What Happened at East 28th and Madison — and Why This Is a Negligent Security Lawsuit, Not Just a Crime Story
The phone call we get is almost always the same.
A family member calls from the hospital. Their husband, their father — a 49-year-old man who did the kind of job New Yorkers don’t think about until something goes wrong — was shot in the abdomen multiple times on a Midtown Manhattan street. One bullet went through his spine. He is in stable condition at the moment, but “stable” in a trauma bay is not the same as “stable” in a life. The police say the man who did it had been banned from the building where he worked. The shooter walked up, said a few words, drew a gun, and fired. Then he ran.
That is the moment this page is written for.
You are not reading this to learn about New York gun law. You are not reading this to follow a press conference. You are reading this because someone you love does the kind of job — security, front-desk, porter, maintenance — where the building knows him by his first name and the neighborhood barely knows he exists. And because the very organization that employed him, the one that told him to do his job in the first place, may have known that a specific person had been banned from the property specifically because he was dangerous — and may have failed to keep that person away from him in any meaningful way.
That is the heart of a New York negligent security case. The criminal case against the shooter is the Manhattan District Attorney’s responsibility. The civil case against the building — the management company that decided what security meant, the property owner that owned the asset, and the security contractor that placed your family member at that door — is yours. We have built our practice around exactly this fight.
The shooting happened in NoMad, on the sidewalk at the intersection of East 28th Street and Madison Avenue, in front of a film crew that had been breaking for lunch. The shooter was identified by NYPD as 31-year-old Shaqueal Parker. The victim was a security guard at The Prince George, the historic former single-room-occupancy hotel at 14 East 28th Street that has been converted into one of the largest supportive housing developments in New York City. The Prince George sits two doors down from the corner where the shots were fired. The shooting, in other words, happened in the immediate orbit of the building where the guard worked, and it happened because of a dispute tied to that building.
The shooter had been restricted from returning to The Prince George since the prior June. He was no longer permitted as a guest for breaking the rules of the residence. The shooting grew out of an ongoing dispute between Parker and the guard — a dispute the building itself knew about, because the building was the one that banned him. The bullet that pierced the victim’s spine is not just a medical fact. It is the single fact that defines the value of this case and the seriousness of what the building’s lawyers are about to face.
This page is the full walk-through of what happens next — the law, the evidence, the money, the defense playbook, and exactly what our firm does about it.
The Man Who Was Shot: Why This Is a Catastrophic Case, Not a “Slip and Fall” Case
Before we get to the law, we have to be honest about what a bullet through the spine means. We have handled enough spinal cord injury cases to know that the medical arc of the next twelve months — and the rest of his life — will define both the human cost of this shooting and the financial cost of getting this case right.
A gunshot wound that pierces the spine is the textbook mechanism for an incomplete or complete spinal cord injury. The bullet does not have to sever the cord to destroy it. Bone fragments, the shock wave through the spinal canal, and the secondary damage that continues for hours and days after the initial trauma all add to the picture. The day of the shooting, the medical team is focused on saving his life and controlling bleeding. The week after, the focus shifts to whether the injury is complete (no motor or sensory function below the level) or incomplete (some preserved function, with a different and still-devastating prognosis). The month after, the focus shifts to whether he can move at all, whether he can breathe without help, whether he can control his bladder or his bowels, and whether his blood pressure stays stable when he sits up — autonomic dysreflexia, the silent killer that stalks incomplete spinal cord injuries for the rest of a patient’s life.
The federal injury registry that tracks every spinal cord injury in the country — the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center at UAB — puts the lifetime cost of care for a high-level injury at well over six million dollars for a young adult, and the lifetime cost for even an incomplete injury runs into the multi-millions. Those figures are only the medical and living-expense line. They deliberately leave out the wages he will never earn, the household services his family will never get from him again, and the pain and loss no spreadsheet can capture. Those numbers are not what the case settles for. They are the floor under which no responsible settlement should land.
You do not need to be a neurologist to understand what this means for the family. You need to understand that the next year of his life is going to be spent in and out of hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, that his home will need to be modified or replaced, that he will need equipment that wears out and has to be replaced again, and that the people who love him will spend the rest of their lives helping him in ways no healthy 49-year-old ever imagines needing help. The building’s lawyers will not talk to you about that. We will.
The Prince George and Breaking Ground: Who You Are Actually Suing
This case is going to be filed against at least three separate entities, and if we get the entity structure wrong the case collapses. The architecture of the building’s ownership is the entire reason the case exists.
The Prince George is operated as supportive housing for people transitioning out of homeless shelters and the streets. The non-profit that manages the property is Breaking Ground (formerly Common Ground), one of the largest supportive housing operators in New York City. Breaking Ground issued a public statement through its public-facing news coverage that it is “cooperating with the NYPD’s investigation,” which is the polite institutional phrasing for “we know there is going to be a lawsuit and we are already preparing for it.”
The defendants in this case are not just Breaking Ground. The Prince George is owned by a separate property entity — the building sits in a landmarked historic structure, and the real estate ownership and the operating management are almost always two different entities. The property owner is the one with the building’s value on its balance sheet. Breaking Ground is the one with the operational responsibility. The security guard — if he was not a direct Breaking Ground employee — was placed at the building by a security contractor, and that contractor is a third defendant with its own insurance tower. The four-way stack is the architecture of almost every negligent security case in New York City, and we build every one of these cases with that structure in mind.
“A landlord has a duty to take minimal precautions to protect tenants from foreseeable harm, including foreseeable criminal conduct by a third party.” — Nallan v. Helmsley-Spear, Inc., 50 N.Y.2d 507, 511 (1980) (New York Court of Appeals).
That is the rule the courts in this state have been applying for forty-five years. It is the spine of this case. New York landlords — and that includes supportive housing operators, who owe the same duty of reasonable care to the people on their property — are required to take reasonable steps to protect the people on their premises from foreseeable criminal harm. The case is going to turn on what “foreseeable” means here, and what reasonable steps the operator took once it knew what was coming.
The Foreseeability Problem: Why This Case Is About What the Building Knew Before the Shooting
Every negligent security case in New York turns on the same two questions. First, was the harm foreseeable? Second, did the defendant take reasonable steps to address the foreseeable risk?
In this case, the answer to the first question has been written down for the building in advance. The Prince George banned Shaqueal Parker from the property. He was not banned for being awkward or unpopular. He was banned for breaking the rules — and the rules in a supportive housing residence are not aesthetic. They exist to keep the residents and the staff safe. The building’s own act of banning Parker is the building’s own admission that Parker was a problem that needed to be controlled.
The shooting grew out of an “ongoing dispute” between Parker and the guard. The building knew about that dispute, because the dispute was the reason the building banned Parker in the first place. The building knew Parker was dangerous enough to keep out. The building knew the guard was the person on the other side of the dispute. The building did not — based on everything that is publicly known — keep Parker away from the guard.
That is the case. The four steps that would have prevented this shooting are not complicated. They are the same four steps a New York jury will be told any reasonable operator should have taken:
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Tell the NYPD that Parker was banned. New York City police maintain a trespass affidavit program. A property owner can sign a trespass affidavit that authorizes arrest for any return to the property. That affidavit, if signed and on file with the local precinct, would have given an officer the authority to arrest Parker the moment he came back. The shooting happened on a Manhattan sidewalk two doors from the building — Parker was clearly in the area. He was not arrested. The question of whether Breaking Ground filed a trespass affidavit will be in the discovery.
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Tell the guard. A building that bans a specific individual because of an ongoing dispute with one of its own security guards is required to make sure the guard knows that the banned individual is banned. If the guard was told “Parker is not allowed here, and if you see him call the police immediately,” the guard’s situational awareness is different. If the guard was not told, the building made the choice to keep its own employee uninformed about the threat to him.
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Enforce the ban. A ban that is not enforced is not a ban. Every time Parker walked back onto the property or stood on the sidewalk outside the building without being stopped, the building told him — and the guard — that the ban was a piece of paper, not a security policy. Discovery will pull the door-access logs, the key-card swipes (if the building uses them), the visitor logs, and the building’s own security incident reports from the months between the June ban and the shooting.
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Staff the building to protect against a banned-but-returning individual. The guard was 49 years old. He was alone on a public sidewalk. A reasonable building that knows a specific dangerous person has been banned will not leave a single guard to handle the situation if that person returns — it will have backup, it will have a protocol, and it will have a relationship with the local precinct so the response time is measured in minutes, not in the forty-five to sixty minutes an NYPD response to a 911 call in Midtown typically takes.
The standard we are going to hold Breaking Ground and the property owner to is the standard a reasonable supportive housing operator in Midtown Manhattan owes to its own security staff when it knows one specific individual has been banned because of an ongoing dispute with that guard. That standard was not met. A 49-year-old man is in a hospital bed with a bullet in his spine to prove it.
New York Negligent Security Law: The Full Arsenal We Are Loading
The page above already quoted Nallan v. Helmsley-Spear, Inc., the 1980 New York Court of Appeals decision that is still the foundation of negligent security law in this state. Nallan held that a landlord has a duty to take “minimal precautions” against foreseeable criminal harm, and that the question of foreseeability is almost always a jury question rather than something a court will resolve as a matter of law.
The cases that have built on Nallan over the last four decades are the cases we will deploy at trial:
- The duty runs not just to tenants but to invitees and, in the right circumstances, to employees of contractors who are working on the property — the security guard falls squarely in that category as the person the building hired (directly or through a contractor) to be its protective presence.
- The foreseeability standard is satisfied by prior similar incidents on or near the property, prior police calls, prior warnings, prior threats, prior banning orders, prior restraining orders, prior no-trespass affidavits, and prior complaints — and by the building’s own knowledge that the shooter was the kind of person who had to be kept out.
- The breach element is satisfied when the building’s security measures were inadequate for the known risk — when there were too few guards, no functioning surveillance, no working access control, no protocol for banned individuals, no communication with staff about the threat, and no coordination with the NYPD.
- Causation in New York is a comparative-fault question under CPLR Article 14-A. New York is a pure comparative-fault jurisdiction, meaning that even if the jury assigns some share of fault to the shooter — and the jury will assign the shooter the lion’s share — the building’s share still supports a full recovery against the building for that share.
The damages we will pursue, on top of every medical and future-care dollar the spinal cord injury requires, include the past and future pain and suffering this man will endure for the rest of his life, the loss of the enjoyment of his life as it was before the shooting, the loss of his earning capacity, the loss of his household services to his family, and — if the shooting killed him, or kills him in the days and weeks ahead — a wrongful death action under EPTL § 5-4.1 pursued by his personal representative for the benefit of his spouse, children, and parents.
“An action to recover damages for a personal injury, except as provided in sections 214-b, 214-c, 214-d, 214-e, 214-f, 214-g and 214-h, must be commenced within three years.” — CPLR § 214(5) (New York Civil Practice Law and Rules).
That is the clock. Three years from the date of the shooting. We will file well before that, because the evidence preservation work and the spoliation arguments we need to win this case do not wait for the statute of limitations.
The Evidence That Decides This Case, and How Fast It Is Disappearing Right Now
The single most important thing we do in the first week of any negligent security case has nothing to do with filing a lawsuit. It has everything to do with sending letters to the building, the management company, the security contractor, and the NYPD that order them to preserve every piece of evidence that exists, because the building and its contractors are under no obligation to keep most of it.
The records this case turns on, and how fast each one dies:
Surveillance video from The Prince George and from the surrounding buildings. The Prince George is a landmarked historic structure that has been converted into supportive housing, and the building’s common areas — lobby, entrances, hallway leading to the sidewalk where the guard worked — almost certainly had cameras. Hotel and residential surveillance footage in New York City is almost always kept on a rolling overwrite, with new footage overwriting old footage on a cycle of days to weeks. Some properties archive footage triggered by a known incident, and some do not. The NYPD may also have city cameras or private-camera footage from neighboring buildings in the immediate area. This evidence will not exist in 30 days unless someone demands it be preserved today.
Door access logs and key-card records. The Prince George is an SRO-style property with controlled-access elements. The entry logs — even paper sign-in books — are the record that proves whether Parker was on the property in the days and weeks before the shooting. Electronic access logs are typically retained on a vendor-controlled server for a finite window. Paper logs disappear when the building decides to throw them out. Electronic logs disappear when the vendor’s retention window closes.
Trespass affidavits and police coordination records. If Breaking Ground signed a trespass affidavit with the 13th Precinct (which covers NoMad), that affidavit is in NYPD files. If they did not sign one, the absence of that affidavit is itself evidence. The local precinct’s records on prior calls for service at 14 East 28th Street are pulled through a FOIL request or a criminal-case subpoena.
Banning records and the dispute file. The building banned Parker in June for breaking the rules. The internal record of that ban — the incident reports, the warnings given, the documentation of the dispute with the guard, the rationale for the ban — is the single most damaging document in the case. Those records are under no obligation to exist after a finite retention period. We send a preservation letter within the first week.
The guard’s personnel and assignment file. Whether the guard was a direct Breaking Ground employee or placed by a contractor, his personnel file contains his training records, his assignment schedule, his supervisor’s notes, and the documentation of what he was told about Parker and any other banned individual. That file is in the building’s control and is the building’s first target for a routine purge.
The shooter’s record. Parker was 31. If he had a prior criminal history, the building’s ban in June was either made or broken by whether the building actually checked. New York has no general-duty background-check requirement on a private residential operator, but a building that bans someone specifically because of an “ongoing dispute” with a guard and then does nothing to find out whether that person is dangerous beyond what the building itself already knew is exactly the kind of conduct a jury punishes.
Cell-site location data and social media. Parker’s phone records and his social media history in the days before the shooting will likely show him in the area, possibly looking at the building, possibly making threats about the guard. Subpoenaed through the criminal case file or through a civil subpoena once the criminal case is in active discovery.
The preservation letter we send the day our client signs a retainer is the single most valuable hour of legal work in any negligent security case. We name every category of evidence above, demand it be preserved, cite the spoliation rule, and put every defendant and every vendor on written notice that they will be sued if they destroy what the case needs.
Workers’ Compensation: The Bar You Need to Know About Before You Talk to Anyone
We have to address this directly, because the family will hear about it within days. If the guard was a direct employee of Breaking Ground, New York Workers’ Compensation Law § 11 generally bars him from suing Breaking Ground in tort and channels his recovery into the workers’ compensation system, which pays a capped schedule of benefits without regard to fault. That is the bar that protects the direct employer from a tort suit.
That bar does not protect the property owner if it is a separate entity from the employer. It does not protect the security contractor that may have placed the guard at the building. It does not protect a third-party management company that made the security decisions but did not directly employ the guard. The civil case we file will name every entity in the ownership and operations stack that is not the direct employer, and it will name them for the negligent security decisions they made — the decision to ban Parker without enforcing the ban, the decision not to coordinate with the NYPD, the decision not to tell the guard, the decision to leave him alone on the sidewalk two doors down from a building that knew the shooter was targeting him.
We will also, in the right case, look at whether the workers’ compensation carrier has a lien against any third-party recovery and how to structure the settlement so the family comes out whole. We have handled enough of these cases to know that the workers’ compensation fork is not a dead end — it is a lane to manage. Do not let a workers’ compensation adjuster convince the family that there is no other path. There is.
The Insurance Adjuster Playbook: The Three Plays They Will Run, and the Counter to Each
Within seventy-two hours of a shooting like this, the building’s insurance carrier will assign a claim handler. The claim handler’s job is to settle the case for as little as possible, as fast as possible, before the family understands what the case is worth. The plays are predictable. We name them so the family knows what is coming.
Play One: The Sympathy Call. The adjuster calls within the first week. The call is warm, gentle, and sympathetic. The adjuster expresses horror at what happened. The adjuster asks how the family is doing. The adjuster asks whether the family needs anything. The adjuster asks, just to make sure the records are accurate, what happened. That call is a recorded statement in waiting. The adjuster is not asking questions out of concern. The adjuster is building a record to pin fault on the shooter, pin a percentage on the guard for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and pin the family into a version of events that minimizes the building’s role. The counter is simple. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not answer questions about the facts. Refer the adjuster to us. We will handle every conversation with the carrier from the moment we are retained.
Play Two: The Quick Check. Within thirty days, the carrier offers a small amount of money — a fraction of what the case is worth — and offers it with a release attached. The release is broad. It waives every claim the family has against every entity in the ownership and operations stack, not just the named defendant. The release is presented as the kind thing to do, as the way to take care of medical bills, as a way to avoid a long lawsuit. The counter is that a release signed before the family understands the value of the case and the scope of the defendants is a release signed under economic duress. The case value range for a shooting that pierces a 49-year-old’s spine at a building that knew the shooter was dangerous is between $2.5 million and $12 million before considering punitive damages and the liability of every separate entity. A small check for immediate bills is the wrong trade. We will not let the family sign anything before the medical picture stabilizes and the discovery is complete.
Play Three: The Comparative Fault Story. The carrier will tell the family, sometimes through its own lawyers, sometimes through the building’s lawyers, that the shooter is the only person responsible, that the building had no duty, and that even if it did, the building could not have prevented this. The counter is the building’s own document. The building banned Parker in June. The building knew about the dispute. The building did not file a trespass affidavit. The building did not tell the guard. The building left the guard alone on a public sidewalk two doors from the property. The comparative fault story collapses when the building’s own file is produced in discovery.
The playbook is the same in every case. The counter is the same in every case. Knowing the playbook in advance is half the fight.
What the Case Is Worth: An Honest Range, Not a Promise
We will not quote a number as a guarantee. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we can do is give the family the honest range that the facts and the law support, so the family can resist the quick check and the small settlement.
The case value is driven by three factors. First, the catastrophic spinal cord injury. The medical and life-care costs alone — the hospital bills, the surgeries, the inpatient rehabilitation, the wheelchair, the home modifications, the round-the-clock care for the rest of his life — are in the multi-millions. The federal injury registry puts lifetime care for a severe spinal cord injury at well over $6 million for a young adult. Second, the venue. Manhattan juries in New York County have a long track record of returning substantial verdicts in negligent security cases where the facts support them, and the Manhattan courthouse is a venue we know well. Third, the conduct. A building that banned the shooter, knew about the dispute, and did not protect its own guard is the kind of conduct that supports not just compensatory damages but punitive damages against the entities that made the security decisions.
The range this case fits into is $2.5 million to $12 million, with the high end driven by the spinal injury and the venue. Punitive damages are a separate question that turns on the discovery. If the discovery shows that the building knew the shooter was a threat and made a conscious decision not to protect the guard — the absence of a trespass affidavit, the failure to warn the guard, the decision to leave him alone on the sidewalk — punitive damages are on the table. We will not promise them, and we will not concede them. We will earn them with the discovery.
The defense will try to argue that the shooter is judgment-proof and the case is worth nothing. The shooter is irrelevant to the value of this case. The case is against the building, the management company, the property owner, and the security contractor. Their insurance towers and their balance sheets are what the case is paid from, and the towers on a Midtown Manhattan property of this scale are substantial.
Why the Firm, Why Us, Why Now
The two people who will run this case are Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña.
Ralph Manginello has been a Texas trial lawyer for more than 27 years. He has tried cases in federal court, in Texas state courts, and in the courts of multiple states. He was a journalist before he became a lawyer, and that history shapes how he builds cases — he treats every case as the story it actually is, not the story the defendant’s lawyers want it to be. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and he takes cases in New York working with local counsel where required. He founded this firm on a single idea: that people in crisis deserve the same preparation and the same fire that the insurance companies’ lawyers bring to every case, and they deserve a lawyer who treats their case as the only case.
Lupe Peña spent years on the other side of this fight. Before he joined this firm, Lupe was an insurance defense attorney at a national defense firm — the firm the carrier’s lawyers work for now, the firm that runs the playbook described above. He knows how the reserve is set in the first 48 hours before the medical picture is clear. He knows how the recorded statement is engineered to lock in a version of the facts that helps the carrier. He knows how the claim is fed into the valuation software that lowballs pain and suffering. He knows how the independent medical exam is scheduled with a doctor the carrier picks. He knows the surveillance that starts the day after the incident. He knows the delays, the policy-limits shell game, and the empty-chair comparative-fault argument that points at the shooter and leaves the building out of the conversation. He now uses that knowledge on the other side. He conducts full client consultations in Spanish, without an interpreter, because the firm was built to serve the families who call us in their own language.
The combination is the point. Ralph brings the trial experience and the strategic eye. Lupe brings the inside knowledge of how the carrier’s playbook works. Together, they build a case that the carrier’s lawyers cannot ignore and cannot settle cheaply. You can read more about Ralph at our attorney profile page and about Lupe at his attorney profile page. If you want to understand the full scope of what our firm does, start with our law practice areas page.
What We Do in the First Seventy-Two Hours
We move fast. We move before the insurance carrier has finished setting its reserve and before the building’s lawyers have decided which version of events to commit to. The first seventy-two hours of a negligent security case are the most valuable hours in the entire case, and we use them.
Hour one through hour four. We meet with the family. We learn what we can about the guard, his work, his family, his medical picture, and what he remembers. We identify every entity in the ownership and operations stack — Breaking Ground, the property owner, the security contractor — and we confirm the entity names for the lawsuit.
Hour four through hour twenty-four. We send the preservation letters. Every entity named above gets a written demand to preserve surveillance video, key-card and access logs, the incident reports on the Parker ban, the guard’s personnel file, and the building’s internal communications about Parker and the guard. We copy the NYPD on the letter so the precinct knows there is a civil case coming.
Hour twenty-four through hour seventy-two. We open the FOIL and public-records requests. We pull the NYPD records on prior calls for service at 14 East 28th Street, the trespass-affidavit file at the 13th Precinct, and any prior incident history on Parker that the public record will give us. We begin the medical-records collection so the life-care planner can start building the lifetime cost projection that anchors the damages demand.
Day three through day thirty. We file the lawsuit. We name every defendant the case supports. We plead the negligent security, the negligent hiring, the negligent retention, the negligent supervision, and the negligent inflictiation of emotional distress counts the facts support. We file the spoliation motion if any defendant has not confirmed preservation in writing. We set the case on a discovery track that forces the building to produce the documents that are the heart of the case — the ban file, the dispute file, the security staffing schedule, the guard’s training records, and the building’s relationship with the 13th Precinct.
The work we do in that first seventy-two hours is the work that determines whether the case settles for the right number or gets discounted. The insurance carrier’s playbook is built around speed — get the family to take the small check before they understand the value of the case. Our playbook is built around the same speed, in the opposite direction. We move faster than the carrier. We get the preservation letters out before the carrier has set its reserve. We get the lawsuit filed before the carrier has decided which entity it wants to sacrifice. We get the discovery rolling before the carrier has decided which version of events it wants to commit to. That is how you win these cases.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can be sued when a security guard is shot by someone who was banned from the building?
The civil case names every entity in the ownership and operations stack that made the security decisions and that is not the guard’s direct employer. In this case that means the management non-profit (Breaking Ground), the property owner of The Prince George (the entity that holds the building’s value on its balance sheet, almost always a separate entity from the operator), and the security contractor that placed the guard at the property if he was placed by a third party. The shooter himself is also a defendant for the intentional tort, but the recovery is against the building and its insurance carriers because the shooter is almost always judgment-proof. The workers’ compensation bar generally blocks a direct suit against the guard’s direct employer, but it does not protect the other entities in the stack.
What is the statute of limitations on a negligent security case in New York?
The statute of limitations for a personal injury case in New York is three years from the date of the injury under CPLR § 214(5). For a wrongful death case arising from the same shooting — if the guard dies — the statute of limitations is two years from the date of death under EPTL § 5-4.1. We file well in advance of either deadline. The more important clock in this case is the evidence clock — the surveillance video, the key-card logs, the incident reports — which we begin preserving within the first week.
What evidence disappears the fastest in this case?
The surveillance video from The Prince George and the surrounding buildings disappears fastest. Hotel and residential surveillance in New York City is routinely overwritten on a rolling cycle of days to weeks. The key-card and access logs disappear next, on a vendor-controlled cycle. The banning file and the personnel records are under no retention obligation and disappear whenever the building decides to throw them out. The preservation letter we send in the first week is the single most valuable hour of legal work in the case, because it freezes all of it.
Can the family sue the shooter too?
Yes. The shooter (Shaqueal Parker) is a defendant for the intentional tort — the assault and battery. New York recognizes a private right of action for assault and battery, and the conviction on the attempted murder and assault charges will support a civil judgment. The practical reality is that the shooter is almost always judgment-proof, and the meaningful recovery comes from the building’s insurance and the operators’ balance sheets. We name the shooter anyway, because the judgment against him drives the building’s insurance carrier to settle.
What is the case worth?
The honest range for this case is $2.5 million to $12 million before considering punitive damages, driven by the catastrophic spinal cord injury and the Manhattan venue. The medical and life-care costs alone are in the multi-millions. The pain and suffering for a 49-year-old man whose life has been permanently altered by a bullet is significant. The punitive damages are a separate question that turns on the discovery — if the building’s own file shows that it banned the shooter, knew about the dispute, and did not protect the guard, the punitive damages are on the table. We will not promise a number. We will earn the right number with the discovery. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Does workers’ compensation block the case against the building?
New York Workers’ Compensation Law § 11 generally bars a direct suit by an employee against his direct employer. The bar does not protect the property owner, the management company, or the security contractor that placed the guard at the building. We sue every entity in the stack that is not the direct employer. We also manage the workers’ compensation lien so the family comes out whole.
Why was the guard shot two doors from the building?
The shooting grew out of an ongoing dispute between the guard and a person who had been banned from the building. The shooter approached him on the sidewalk, spoke briefly, and fired. The fact that the shooting happened two doors from the building is part of the case — it shows the shooter was in the immediate orbit of the building, it shows the building’s ban was not enforced, and it shows the guard was targeted because of his role at the building. The venue of the shooting is part of the building’s responsibility, not a reason the building is off the hook.
How long does a negligent security case take to resolve?
The honest range is twelve months to three years, depending on how the defense fights discovery, whether the defendants file motions to dismiss that have to be litigated, and whether the case settles or goes through a trial. Cases that settle fairly resolve in twelve to eighteen months. Cases that have to be tried take longer. We do not let the defense use delay as a pressure tactic. We set the pace.
What if the guard dies from the spinal cord injury?
The case converts into a wrongful death action under EPTL § 5-4.1, pursued by the personal representative of his estate for the benefit of his spouse, children, and parents. The damages shift to the conscious pain and suffering he endured between the shooting and his death, the funeral and burial expenses, the loss of financial support his family would have received, the loss of his services, and the loss of his parental guidance and consortium. The statute of limitations becomes two years from the date of death. We are ready to convert the case the moment the medical picture turns, and we do not lose a single day of preparation in doing so.
Can the family talk to the press?
The family can talk to the press if they choose to, and we are not the family lawyer for that question. What we will say is that anything the family says to the press can be used against the family in the civil case, that the recorded-statement and document-production process will eventually reach anything that was said publicly, and that the safest path is to refer all press inquiries to us. The defense’s lawyers will be reading the coverage just as carefully as the family will be.
What if the shooter is convicted? Does that help the civil case?
Yes, significantly. A conviction on the attempted murder and assault charges is conclusive proof in the civil case that the shooter committed the intentional tort — New York’s collateral estoppel rule means a criminal conviction is binding in the subsequent civil case on the issue of the shooter’s conduct. The conviction also helps the negligent security case against the building, because the more clearly the shooter is the sole intentional wrongdoer, the more clearly the building’s failure to protect the guard is the proximate cause of the family’s harm.
What about a wrongful death case if he dies in the weeks ahead?
If the guard dies, the personal representative of his estate files the wrongful death claim under EPTL § 5-4.1 within two years of death. We will have already converted the personal injury case into a wrongful death case before the statute is even a question. The medical records from the hospital stay between the shooting and death are the proof of conscious pain and suffering, and they are the records we begin collecting from day one. Read more about wrongful death claims on our practice areas page.
What about the spinal cord injury itself — what is the lifetime cost?
The federal injury registry (the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center at UAB) tracks every spinal cord injury in the country and publishes lifetime cost projections by injury level and age. For a high cervical injury in a young adult, the lifetime cost of care runs well over $6 million. For an incomplete injury, the cost is lower but still in the multi-millions, and the cost of equipment replacement, home modification, and round-the-clock care extends across the rest of his life. Read more about brain and spinal injury cases on our practice areas page.
What if the family cannot afford a lawyer?
You cannot afford not to have one. We work on contingency. There is no fee unless we win. The free consultation is the first conversation. We do not send a bill. We do not require payment up front. We advance the costs of the case — the filing fees, the deposition costs, the expert fees — and we recover those costs out of the recovery at the end. The family pays nothing out of pocket to bring this case. No fee unless we win.
How do I get in touch with the firm right now?
The fastest way is to call our 24-hour line at 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). The call is free, the consultation is free, and you will speak with a real person who can start the case the same day. You can also reach us through our contact page. We move on these cases in the first seventy-two hours, and that starts with the first phone call. Hablamos Español. If you would prefer to conduct the consultation in Spanish, Lupe Peña conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. The firm was built to serve the families who call us in their own language. The consultation is free. The contingency is straightforward. There is no fee unless we win. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 now.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.