — but maintenance contractor records, inspection logs, and security measures documentation may be destroyed or lost. These need to be preserved through a litigation hold.
911 call recordings, dispatch records, and law enforcement body-camera footage. These reconstruct the response timeline, victim locations, and may capture critical statements about the premises and security conditions. Texas public information requests should be filed promptly. Retention policies vary by agency, and body-camera footage in particular can be subject to relatively short retention windows.
Victim medical records from Midland-area hospitals. These document injury severity, treatment rendered, prognosis, and establish the causal chain between the shooting and each victim’s damages. Medical records are generally retained long-term, but early collection preserves treatment narratives before defense interpretation can shape them.
The shooter’s employment, mental health, and background history. These records may reveal motive, prior threats, connections to the premises, or relationships with victims that inform foreseeability and duty analysis. Access requires the civil discovery process and some records may be protected by privilege.
The preservation letter is the tool that freezes this evidence. It is a formal written demand that puts every person and entity in possession of relevant evidence on notice that the evidence must be preserved and that destruction will result in court sanctions. The day you call a lawyer is the day that letter goes out — not the day a lawsuit is filed, not the day the criminal case concludes, and not the day you feel ready. The evidence does not wait for readiness.
The Medicine of Gunshot Trauma: What the Injured Are Living Through
If someone you love was shot and survived, what follows is not a recovery — it is a restructuring of an entire life around an injury that the body was never built to absorb. We write this section not to be clinical, but because the defense will be clinical about your family’s suffering, and you deserve to know what the medicine actually says.
A gunshot wound is a transfer of kinetic energy from a projectile into human tissue. The injury is not just the hole the bullet makes — it is the cavity of damage that the energy creates around the path. A high-velocity projectile creates a temporary cavity that can be twenty times the diameter of the bullet itself, stretching and tearing tissue far beyond the direct path. Organs can be destroyed by pressure waves that never touch the bullet. Blood vessels can be severed by the shock wave alone.
The ten people who were injured in this shooting each carry an individual injury profile that will determine the rest of their lives. Some of the patterns we see in mass shooting survivors include:
Abdominal and thoracic gunshot wounds. A bullet that enters the torso can perforate the bowel, liver, spleen, kidneys, or major blood vessels. Emergency surgery is often required within minutes — not hours. The victim may face multiple surgeries, ostomy creation, bowel resection, organ removal, and a lifetime of digestive consequences. Vascular injuries can lead to compartment syndrome, requiring fasciotomy — surgically slicing open the muscle compartment to relieve pressure — and potentially amputation if the limb was without blood flow too long.
Extremity gunshot wounds. A bullet to an arm or leg can fracture bone, sever arteries, and destroy nerve function. Open fractures carry a high risk of infection. Vascular repair may be needed to save the limb. Nerve damage may be permanent — a hand that cannot grip, a leg that cannot bear weight, a foot that drags. The difference between saving a limb and losing it can be measured in the hours between injury and vascular repair, and in the quality of the surgical intervention.
Head and neck gunshot wounds. A penetrating brain injury is among the most devastating injuries in medicine. Even a projectile that does not directly lodge in the brain can cause traumatic brain injury through the pressure wave — diffuse axonal injury, where the brain’s white-matter tracts are sheared by deceleration forces. The standard CT scan in the emergency room may look normal in a mild TBI, which is exactly the gap the defense exploits: “the scan was clean, so the injury is not real.” It is real. The damage is microscopic tearing of nerve fibers that a standard scan was never built to see. Advanced imaging — diffusion tensor imaging, susceptibility-weighted MRI — can detect what the CT missed, but only if someone orders it.
Psychological injury. Every person who was present during this shooting — whether physically injured or not — carries a psychological injury. The clinical diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder, and it is not a mood or a label. It is a formal medical diagnosis with eight separate diagnostic criteria, and a survivor has to meet every one of them: the event itself, the nightmares that will not stop, the streets they now avoid, the way their body still jumps at a sound, and symptoms that last more than a month and wreck their ability to work or be close to anyone. In the largest study of its kind, rape was the most psychologically damaging event researchers measured — more likely to cause lasting PTSD than combat, than a car wreck, than a natural disaster. A mass shooting is in that same category of psychological devastation.
For the family of the person who was killed, Texas wrongful death law allows recovery for mental anguish, lost earning capacity, loss of companionship and society, and funeral expenses. A separate survival action captures the decedent’s pain and suffering in the time between injury and death. If your loved one survived even briefly after the shooting — if they were conscious, if they experienced pain, if they knew what was happening — the survival claim is real and it is separate from the wrongful death claim. A defense lawyer is happy to let a grieving family walk through only one of those doors. We walk through both.
The Money: What This Case Is Worth
We are going to be honest with you about case value, because honesty about value is the most important thing a lawyer can give you at the start. The value of a mass shooting civil case is binary — it depends on whether a viable premises liability defendant with substantial insurance coverage can be identified and whether foreseeability can be established.
If no viable premises liability theory exists and recovery is limited to the deceased shooter’s estate, the value is minimal to low — likely in the range of a few million dollars or less, given the probable intentional-act exclusions in any insurance policies the shooter carried. The estate of a deceased individual with minimal assets and excluded coverage is a thin target.
If a viable negligent security claim is established against a commercial property owner with substantial insurance coverage and evidence of prior similar incidents or ignored security deficiencies, the aggregate value across one wrongful death and ten personal injury claims could reach catastrophic levels — potentially $75,000,000 or more across all victims. Midland’s Permian Basin commercial corridor includes significant industrial and commercial properties with deep-pocket ownership structures, and the coverage on those properties can be substantial.
The enormous spread — from minimal to potentially tens of millions — reflects the binary nature of premises liability in mass shooting cases. Without foreseeability and a collectible defendant, the case is nearly worthless. With both, it is among the highest-value plaintiff matter types in the legal market. The job of the civil investigation is to determine which side of that line this case falls on — and that determination is made from the evidence, not from speculation.
Here is how a real damages number is built for each individual victim:
Economic damages are the losses you can put on a spreadsheet. For the surviving victims, they include: past and future medical bills (emergency surgery, hospitalization, rehabilitation, medication, future revision surgeries), past and future lost wages, lost earning capacity, and the cost of a life-care plan that projects every medical need — including pain management, mental health treatment, and functional impairment accommodations — across the victim’s remaining lifespan. A life-care planner builds this cost stream year by year. A forensic economist reduces it to present value. The adjuster’s first offer is typically a fraction of this number, because the adjuster knows most people have never seen the full calculation.
Non-economic damages are the human losses no receipt can measure: pain, suffering, mental anguish, scarring, disfigurement, loss of enjoyment of life, and — for the families — loss of companionship, loss of society, loss of the future they thought they had. Texas is one of the few states where a jury may compensate the value of your loved one’s life itself — not just the paychecks that stopped. The insurance company’s lawyers know that case by heart. Now you do too.
Punitive damages may be available if the property owner had actual awareness of a dangerous condition and consciously disregarded it. Punitive damages are subject to caps under Texas tort reform provisions, but the existence of a punitive damages theory — and the evidence that supports it — is leverage that shapes the entire negotiation, even if the caps limit the ultimate punitive recovery.
The Insurance Playbook: What the Adjuster Does and How to Counter It
We know the insurance playbook from the inside. Lupe Peña spent years at a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue people exactly like you. He sat in those rooms. Now he sits on your side of the table. Here is what the other side does, and here is the counter to each play:
Play 1: The “just checking in” recorded statement call. Within days, someone friendly will call to “check on you” and ask you to “just tell us what happened” — on a recording engineered to be quoted against you. They are not checking on you. They are building a defense file. The counter: Do not give a recorded statement without counsel. You are not required to. The recording is voluntary, and anything you say while injured, medicated, and in shock will be parsed for inconsistencies that do not exist.
Play 2: The fast settlement check with a release buried under it. A check may arrive fast — before the full medical picture is known, before the injuries have declared themselves, before anyone has identified the premises defendant. The release attached to that check closes every claim forever, including the claims you do not yet know you have. The counter: Never sign a release without an attorney reviewing it. A check that arrives in the first weeks is designed to close the case before its value is known. The injuries from gunshot wounds are not fully apparent in the first weeks — the infections, the nerve damage, the PTSD, the revision surgeries all come later.
Play 3: The “you assumed the risk” and “the shooter was the only cause” argument. The premises defendant’s insurer will argue that the shooting was an unforeseeable criminal act by a third party, that the property owner could not have prevented it, and that the shooter — not the property — is responsible. The counter: The prior-incident evidence. If police had been called to this property before, if similar violence had occurred, if the security measures were inadequate for the known risk, the “unforeseeable” argument collapses. The foreseeability analysis is fought on the specific history of the specific location — which is why the police call logs and security records must be preserved immediately.
Play 4: The independent medical examination with a doctor the insurer picks. The insurer will send you to a doctor of their choosing — a physician who earns a significant portion of their income from insurance examinations and whose report will minimize your injuries. The counter: Your treating physicians are your proof. The medical record built from day one — the emergency surgery notes, the imaging, the rehabilitation records, the psychiatric evaluation — is the evidence that defeats the defense IME. But the record has to exist, and it has to be complete.
Play 5: The delay aimed at the statute of limitations. The insurer may string out negotiations, request additional documentation, promise a resolution “soon,” and otherwise run the clock toward the two-year deadline — knowing that if the deadline passes, every claim is dead. The counter: A lawsuit filed before the deadline changes the entire dynamic. Once suit is filed, the insurer’s reserve increases, the defense lawyers get involved, and the timeline is controlled by the court, not by the adjuster. The decision to file is the most powerful leverage tool in the case — but it requires being ready to file, which requires the evidence to be preserved and the experts to be retained.
The Proof Story: How a Case Like This Is Actually Built
Here is how a mass shooting civil case is actually built — from the first day to the verdict. This is not a summary. It is the walk.
Week one: the preservation letter. The day you call, a formal preservation demand goes out to every entity that may hold evidence — the property owner, any security company, the management company, any entity that controls the camera system, and every surrounding property whose cameras may have captured the incident. The letter names the specific evidence to be preserved: CCTV footage, security guard logs, patrol schedules, incident reports, maintenance records, key-card access data, and any internal communications about security at the property. The letter creates a legal duty to preserve. If evidence is destroyed after the letter is received, the court can impose sanctions — including an adverse-inference instruction telling the jury they may assume the destroyed evidence would have been unfavorable to the defendant.
Weeks one through four: the records avalanche. Public records requests go out to the Midland Police Department, the Midland County Sheriff’s Office, DPS, and any other agency with relevant records. The requests seek: 911 call recordings, dispatch records, body-camera footage, police call-for-service history for the property address, prior incident reports, and any prior security assessments. Property records are pulled from the Midland County deed records to identify the ownership structure. Corporate filings are pulled from the Texas Secretary of State to identify the entities that own, operate, and manage the property.
Months one through three: the expert team. A board-certified security consultant is retained to analyze the adequacy of security measures against industry standards for the property type and location. A forensic crime scene reconstructionist is retained to reconstruct the shooting from the physical evidence, the witness statements, and the surveillance footage. Treating physicians are identified for each victim’s injury profile — the trauma surgeon, the orthopedic surgeon, the neurologist, the psychiatrist. A life-care planner is retained for each permanently injured victim to project future medical costs. A forensic economist is retained to reduce those costs to present value.
Months three through six: discovery and depositions. Once suit is filed, discovery begins. The property owner produces its security manuals, its incident reports, its insurance declarations, its lease agreements, its maintenance records. The security company produces its contracts, its staffing records, its training materials, its patrol logs. Depositions follow — the property manager explaining under oath what security was in place, the security company’s operations manager explaining what guards were on duty, the property owner’s corporate representative explaining what they knew about the danger. The depositions are where the case is won — because the documents show what the company did, but the depositions show what the company knew and when it knew it.
The number at the end. The damages presentation is built from all of it — the medical records, the life-care plans, the economic projections, the lost-earning-capacity analysis, the pain and suffering testimony, and the wrongful death damages for the family of the person who was killed. The number is not pulled from the air. It is built, line by line, from the evidence and the expert testimony, and it is presented to a jury of twelve people from Midland County who understand what community means and what accountability looks like.
The First 72 Hours: A Practical Roadmap
If the shooting happened within the last 72 hours, here is what matters most right now:
Medical first. If you or a family member was injured, your first priority is medical treatment — not just for the obvious wounds, but for the full evaluation. Gunshot injuries can have delayed presentations. Internal bleeding may not be immediately apparent. Concussion symptoms may take hours to declare. Psychological injury — the numbness, the dissociation, the inability to process what happened — is the normal response to an abnormal event, and it needs clinical attention. Get the full workup. Every medical record from the first hours is evidence.
Do not give a recorded statement. If an insurance adjuster calls, you are not required to give a recorded statement. Be polite. Take their name and number. Tell them you will call back. Then call a lawyer. The recording is not a formality — it is a tool, and the tool is designed to be used against you.
Do not sign anything. If you are handed a release, a settlement offer, a medical authorization, or any document you do not fully understand, do not sign it. A release signed in the first days can close every claim forever. A medical authorization can give the insurer access to your complete medical history, including records unrelated to the shooting.
Do not post on social media. The insurance company and its investigators monitor social media. A photograph of you smiling at a family gathering can be used to argue your injuries are not serious. A comment about the shooting can be taken out of context. Assume everything you post will be exhibit A in a deposition.
Document everything. Photograph your injuries. Photograph the location if you safely can. Write down everything you remember — the timeline, the sounds, what you saw, who was there. Memory degrades. The most detailed account is the one taken closest to the event. Keep every medical bill, every discharge instruction, every prescription receipt. Keep the clothes you were wearing if they are evidence. Do not clean them.
Call a lawyer. The preservation letter goes out the day you call. The records requests go out within days. The expert team is identified within weeks. The two-year statute of limitations is the outer limit — but the evidence deadline is the one that matters, and it is already running.
Why This Firm: Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
We are not a billboard law firm. We are a trial firm. The difference matters when the case is this serious.
Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in Texas courtrooms, including federal court. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer — which means he was trained to find the story the facts actually tell, not the story the other side wants told. He is admitted to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Houston Bar Association. He is lead counsel in the active $10 million-plus Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston hazing lawsuit in Harris County. He does not settle cases because settling is easier. He prepares every case as if it is going to trial, because the cases that settle for full value are the ones the other side knows are ready to be tried. You can read more about Ralph Manginello here.
Lupe Peña is a former insurance-defense attorney. He spent years inside a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. He knows how claims are valued from the inside — the reserve-setting process, the IME-doctor selection, the surveillance tactics, the delay strategies. He now uses that knowledge for injured clients. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. You can read more about Lupe Peña here.
Together, the firm has recovered over $50 million for clients, including a $5 million-plus brain-injury settlement, a $3.8 million-plus amputation settlement, and a $2.5 million-plus truck-crash recovery. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But the track record tells you something about how we build cases: we build them to be tried, and because we build them to be tried, they tend to resolve on terms that reflect their full value.
We are based in Houston and we take cases across Texas. We handle wrongful death claims, premises liability cases, and the full range of catastrophic injury matters — and the Permian Basin is a region we know. Midland and Odessa are oil and gas communities with a transient workforce, heavy commercial traffic along the I-20 corridor, and a rapidly growing population that has strained local emergency services. The security challenges at commercial venues, parking facilities, and workplace sites throughout the area are real and documented. The Midland County District Court is where a case like this would be filed, and the jury pool there — conservative, community-oriented, plaintiff-receptive on premises duty cases — is a jury pool we understand.
The Midland County Courthouse and Your Jury
If a civil case is filed arising from this shooting, the likely venue is Midland County District Court. That matters — because venue decides who sits on your jury, and who sits on your jury decides what your family’s loss is worth.
Midland County juries are drawn from the people who live here. They are oilfield workers, schoolteachers, nurses, small-business owners, and retirees. They are conservative — but conservative in West Texas does not mean anti-plaintiff. It means they take duty seriously. They take property ownership seriously. They take the idea that a person who invites you onto their property has a responsibility to keep you safe seriously. When you put a premises liability case in front of a Midland County jury and show them that a property owner knew about danger and did nothing, that jury understands the failure — because in this community, looking out for your neighbor is not a slogan. It is how people survive in a place where the nearest big-city trauma center can be hours away and where everyone depends on everyone else.
Voir dire in a mass shooting case in Midland County would address juror attitudes toward gun violence, property owner responsibility, and the distinction between the shooter’s criminal culpability and the premises defendant’s civil negligence. These are not abstract legal concepts to a Midland jury — they are lived realities. The defense will try to focus the jury on the shooter. Our job is to focus the jury on the property owner’s choices — because the shooter is dead, but the property owner’s insurance is not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue if the shooter is already dead?
Yes. The estate of a deceased shooter can be named as a defendant, but the estate often carries minimal assets and insurance policies typically exclude intentional acts. The more meaningful civil case is usually against the property owner or operator under a premises liability / negligent security theory — if the property had a history of similar danger and security was inadequate. The civil case is separate from the criminal investigation and proceeds on its own timeline.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit?
Texas generally imposes a two-year statute of limitations on wrongful death and personal injury claims, running from the date of the incident. But the evidence deadline is much shorter — surveillance footage can be overwritten in 7 to 30 days, and witness memories degrade within weeks. The two-year deadline is the outer limit. The evidence deadline is the one that controls, and it starts running the day the shooting happens.
What is negligent security?
Negligent security is a form of premises liability. Under Texas law, a property owner or operator has a duty to protect people lawfully on the premises from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties. If the property had prior incidents of violence, inadequate security measures, or ignored warnings about danger, the owner can be held liable for failing to prevent a shooting that a reasonable owner should have anticipated. The foreseeability analysis — built from prior police calls, incident reports, and security assessments — is the core of the case.
How much is my case worth?
The value of a mass shooting civil case depends on whether a viable premises defendant with substantial insurance can be identified and whether foreseeability can be proven. If no viable premises theory exists, recovery may be limited to the shooter’s estate — minimal. If a viable negligent security claim is established against a well-insured commercial property owner, the aggregate across all victims could reach $75 million or more. The spread is enormous because the case is binary: without foreseeability and a collectible defendant, the case is nearly worthless; with both, it is among the highest-value plaintiff matter types in the legal market.
Do I have to wait for the criminal investigation to finish?
No. The civil case is a separate proceeding that does not depend on the criminal investigation. In fact, the civil case often needs to move faster than the criminal investigation — because the evidence the civil case depends on is disappearing on a much shorter timeline than the criminal investigation takes to complete. The DPS investigation may take months. The surveillance footage may be gone in weeks. The civil preservation letter and records requests proceed independently and immediately.
What if I was not physically shot but was present during the shooting?
You may still have a claim. Psychological injury — PTSD — is a real, diagnosable, compensable injury. The clinical criteria are specific and the diagnosis requires meeting every one of them, but mass shooting exposure is among the events most likely to produce lasting PTSD. If you were present during the shooting and are experiencing symptoms — nightmares, avoidance, hypervigilance, sleep disturbance, concentration problems lasting more than a month — you should be evaluated by a mental health professional, and those records become evidence.
Will the insurance company try to settle quickly?
Yes — and a quick settlement is almost always designed to close the case before its full value is known. A check that arrives in the first weeks, with a release attached, is the insurance company’s most effective tool. It is designed to close every claim forever before the injuries have fully declared themselves, before the premises defendant has been identified, and before the evidence has been preserved. Never sign a release without an attorney reviewing it. The injuries from gunshot wounds — infections, nerve damage, PTSD, revision surgeries — develop over months, not days.
What should I do right now?
Get medical treatment for every injury, physical and psychological. Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance adjuster. Do not sign anything. Do not post about the shooting on social media. Photograph your injuries. Write down everything you remember. Keep every medical bill, discharge instruction, and prescription receipt. And call a lawyer — because the preservation letter that freezes the evidence before it disappears goes out the day you call, not the day you file a lawsuit.
Can multiple victims work together in one case?
Coordinated multiclient representation is common in mass casualty cases. Multiple victims sharing a common defendant can work together to share evidence, experts, and discovery costs while maintaining individual damages presentations tailored to each victim’s specific injuries and prognosis. The coordination must be structured to avoid conflicts — each victim’s case is individual — but the leverage of multiple claims against a common defendant can be powerful. Each family should have independent counsel evaluating their individual claim’s value.
Does it cost anything to talk to a lawyer?
No. The consultation is free. We work on contingency — 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. You can call 1-888-ATTY-911 at any hour, and a live person — not an answering service — will answer. Hablamos Español.
If You Are Reading This Page
If you are the family of the person who was killed, or if you are one of the ten who was shot and survived, or if you are the parent or spouse or child of someone who was in that place on that Friday morning — the most important thing on this page is not the law. It is the clock. The evidence that decides whether anyone beyond the shooter can be held accountable for what happened to your family is disappearing right now. The cameras. The logs. The witness memories. The security records. The police call history. Every one of those has a shelf life, and the shelf life started the moment the shooting stopped.
We cannot undo what happened. We cannot bring back the person who was taken. What we can do is make sure that every person and entity whose choices contributed to this tragedy is held accountable to the full extent the law allows — and that your family has the resources to face the future that was forced on you.
The call is free. The consultation is confidential. And the preservation letter — the one that freezes the evidence before it disappears — goes out the day you call.
1-888-ATTY-911. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. A live person answers.
We are Attorney911, The Manginello Law Firm. Contact us. Free consultation. No fee unless we win your case. Hablamos Español.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Every case is different. The information on this page applies to Texas law and is based on the facts reported in public accounts of the Midland shooting as of the date of publication. The civil investigation is independent of the criminal investigation being conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety.