A Motel Wall Should Not Be a Killing Floor
Your seventeen-year-old son was playing video games. The room next door was occupied by a man who told detectives he had just come back from a gun range and was cleaning his firearm. One bullet punched through the partition wall and into the body of a boy who had just been talking to his family. You were there. You saw the wall pulse. You heard a sound no family should ever hear, and you ran to his doorway. He was already gone.
That wall should have held. The motel that rented both rooms should have known that a man next door was handling a gun, should have built the partition to a standard that stops a bullet, and should have screened and supervised its guests in a way that makes a stray-bullet death through drywall essentially impossible. Georgia law is built to ask exactly that question. We are built to answer it. If you have lost a child in this way, we want to sit at your kitchen table and walk you through what the law owes you, and we want to start work before the evidence goes cold. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 for a free, confidential consultation. We work on contingency — no fee unless we win.
This is the page for any Georgia family that has lost a loved one to a stray bullet, a negligent motel, or the kind of gun-handling that destroys lives because someone decided a wall was good enough and a guest was nobody’s business. It is also the page for families who watched it happen and were told, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that there is nothing they can do. There is something you can do. Read on.
What Happened at the Live In Lodge Extended Stay
On the night of February 5, 2026, in a unit of the Live In Lodge Extended Stay on Stone Mountain Highway (US-78) in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a 17-year-old high school junior from Parkview High School was playing video games in the room he and his family had been living in. The motel had become their home because of hard circumstances — financial hardship and a mother’s cancer diagnosis. Across the wall, in the next unit, 31-year-old Shemarcus Cockran was handling a firearm. He told Gwinnett County Police detectives that he had recently returned from a gun range and was cleaning the weapon when it discharged. The bullet went through the partition wall. It struck the teenager. The family, in the next room, witnessed the final moments. The boy died at the scene. Cockran has been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct under Georgia law.
“We were all there to witness it which makes it more traumatic than it seems. Like a phone call would’ve been easier to process, but actually witnessing it and him taking his last breaths was hard to see.”
— Tomyia Lewis, the teen’s sister, in a public statement reported by the Gwinnett County Police Department and covered in local press.
The family did not choose to be there. They were there because they needed a place to live, and the motel that took their rent took their son’s life.
The Three Defendants We Hold Accountable
When a stray bullet punches through a motel wall and kills a child, the shooter is not the only person with a duty. The wall, the room assignment, the screening, the supervision, and the gun policy all sit on someone else’s shoulders. In a case like this we name three distinct categories of defendant, because each carries a different insurance tower and a different theory of liability:
1. The shooter, Shemarcus Cockran — direct liability for the negligent handling and discharge of a firearm, with negligence per se available because his alleged conduct violated Georgia’s criminal statutes on reckless conduct and involuntary manslaughter under Title 16 of the Georgia Code. He is the person who handled the gun, the person who owed the standard “cardinal rules” of firearm safety, and the person whose conduct the State has already charged criminally. The criminal case and the civil case move on parallel tracks; the criminal conviction, if it comes, can later be used as evidence in the civil case.
2. Live In Lodge Extended Stay (the owner/operator of the property) — premises liability for failure to maintain a safe environment, failure to enforce a sensible firearm policy in an extended-stay setting where families with children live next to strangers, failure to construct or maintain partition walls to a building-code standard that would have stopped an ordinary bullet, and potential negligence in guest screening and supervision. A motel is not a hotel. It is the home of its occupants for the duration of the stay, and the duty owed to a family living there for weeks or months is the duty owed to an invitee, not the duty owed to a walk-in.
3. The property management company — vicarious liability for the operational failures of the staff it trained, the policies it set, and the inspections it did or did not perform. Often the property management company is the entity that holds the real money, even when the on-property sign reads a different name. We sue up the corporate stack so the recovery lands on the deepest pocket, not the thinnest.
We do not file one complaint. We file one complaint that names every layer and we let the discovery do the work of showing which layer actually controlled the risk that killed your child. For more on how we identify the right defendants in a wrongful death case, that practice-area page walks through the same playbook.
The Georgia Law We Fight Under
Georgia wrongful-death law is, in many ways, the strongest in the country for a family like yours. We work under O.C.G.A. § 51-4-2, the Georgia Wrongful Death Act, which allows a full civil recovery when a death is caused by a negligent or wrongful act. Georgia measures damages by the “full value of the life” of the person who died. That phrase is not a euphemism. It is a deliberate legal standard.
The “Full Value of Life” Standard
Under Georgia’s “full value of the life” rule, a jury is asked to value what the decedent lost — not what the survivors lost, not what the paycheck would have been, not the funeral bill. The standard is subjective and measured from the perspective of the person who died. A seventeen-year-old with a future as a chef, a future of friendships, a future of choices, and a future of relationships has a measurable, compensable, full-value-of-life claim. The law understands that the boy’s life had value to him, separate and apart from the wages he would have earned, and the jury is permitted to compensate that loss in full. The defense will try to reduce this to an economic spreadsheet. We push back, because Georgia law does not let them.
Modified Comparative Negligence
Georgia follows a modified comparative fault rule. Your son bears zero fault in this case. He was playing video games in his own room. There is no comparative fault argument available to the defense, and we will move to strike any attempt to suggest otherwise. Even if a jury did find some comparative fault on his part — which we will not concede — the rule in Georgia allows recovery reduced by his percentage of fault, not barred by it, until his share reaches the bar. The defense is not going to win on comparative fault here.
The “Impact Rule” for Emotional Distress
Georgia has historically applied an “impact rule” to negligent-infliction-of-emotional-distress claims: the plaintiff generally must show a physical impact or a pecuniary loss to recover. But you and your family are inside the zone of danger in a way that satisfies even a strict reading of the rule. More importantly, the wrongful-death claim under O.C.G.A. § 51-4-2 is a separate cause of action that does not depend on the impact rule at all. And the bystander-recovery cases in Georgia, while narrower than in some other states, still protect family members who witnessed the death of a close relative in their immediate presence. You did not hear about this over the phone. You were in the next room. You ran to him. You watched him take his last breaths. That is a compensable harm under the wrongful-death statute.
Punitive Damages
Where the defendant’s conduct shows “that entire want of care which would raise the presumption of conscious indifference to consequences” — Georgia’s standard for punitive damages, drawn from cases like Baker v. Howell and its progeny — punitive damages are available. Cleaning a firearm and negligently discharging it through a wall into a sleeping family’s unit is the kind of conduct that supports a conscious-indifference argument. We will plead and present punitives against both the shooter and the motel if the evidence supports it.
The Motel Owed a Real Duty
The Live In Lodge is an extended-stay property. That changes the duty analysis materially. Guests at an extended-stay motel are not transients. They live there. They cook there. Their children sleep there. The relationship between the motel and the family is far closer to landlord-tenant than to hotel-guest. Under Georgia premises-liability law, the duty owed to an invitee (and certainly to a long-term resident) is to exercise ordinary care to keep the premises safe. That duty includes:
- Foreseeable criminal activity by other guests. A motel that houses strangers next door to families with children has a foreseeable risk of gun violence, drug activity, domestic violence, and other conduct that puts those families in danger. The “red flag” doctrine in Georgia negligent-security cases asks what the property knew or should have known. A man handling a firearm in his room is a foreseeable hazard to the room next to his, and the property has a duty to detect and act on that hazard.
- The structural integrity of the building. Partition walls between guest rooms in a property that markets itself as family housing must be built to a standard that does not allow an ordinary bullet to pass through into an occupied room. Georgia building codes and common-law duties of care both support a finding that an interior partition that fails to contain a single round of small-arms fire is a structural defect, not a minor maintenance issue. We will retain a building-code expert to inspect the actual wall, photograph the bullet path, and testify to the deviation from standard construction.
- Screening and supervision of guests. Extended-stay properties in Georgia have a duty of reasonable care in guest screening, room assignment (not putting a family with children next to a single adult male of unknown background), and supervision (responding to noise, smell, and behavioral red flags). The discovery in this case will pursue the property’s policies, the staff’s training, the room assignment decisions, and the chain of warnings the property received or should have received.
- A firearms policy. A motel that knows guests bring firearms onto the property and does nothing to address it has chosen to leave the next-room family at risk. We will demand the property’s policies, its signage (or lack thereof), and its training on firearm-related red flags.
If the property was aware, or should have been aware, of firearm handling by the guest in the next room — through noise complaints, through the smell of gun cleaning solvent, through the guest’s own statements, through a prior incident — the failure to act is the proximate cause of your son’s death, alongside the shooter’s own negligence. Georgia law on joint and several liability among co-tortfeasors allows a plaintiff to recover the full judgment from any one defendant who is found liable, so we pursue both the shooter and the motel in the same case, and we let them fight over who pays what.
For the related, broader question of premises liability in cases like this, our work in personal injury and premises cases draws on many of the same discovery moves — and we apply them to the motel, the property manager, and the corporate parent without pause.
The Shooter’s Own Liability: Negligence Per Se
The shooter, Shemarcus Cockran, is charged under Georgia’s criminal statutes for reckless conduct and involuntary manslaughter — both Title 16 offenses. The doctrine of negligence per se in Georgia allows a civil plaintiff to use the violation of a criminal statute as automatic proof of negligence (and often of proximate cause) when (1) the plaintiff is in the protected class of the statute, (2) the harm is the type the statute was designed to prevent, and (3) the defendant violated the statute. A child killed by a bullet fired through a motel wall is squarely within the class the reckless-conduct statute was designed to protect. The harm is the type the statute was designed to prevent. And the alleged criminal violation is the conduct at the heart of the civil case.
What negligence per se gives us in the courtroom is the elimination of the defense’s “he was being careful” argument. The State of Georgia has already taken the position that the conduct rose to a reckless, criminal level. We use that in the civil case to argue that the conduct was, at a minimum, negligent as a matter of law.
What the Case Is Worth
The case-value range for a wrongful death in this fact pattern, given the strength of the venue, the quality of the evidence, and the alignment of Georgia’s damages law, runs from roughly $2,000,000 to over $10,000,000, with punitive damages potentially pushing the figure higher. The range comes from the real-world economics of these cases: a seventeen-year-old with a full life ahead of him, a jury in Gwinnett County that has repeatedly returned substantial verdicts in catastrophic cases, and a clear liability story that the defense will struggle to dilute.
What drives the number within that range:
- The “full value of life” component. A seventeen-year-old has decades of relationships, milestones, and personal growth ahead. The subjective full-value-of-life measure is the part of the verdict that captures the irreplaceable. This is where the largest numbers in Georgia wrongful-death cases live.
- Economic loss. Even a high-school student has a measurable future earning capacity. An economist will project the wages he would have earned, the benefits he would have received, the household services he would have contributed, and the career trajectory he would have followed. Even a conservative projection produces a multi-million-dollar number.
- The witness-trauma component. The family watched this happen. The bystander recovery and the wrongful-death emotional damages for the parents and the sister are independently compensable harms, and they are not a small part of the total.
- Punitive damages. Where the conduct supports a conscious-indifference finding, punitives can multiply the compensatory verdict meaningfully.
We are not going to promise a number on this page. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we will tell you, after we have seen the police file, the building records, the financial records, and the witness statements, is what we believe the case is worth and what the path to that number looks like. We are paid on contingency — no fee unless we win — and our fee is a percentage of the recovery. We have every incentive to value the case honestly and to pursue it with the resources that maximize the result.
What Evidence Has to Be Preserved — And How Fast It Disappears
A stray-bullet motel case is built on paper. The proof of how this happened, who knew what, and what the property did or did not do is sitting in records that are decaying on a clock. Our first move when we take the case is to send the preservation letters that freeze everything we can reach. Here is the inventory of the evidence, who holds it, and how fast it can disappear if we do not move.
911 recordings and CAD logs. Gwinnett County 911 Communications and the police Computer-Aided Dispatch system hold the original call, the response timestamps, the dispatch information, and the officer arrival times. These are subject to standard Georgia records-retention windows (often 1–3 years on a rolling cycle, with audio retained on a shorter cycle). We send a preservation demand within the first week.
Police investigation files. The Gwinnett County Police Department has the incident report, the witness statements, the on-scene photographs, the ballistics evidence, the firearm recovered, and the suspect’s recorded statements to detectives. The criminal case is active, which actually helps us: many of those records are now part of an open prosecution and will be retained as long as the criminal case is open. We obtain them through the Open Records Act and, if necessary, through subpoena in the civil case.
Motel surveillance video. The Live In Lodge, like any extended-stay property, almost certainly has interior and exterior CCTV. The footage of the night in question — lobby, hallways, parking lot, any camera covering the doorways of the two units — usually sits on a rolling overwrite cycle. Many systems overwrite in 7 to 30 days; some overwrite in as few as 72 hours. This is the single most perishable record in the case. Our preservation letter to the property must name the camera system by manufacturer and demand the footage from the date of the incident be preserved on a separate, non-overwriting drive. We move on this in days, not weeks.
Partition wall construction records. The original building plans, the construction records, any subsequent renovations, the fire-code compliance documents, and the partition-wall specifications. These are held by the property, the property management company, the architect of record, and Gwinnett County building and code-enforcement. The county’s records are public; the property’s records are demanded in discovery. We retain a building-code expert to inspect the wall and compare its actual construction to the code in force at the time the property was built and at the time of any subsequent renovation.
The firearm, the recovered bullet, and the ballistics evidence. The Gwinnett County Police Department has the firearm and the recovered bullet. The State Crime Lab (the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Division of Forensic Sciences) will have run the ballistics. The criminal case keeps these in evidence custody for the duration of the prosecution. We obtain them through the criminal discovery process and through the civil subpoena.
The shooter’s criminal case file. The arrest warrant, the charging documents, the bond hearing transcript, the discovery produced to the criminal defense, and any pretrial motions. All of this is public record through the Gwinnett County Clerk of Court. It is also the source of admissions the shooter has made that we can use against him in the civil case.
Cockran’s digital footprint. Social media posts, text messages, prior incidents at the property, prior complaints from other guests, prior interactions with law enforcement. We subpoena the platform records and we issue a litigation hold letter to the shooter personally.
The family’s contemporaneous records. Medical records, counseling records, school records, the mother’s oncology records, the family’s lease and rent receipts with the motel, photos and videos of Sheldon in the days and weeks before his death, and any communications between the family and the property before and after the incident. The most important of these are the outcry records — the first people each family member told, the first moments of grief, the first medical visits. Those records are taken contemporaneously and they pre-date any litigation motive. They are the proof of how real the harm is.
If you have already begun to lose any of these — the motel is stonewalling, the records are not forthcoming, the family is being asked to sign things they do not understand — that is exactly the moment to call. 1-888-ATTY-911. We send the preservation letter the same day you sign our engagement.
The Insurance Playbook We Know Is Coming
Insurance carriers on both sides — the shooter’s carrier and the motel’s carrier — will run a coordinated playbook. We have seen every move. Here is what they will do, and here is what we do about it.
Play 1: The “just tell us what happened” recorded statement. Within days, a friendly adjuster from one of the carriers will call and ask for a recorded statement. They will tell you it will help the case. It will not. The recorded statement is engineered to lock you into a version of the facts that minimizes the carrier’s exposure. The counter: Do not give a recorded statement. Direct the adjuster to us. We will provide a written, supervised statement on our timeline, in our words, after we have seen the evidence.
Play 2: The fast check with a release. A check may arrive quickly, with a release printed on the back. The release is the trap: you sign it for a small fraction of what the case is worth and you give up the right to ever pursue the full value of the life claim. The counter: Do not sign anything that comes in the mail. Do not deposit any check without our review. We will tell you within 24 hours whether the offer has any merit.
Play 3: The comparative fault smear. The carriers will argue that your son was somehow at fault — that he was unsupervised, that he was in an area he should not have been, that he did something to contribute to his own death. He was playing video games in his own room. The counter: We move to strike any comparative fault allocation against the decedent. Georgia law does not allow the defense to manufacture fault out of thin air, and the facts of this case do not support any comparative fault argument.
Play 4: The delay. The carriers will move slowly. They will ask for extensions. They will schedule depositions months out. They will hope you run out of energy, run out of resources, or run out of the statute of limitations. The counter: We control our own calendar. Georgia’s two-year statute of limitations for wrongful death is the deadline, and we file suit well before it, even if settlement discussions are ongoing. A filed case is a fast-moving case.
Play 5: The “we’re not responsible for the shooter” wall. The motel’s carrier will try to push everything onto the shooter. The shooter’s carrier (if any — many household policies exclude this kind of conduct) will try to push everything onto the motel. The counter: Georgia joint and several liability lets us recover the full judgment from either defendant once liability is established. We do not need to fight the carriers’ internal finger-pointing; we fight it at trial, where one or both of them pays.
Play 6: The IME. The carriers will demand an Independent Medical Examination of the family members. The counter: We challenge improper IMEs, we ensure the doctor selected is board-certified in the relevant specialty, and we make sure the family is never alone with a defense-hired doctor.
For more on how we work insurance carriers in these cases, our insurance claim practice walks through the same playbook from the angle of the family fighting the carrier directly.
The Road Ahead: How We Build the Case
We do not take these cases in halves. We take them the way they need to be taken. Here is the path, in plain English, from the day you call us to the day we put a number in front of a jury.
Week 1. Preservation letters go out the day you sign our engagement. We obtain the police report, the 911 audio, and the CAD logs. We lock down the surveillance video. We retain a building-code expert to inspect the wall. We retain a ballistics expert to evaluate the projectile path. We pull the Gwinnett County building and code-enforcement records on the property. We identify and interview the family members, the friends, the teachers, and any eyewitnesses.
Weeks 2 to 8. Discovery. We serve the property, the management company, and the shooter with civil discovery. We depose the on-site manager, the corporate designee under Georgia Code § 9-11-30(b)(6), the prior tenants of both rooms, and any eyewitnesses. We obtain the property’s full firearms policy (or the absence of one), its training materials, its incident logs, its prior complaints, and its lease documents. We obtain Cockran’s prior interactions with law enforcement, his social media, his range membership records, and his firearm-purchase history through the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the ATF.
Months 2 to 6. Expert development. The economist builds the lost-earnings and lost-services model. The life-care planner quantifies the loss of guidance, nurture, and companionship for the family. The building-code expert produces the report on partition-wall adequacy. The ballistics expert produces the report on projectile path and wall performance. The forensic psychologist produces the report on the family’s witness trauma and grief.
Months 6 to 12. Negotiation and mediation. Georgia civil cases almost always mediate before trial. We go into mediation with the full evidentiary record, the full expert development, and the full damages model. The carriers know what the case is worth. The mediation either produces a fair number or it does not.
Trial, if needed. A Gwinnett County jury, in a courtroom we have tried in, hearing the full value of the life of a seventeen-year-old whose family watched him die, with the proof that the wall was inadequate, the policy was inadequate, and the conduct was conscious. We are ready to try the case. The carriers know we are ready to try the case. That is why most of them settle before trial.
Who We Are
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC, a trial firm that takes catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death cases across the country, including in Georgia. We work with local Georgia counsel under pro hac vice admission when the venue requires it. We are not a referral shop that hands the case off. We are the lawyers who walk the case from the first preservation letter to the verdict or settlement.
Ralph Manginello is the Managing Partner. He has been licensed in Texas since 1998 — more than 27 years of trial practice — and is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Before law school he was a journalist, and that background shows in the way he prepares a case: he finds the story, he gets the documents, and he tells it to a jury in language a jury understands. He built his career in commercial-vehicle, catastrophic-injury, and wrongful-death cases, and he has handled trucking, refinery, construction, and premises cases on both sides of the v. Ralph is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the Houston Bar Association, and the Million Dollar Trial Lawyers Association. He is admitted to the bar and is licensed to handle the work; the firm does not claim an active Georgia bar license, and we work with local Georgia counsel on the procedural steps that require it.
Lupe Peña is an Associate Attorney. He was a former insurance-defense attorney at a national defense firm before joining the firm — he has worked inside the rooms where adjusters, software, and defense counsel decide how to value and deny cases like yours. That insider knowledge is how we anticipate the playbook described above before it runs. Lupe is fluent in Spanish — Hablamos Español — and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. He has been licensed in Texas since 2012.
Together, Ralph and Lupe bring the same thing to a family in Gwinnett County that we bring to a family in Houston: a trial team that knows the medicine, knows the insurance, knows the venue, and is not afraid of a courtroom. We are paid on contingency. No fee unless we win. The first call is free, confidential, and answered by a person, not a script.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a wrongful death lawsuit in Georgia?
Georgia’s general statute of limitations for wrongful death is two years from the date of death, under O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33. The clock starts the day your son died. There are narrow exceptions for minors, for fraud, and for cases where the cause of death was not immediately discoverable — but in a stray-bullet case where the death is immediate and the cause is known, the two-year clock runs from day one. Do not wait. Evidence decays, witnesses move, and the carriers will use delay as a strategy. The call that starts the preservation letter is the call that protects the case.
Who can bring the wrongful death claim in Georgia?
Under O.C.G.A. § 51-4-2, the claim is brought by the surviving spouse, or if there is no spouse, by the surviving children. In this case, the parents and the sister have standing to pursue the claim through the estate’s personal representative. The wrongful-death recovery for the full value of the life goes to the estate and is distributed according to Georgia’s intestacy rules absent a will. The family can also pursue a separate survival action for any conscious pain and suffering your son experienced between the bullet striking him and the moment of death, and for pre-death medical bills.
What does “full value of life” mean in a Georgia case?
It means what your son’s life was worth to him. The jury is asked to put a number on the value of his existence — his relationships, his interests, his hopes, his plans, the things he would have done, the people he would have loved, the experiences he would have had. It is a subjective standard, measured from his perspective. The law understands that a seventeen-year-old’s life has a value that cannot be reduced to a payroll projection, and the full value of life is designed to capture that. The number is large because the loss is large.
Can we recover for what we saw and felt, even if we were not physically injured?
Yes. The wrongful-death cause of action under O.C.G.A. § 51-4-2 is not the same as a negligent-infliction-of-emotional-distress claim. The wrongful-death action measures the loss to the decedent and the loss to the survivors — including the loss of his companionship, his guidance, his love. The witness trauma, the grief, the empty chair at every family table, the therapy, the medical consequences of the grief, the loss of the sister’s relationship with her brother — those are real, compensable harms under the wrongful-death statute. We will present them with expert testimony and with the family’s own voices.
Do I have to wait for the criminal case to finish before I file a civil case?
No. The criminal case and the civil case move on parallel tracks. You are not required to wait for the State of Georgia to finish prosecuting Cockran. We can file the civil case now and let the discovery in the civil case — including the criminal case file, the witness statements, the ballistics — develop the civil case. In fact, the criminal case can help the civil case: a criminal conviction, when it comes, is admissible in the civil case as evidence of negligence per se.
What if we cannot afford a lawyer?
You do not need to afford a lawyer. Attorney911 works on contingency. No fee unless we win. The consultation is free. The investigation, the expert retention, the filing fees, the depositions, the trial — all of it is on us until there is a recovery. Our fee is a percentage of the recovery, and if there is no recovery, you owe us nothing. We have done this enough to know how to fund the case through to verdict or settlement.
What happens in the first 72 hours after I call you?
We send the preservation letters the same day. We obtain the police report, the 911 audio, and the CAD logs within the first week. We retain the building-code expert and the ballistics expert. We schedule a face-to-face meeting with the family — in your home, at our office, or wherever is most comfortable. We begin the family interview, the medical-records collection, and the witness identification. By the end of the first 72 hours, every clock that matters in this case has been stopped, and the work that cannot be done later is already in motion.
What if the property says it is not responsible for the shooter’s actions?
Georgia’s joint and several liability rule means we do not need to choose. We sue both. The jury decides who is at fault and in what proportion. If the jury finds both the shooter and the motel at fault, we can collect the full judgment from either defendant. The carriers will fight over who pays, but that is their problem, not yours. Our job is to make sure the verdict lands.
How long will this take?
A Georgia wrongful-death case of this complexity typically resolves in 12 to 24 months from filing, sometimes faster if the carriers recognize the exposure and settle, sometimes longer if the case goes to trial. We push for the fastest resolution that produces a fair number. We are not interested in delay for its own sake, and we are not interested in a fast settlement that leaves money on the table. The right number in the right amount of time is the goal.
Can a case like this really be won against a motel?
Yes. Georgia negligent-security and premises-liability law has produced significant verdicts against motel and hotel operators who knew, or should have known, about foreseeable risks to their guests and failed to act. The key is the proof of what the property knew and when. The CCTV, the prior incident logs, the staff training records, the room assignment decisions, the firearms policy (or absence of one) — that is the proof that turns “we did not know” into “we knew and we did not act.” We have the discovery tools to get that proof.
Is there anything I should not do right now?
Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance adjuster. Do not sign anything that comes in the mail. Do not post about the case on social media. Do not let the property’s representatives into your home for a “check-in” without us. Do not let anyone convince you that the criminal case is the only case. Save everything — texts, photos, voicemails, the condolence letters, the bill for the funeral. And call us.
What Happens Next
You have carried this alone long enough. The law gives you a way to make the motel, the shooter, and the property management company answer for what they did, and it gives you the resources to hire us to do that without paying anything up front. We have built this firm to take on exactly this kind of case.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. The call is free. It is confidential. It is answered by a person who has done this before. We will tell you honestly what the case is worth, what it will take to get there, and what your role in the fight is. We will send the preservation letter the same day. We will handle the insurance carriers. We will sit with you at every hearing. We will try the case if it has to be tried, and we will settle it if it can be settled fairly.
Hablamos Español.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.