Midland, Texas Mass Shooting on West Wall Street: What Victims and Families Need to Know Right Now
If you are reading this, someone you love was on the 4600 block of West Wall Street in Midland on a Friday morning when gunfire erupted — or you were there yourself. You may be sitting in a hospital room. You may be planning a funeral. You may be reliving the sound of those shots every time you close your eyes. Whatever brought you here at this hour, we want you to know two things before anything else: the death of the shooter does not end the search for accountability, and the evidence that could prove a property owner’s failure to protect the people on that block is already beginning to disappear.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm. We are Texas-licensed trial lawyers who handle catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases. We have built this page so that every family affected by the Midland shooting can understand, in plain language, what Texas law allows them to do, what evidence needs to be preserved before it is gone, and how a case like this is actually built. Nothing here is legal advice for your specific situation — it is legal information from attorneys who have spent decades in Texas courtrooms, offered freely so that you can make decisions with clarity instead of fear. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 any hour, day or night. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case.
What Happened on West Wall Street in Midland
On a Friday morning in early June 2026, at approximately 8:00 a.m., an active shooter call brought Midland police officers, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, and other state, local, and federal law enforcement to the 4600 block of West Wall Street in Midland, Texas. According to DPS, the suspect opened fire on officers and bystanders before barricading himself inside an abandoned building on the block.
“Upon arrival, DPS said Villarreal opened fire on officers and bystanders before barricading himself inside an abandoned building.” — Texas Department of Public Safety, public statement
Eleven people were struck by gunfire. Edward Randall Scott, age 62, was killed at the scene. Ten surviving victims were transported to a local hospital for treatment. No members of law enforcement were injured. After a perimeter was established, officers found the suspect dead inside the building shortly after noon, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
DPS identified the suspect as an Odessa resident, age 45. The Texas Rangers are leading the investigation. DPS also confirmed that the suspect had been accused of attempted capital murder of a peace officer after allegedly firing shots at a Midland police officer two days earlier, on the Wednesday before the shooting. That prior allegation is an investigative lead — not confirmed foreseeability evidence against any property owner. But it is a thread that a thorough civil investigation will pull.
West Wall Street is a major commercial corridor running through central Midland, the county seat of Midland County in the Permian Basin — roughly twenty miles east of Odessa along Interstate 20. The 4600 block sits in a heavily trafficked area with retail businesses, restaurants, strip-center developments, and surface parking lots. At 8:00 a.m. on a weekday, that corridor is filled with commuters, employees opening businesses, and customers arriving for morning coffee or early appointments. Every one of those people was an invitee — a person the property owners on that block had invited onto their premises, directly or indirectly, for commercial purposes. And every one of them was owed a duty.
The Abandoned Building: When Property Becomes a Hazard
The single fact that sets this case apart from an ordinary criminal act is this: the shooter barricaded himself inside an abandoned building on a commercial corridor. That building is not a passive backdrop. It is a piece of evidence. And it raises immediate, specific questions that a civil investigation must answer.
Who owned that building? Why was it abandoned? Had the City of Midland cited the owner for code violations? Had the city issued notices to secure the structure — to board it, fence it, or otherwise prevent unauthorized entry? If such notices were issued and ignored, the unsecured building may have constituted a dangerous condition that the property owner knew about and failed to remedy. An abandoned, unsecured building in a commercial corridor provides exactly what an armed assailant needs: concealment, a fortified position, and a place to trap or ambush responding officers and fleeing bystanders.
The City of Midland, like most Texas municipalities, maintains ordinances addressing vacant, abandoned, and dangerous buildings. These ordinances typically require owners to secure structures against unauthorized entry — to board windows, lock doors, fence perimeters, and maintain the property so it does not become a hazard to the surrounding community. If the abandoned building on the 4600 block violated those ordinances, the code violation may serve as the standard of care the property owner breached — what Texas law calls negligence per se. Under that doctrine, when a defendant violates a statute or ordinance designed to protect the public, and that violation causes the kind of harm the ordinance was meant to prevent, the violation itself can establish the standard of care the defendant failed to meet.
The code enforcement records for that building are a critical piece of evidence. Prior code violations, notices to secure, complaints from neighboring businesses, and the city’s own inspection history — all of these establish what the property owner knew and when. Those records must be requested through the City of Midland’s open-records portal immediately, because municipal records retention varies and some documents can be purged on shorter cycles than families expect.
Who Can Be Held Accountable in a Mass Shooting Case
The shooter is dead. That is the first thing an insurance adjuster or a property owner’s lawyer will tell you, and they will say it as if the sentence ends there. It does not. Texas law provides a civil remedy against property owners whose failure to implement reasonable security measures or to secure dangerous conditions on their premises creates or enables the conditions for foreseeable third-party violence.
The potential defendants in a case like this fall into several categories:
Property owners of commercial premises at or near 4600 West Wall Street where bystanders were shot. These owners owe a duty of reasonable care to business invitees — the customers, employees, and commuters on the corridor — to protect them from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties when the owners have notice of dangerous conditions on or near the property. That duty is not a guarantee against all crime. It is a duty to take reasonable precautions — lighting, surveillance, access control, security personnel — that a reasonably prudent property owner would take given the crime profile of the area and the nature of the property.
The owner of the abandoned building used by the shooter as a barricade position. This owner had a duty — under municipal ordinance and under common law — to secure the vacant structure. Failure to secure an abandoned building in a commercial corridor may have enabled the shooter to fortify and prolong the assault, trapping bystanders in the line of fire for the duration of the standoff.
A property management company, if one was retained. Many commercial properties are managed by third-party management companies that assume contractual and operational duties to maintain safe premises, implement security measures, and address known hazards — including unsecured neighboring structures.
A private security contractor, if one was retained. If the property or corridor had contracted for security services, that contractor had a duty to provide security consistent with industry standards for the property type and known risk profile.
The estate of the shooter. The direct intentional tortfeasor. Collectibility is likely nominal — an individual’s estate typically cannot satisfy the damages of eleven gunshot victims — but naming the estate preserves cross-claim and fault-allocation positions against the premises defendants. Under Texas’s comparative-responsibility framework, the jury will apportion fault among all responsible parties, and the shooter’s share of fault will be assigned to his estate even though the estate may have no money to pay it.
The first operational priority in building a case like this is identifying every property owner and lessee in the 4600 block through Midland County deed records and lease filings. The identity and insurance profile of the premises defendants determines whether this case has a viable recovery path or collapses to the Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund — a state-administered program that provides limited compensation to victims of violent crime but is statutorily capped at modest per-incident amounts that fall far short of what a catastrophic gunshot injury or a wrongful death actually costs.
Texas Law on Negligent Security and Premises Liability
Texas premises liability law is built on the classification of the injured person. The highest duty is owed to business invitees — people who are on the property for a commercial purpose connected to the owner’s business. Every person on the 4600 block of West Wall Street at 8:00 a.m. on a weekday was an invitee: they were customers, employees, commuters, visitors to businesses. Texas Property Code provisions define the landowner’s duty to invitees, which includes a duty to inspect the premises for dangerous conditions, to warn of known dangers, and to protect invitees from foreseeable criminal acts of third parties when the owner has notice of the dangerous conditions.
The notice question is the spine of every negligent security case. Texas recognizes two types of notice: actual notice (the owner knew about the danger) and constructive notice (the owner should have known, because the danger had existed long enough that a reasonably prudent owner would have discovered it). In a mass shooting case, notice is typically established through a documented pattern of prior criminal activity at or near the property — what security experts call the “crime grid” or “calls-for-service history.”
That is why the Midland Police Department’s calls-for-service and crime-report data for the 4600 block, going back three to five years, is the single most important evidence demand in this case. If that data reveals a pattern of prior violent crime, drug activity, weapons calls, or trespassing at or near the location — and the property owner implemented no meaningful security response — foreseeability is established and the premises liability case has a viable foundation. If the data is clean, the foreseeability argument weakens and recovery may collapse.
Texas also applies a modified comparative negligence standard — what the state calls “proportionate responsibility” under Chapter 33 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. Under that rule, a plaintiff is barred from recovery only if assigned 51% or more of the fault. For mass-shooting bystanders — people who were simply standing on a public commercial corridor when gunfire erupted — an allocation of fault to the victims is unlikely. But the defense will attempt to allocate all fault to the deceased shooter, arguing that the property owner’s conduct — however negligent — was not the proximate cause of an intentional criminal act. That argument is the central battlefield of every negligent security case, and it is why the proof story must tie the property owner’s specific failures to the specific harm: the unsecured building that enabled the barricade, the absent lighting that hid the shooter’s approach, the missing surveillance that delayed response.
One of Texas’s strongest advantages for plaintiffs in premises cases is the absence of a non-economic damage cap. Unlike its medical-malpractice regime, Texas imposes no cap on pain and suffering, mental anguish, or loss of companionship in negligent security or premises liability actions. That means the full human cost of eleven gunshot injuries — the physical pain, the psychological trauma, the lost years, the shattered families — is recoverable in full, subject only to the jury’s judgment.
Punitive damages are also available under Chapter 41 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code upon a showing of gross negligence — which means the property owner’s disregard of a known security risk was so extreme that it amounted to a conscious indifference to the safety of the people on the property. Punitive damages are subject to statutory caps tied to economic and non-economic damages, but the availability of punitive exposure is a powerful settlement lever — and the threshold for gross negligence is driven entirely by what discovery reveals about prior criminal activity at the location and the property owner’s response to it.
For a deeper look at how premises liability works when property owners fail to protect people from foreseeable violence, our premises liability practice page walks through the duty framework in more detail.
Wrongful Death and Survival Claims Under Texas Law
The family of Edward Randall Scott, the 62-year-old man killed at the scene, has two separate legal claims under Texas law — and the distinction between them matters enormously.
The wrongful death claim belongs to the surviving statutory beneficiaries — the spouse, children, and parents of the decedent. Under the Texas Wrongful Death Act, these beneficiaries may recover for the loss of the decedent’s earning capacity, the loss of companionship and society, the mental anguish of the beneficiaries, and funeral expenses. A wrongful death claim compensates the family for what they lost — the financial support, the guidance, the presence, the relationship that was taken from them.
The survival claim belongs to the estate of the decedent. It is prosecuted by the personal representative of the estate — the person Texas law authorizes to bring the case — and it compensates for what the decedent personally endured between the infliction of the gunshot wound and death. If Mr. Scott survived even briefly after being shot — if he experienced conscious pain and suffering, however brief — the survival claim preserves that recovery for the estate, along with any medical expenses incurred during that interval.
Before any lawsuit is filed, a court appoints a personal representative — the one person Texas law authorizes to bring the family’s case. That appointment is a procedural step, but it is an essential one, and it is something we handle as part of the process.
The statute of limitations for both personal injury and wrongful death claims in Texas is two years from the date of injury or death. That means the families of the Midland shooting victims have approximately two years from the date of the shooting to file suit. This deadline is unforgiving — miss it and the case is over, no matter how strong the evidence. Whether any crime-victim tolling provision applies to extend that deadline is a question that must be confirmed for each victim’s specific situation with an attorney admitted in Texas.
For each of the ten surviving victims, the personal injury claims are also governed by the two-year statute of limitations. Those claims will include past and future medical expenses, lost wages, diminished earning capacity, physical pain, mental anguish, and — for injuries that produce lasting psychological harm — the cost of long-term mental health treatment.
For more on how wrongful death claims work in Texas, including who can file and what compensation is available, visit our wrongful death practice page.
The Injuries Gunfire Inflicts
A penetrating gunshot wound is unlike almost any other injury the human body can survive. The damage is not limited to the path the bullet travels. As a projectile enters the body, it creates a temporary cavity — a stretch of tissue far wider than the bullet itself — that tears blood vessels, nerves, and organs the bullet never directly touched. The higher the velocity, the wider the cavity, and the more tissue dies in a radius the entry wound never reveals.
The ten surviving victims of the Midland shooting likely sustained gunshot wounds of varying severity — and varying prognosis. Some may have suffered thoracoabdominal injuries: bullets that entered the chest or abdomen and damaged the lungs, liver, spleen, or bowel. These injuries carry the highest mortality risk and often require emergency surgery — thoracotomy, laparotomy, damage-control procedures to stop bleeding and control contamination — followed by days or weeks in a surgical intensive care unit.
Others may have sustained extremity wounds — gunshot injuries to the arms or legs that fractured bones, severed arteries, or destroyed nerves. A fractured femur from a gunshot can mean weeks of non-weight-bearing recovery, surgical fixation with plates and rods, and a permanent risk of compartment syndrome if the swelling from the injury compressed the leg’s blood supply. A vascular injury — a severed femoral artery, a damaged brachial artery — can mean the difference between a saved limb and an amputation, and the warm-ischemia clock (roughly six hours before tissue death becomes irreversible) is the stopwatch the trauma surgeon races against.
Even gunshot wounds that appear minor on initial evaluation can produce long-term consequences the emergency room does not always flag. Nerve damage may not declare itself for days or weeks. A bullet that passes near a joint can cause post-traumatic arthritis years later. An entry wound that closes cleanly can still leave a permanent disability in the tissue beneath.
And the psychological injuries are as real as the physical ones. Mass-shooting trauma is among the most thoroughly documented psychological injuries in the clinical literature. Post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, major depression, and chronic anxiety are foreseeable consequences even for victims who were not physically shot — for the people who were in the zone of danger, who heard the shots, who saw the victims fall, who ran for their lives. Texas courts recognize mental-anguish damages in violent-crime contexts, and the diagnostic tools — structured clinical interviews, validated symptom checklists — make these injuries provable, not speculative.
Each of the eleven victims requires an individual trauma-surgical evaluation, imaging review, and — for those with catastrophic or permanent injuries — a life-care plan that projects the cost of future medical care, rehabilitation, equipment replacement, and attendant care across the victim’s expected lifespan. A life-care plan is not a guess. It is a formal medical-economic document, built to a published professional standard, that prices out every surgery, therapy session, medication, and caregiver hour a person will need for the rest of their life. That document is what turns “lifetime care” from a phrase into a figure a jury can trust.
Evidence That Is Already Disappearing
This is the section to read twice. The legal right to sue may survive for two years, but the proof that wins the case is on a clock that runs in days and weeks — not months. Every record listed below is evidence that a thorough civil investigation would demand. Every one of them is deteriorating right now.
Surveillance footage from businesses in the 4600 block. Every restaurant, retail store, and strip-center business on that corridor likely had surveillance cameras operating at 8:00 a.m. That footage shows the shooter’s approach, the positioning of victims, the bullet trajectories, and — critically — what security camera coverage existed or did not exist at the time of the attack. Commercial DVR and NVR systems typically overwrite on a 7-to-30-day cycle. Once that cycle completes, the footage is gone — not archived, not retrievable, gone. A formal preservation letter demanding that the footage be saved can be sent on a victim’s behalf without filing a lawsuit or committing to litigation. It must go out within days.
Midland Police Department body-worn camera and in-car dashcam footage. The officers who responded to the active-shooter call were wearing body cameras and driving camera-equipped patrol cars. That footage documents the response timeline, the scene conditions upon arrival, statements by witnesses and victims at the scene, and the condition of the abandoned building. It is subject to MPD’s retention policies. An open-records request under the Texas Public Information Act should be filed immediately.
911 call records, CAD dispatch logs, and radio traffic. These records establish when the first call was received, the response times, and the sequence of events as reported by callers in real time. They are typically retained but should be requested promptly to prevent routine purging.
Midland County Appraisal District and deed records for properties at and near 4600 West Wall Street. These are permanent public records, but they must be pulled immediately to identify the legal owners of the commercial premises and the abandoned building — the defendants who will be named in the preservation letters and, potentially, in the lawsuit. Property ownership, lease arrangements, and any prior calls for service along the block must be established through these records and MPD open-records requests.
Midland Police Department calls-for-service and crime-report data for the 4600 block (three-to-five-year lookback). This is the foreseeability engine. Prior incidents of violent crime, drug activity, trespass, or weapons calls at or near the location establish the property owner’s notice of dangerous conditions. An open-records request should be filed immediately. The data exists, but response times vary.
City of Midland Code Enforcement records for the abandoned building. Prior code violations, notices to secure, or complaints about the vacant structure establish notice of the dangerous condition and may support a negligence-per-se theory if the building violated municipal vacant-building ordinances. These records must be requested through the City of Midland’s open-records portal.
Scene photographs, measurements, and diagrams by law enforcement. These document the layout, sight lines, lighting conditions, distances, and the physical relationship between where victims fell and the abandoned building. The scene will be released and potentially altered after the criminal investigation concludes. A private scene reconstruction team should document conditions as soon as access is possible.
Medical records of all eleven victims. These document the nature, severity, and treatment of each gunshot wound and establish the causal link between the assault and each victim’s specific injuries. Records accumulate as treatment progresses. HIPAA-compliant authorizations should be obtained from each victim or family.
Cell phone records and location data of victims and witnesses. These corroborate victim positions, timestamps, and may capture real-time communications or video during the attack. Carrier retention periods vary — some data types survive only 90 to 180 days. Preservation letters to carriers should be sent promptly.
Employment and financial records of Edward Randall Scott. These establish the economic-loss components of the wrongful death claim, including lost wages, benefits, retirement contributions, and household services. Employer records may be subject to routine destruction policies and should be preserved through early discovery.
The preservation letter is the tool that freezes this evidence. It is a formal written demand that the property owner, the business owners, the camera-system operators, the phone carriers, and the city agencies retain all relevant records and refrain from destroying them. It can be sent on a victim’s behalf without filing a lawsuit. The day you call us is the day that letter goes out.
The Insurance Adjuster’s Playbook
If you or a family member were shot on West Wall Street, someone from a property owner’s insurance company may contact you. They will sound sympathetic. They may offer to help with medical bills. They will almost certainly ask you to describe what happened — on a recording. Everything they do is designed to minimize what the insurance company pays. Here are the plays you will see, and the counter to each one.
Play 1: “The shooter is dead, so there’s nobody to sue.” This is the first and most common line. The adjuster will frame the shooting as an unpredictable, one-man criminal act for which no property owner can be held responsible. The counter: Texas law has long recognized that a property owner’s independent duty to take reasonable precautions against foreseeable criminal violence does not depend on the shooter’s availability. The shooter’s death eliminates direct recovery from his estate, but it concentrates the liability analysis on the premises defendants — the owners who controlled the property, who knew or should have known about the danger, and who failed to act.
Play 2: “This was an unpredictable act of violence — nobody could have foreseen it.” The adjuster will argue that a mass shooting is a freak event, not a foreseeable risk a property owner should have guarded against. The counter: foreseeability is established through evidence, not assertion. If the calls-for-service data for the 4600 block shows a history of violent crime, weapons calls, or trespassing — and if the abandoned building had been cited for code violations and left unsecured — the danger was foreseeable. The adjuster does not know what the data shows yet. We do not either, but the only way to find out is to demand the records before they disappear.
Play 3: The fast settlement check. An insurance company may offer a quick settlement — sometimes within weeks of the shooting — before the full extent of the injuries is known, before the medical records are complete, before the life-care plan is built, and before the foreseeability evidence has been gathered. A check that arrives before the medical results does is designed to close the case for a fraction of its value. The counter: never accept a settlement before a physician has documented the full extent of the injuries, before a life-care planner has projected the future costs, and before the preservation letters and open-records requests have produced the foreseeability evidence. A gunshot wound that looks survivable in the first week can produce nerve damage, infection, or psychological disability that lasts a lifetime.
Play 4: The recorded statement. An adjuster will call and ask you to “just tell us what happened” on a recording. That recording is built to be quoted against you. The counter: do not give a recorded statement to any insurance representative without your own attorney present. You are under no obligation to do so. Anything you say can be edited, taken out of context, and used to minimize your claim.
Play 5: The social media watch. Insurance investigators will monitor the social media accounts of victims and family members, looking for photos or posts that can be used to argue the injuries are not as severe as claimed. The counter: set all social media accounts to private, do not post about the shooting, the injuries, the medical treatment, or the legal case, and understand that anything posted publicly may be screenshotted and used by the defense.
What a Case Like This Is Worth
The honest answer is that the value of the Midland shooting cases depends almost entirely on what the evidence reveals about foreseeability — and that evidence has not yet been gathered. We can give you the range, and we can tell you what drives the range, but we will not pretend to a precision the facts do not yet support.
The aggregate value across all eleven victims — one wrongful death and ten personal-injury claims — could range from approximately $3,000,000 to well over $35,000,000, depending on what discovery produces. That is an extraordinary range, and it reflects the binary nature of foreseeability in Texas premises law.
If discovery reveals a documented pattern of prior violent crime at or immediately adjacent to the 4600 block, and the property owner implemented no meaningful security response — no improved lighting, no surveillance cameras, no access control, no security personnel — the aggregate value against a well-insured commercial defendant could reach well into eight figures. The wrongful death claim and any catastrophic injury claims (spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, amputation) would anchor the high end. Punitive damages under Chapter 41 would be in play if the property owner’s disregard of the known security risk rises to gross negligence.
If foreseeability cannot be established — if the calls-for-service data is clean, if the abandoned building had no prior code violations, if there is no evidence that the property owner knew or should have known about a danger — the recovery path narrows dramatically. The shooter’s estate is likely nominal. The Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund provides limited, statutorily capped compensation to victims of violent crime, but those amounts fall far short of what a catastrophic gunshot injury or a wrongful death actually costs.
Individual claim values will stratify significantly based on injury severity. The wrongful death claim and any catastrophic injury claims anchor the high end. Less severe gunshot wounds — injuries that require hospitalization and surgery but recover fully — will settle in a lower range. Psychological-injury-only claims for victims who were in the zone of danger but not physically shot may be recoverable under Texas bystander rules, subject to specific legal requirements that must be evaluated for each victim’s situation.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The figures above are an analytical range based on Texas law and the known facts of this incident, not a prediction of what any individual victim will recover.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do Now
If you or a family member were among the eleven victims, here is what matters most in the first 72 hours.
Medical care comes first. If you were shot, even if the wound seems minor, you need a full medical evaluation. Gunshot wounds that look small on the surface can involve deep tissue damage, vascular injury, or organ damage that only imaging and a thorough examination can detect. Follow every medical recommendation. Attend every follow-up appointment. Keep every record. The medical chart is the foundation of the injury claim — it is the document that proves the causal link between the shooting and the harm.
Do not sign anything from an insurance company. Do not accept a settlement check. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not sign a medical authorization that gives the insurance company access to your entire medical history. Do not sign a release of any kind. If someone hands you a document and tells you it is routine, read it or — better — let a lawyer read it before you sign.
Do not post about the shooting on social media. Set your accounts to private. Do not describe the incident, your injuries, your medical treatment, or your emotional state in any public forum. Insurance investigators monitor social media, and even an innocent photograph — a smiling family photo at a hospital bedside — can be used to argue the injuries are not as severe as claimed.
Preserve evidence. If you have cell phone video, photographs, or text messages from the morning of the shooting, save them. Do not delete anything. If you know other witnesses, get their contact information. Memory degrades quickly, and the first person a survivor told about the shooting may become a critical witness later.
If a family member was killed, ask about the personal representative. Before a wrongful death lawsuit can be filed, a court must appoint a personal representative of the estate — the person Texas law authorizes to bring the family’s case. That appointment is a procedural step, but it takes time, and the two-year statute of limitations runs from the date of death, not from the date the representative is appointed.
Call a lawyer. Not next month. Not after the medical bills pile up. Not after the insurance adjuster makes an offer. Now. The preservation letters that freeze the surveillance footage, the body camera video, the 911 calls, and the code enforcement records need to go out within days — not because the statute of limitations is about to run, but because the evidence is about to overwrite itself, be purged, or be legally destroyed. The day you call is the day the clock starts working for you instead of against you.
How We Approach Mass Shooting Cases
We are not going to tell you we are investigating this incident — because we are not your counsel unless and until you hire us, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can tell you is exactly what we would do if you called us today.
The preservation letters go out first. Within 24 to 48 hours of being retained, we send formal written preservation demands to every property owner on the 4600 block, every business with surveillance cameras, the Midland Police Department, the Texas Rangers, the City of Midland Code Enforcement division, and every cell phone carrier whose records are relevant. Those letters freeze the evidence. They create a legal duty to retain. If a recipient destroys evidence after receiving a preservation letter, that destruction becomes its own source of liability — a spoliation claim that can produce an adverse-inference instruction, telling the jury they may assume the destroyed evidence would have helped the victims.
The open-records requests go out simultaneously. We file Texas Public Information Act requests with the Midland Police Department for all calls-for-service and crime-report data for the 4600 block over a five-year lookback. We file requests with the City of Midland for all code enforcement records related to the abandoned building. We file requests with the Texas Rangers for any records that can be released without compromising the criminal investigation. The data from these requests is the foreseeability engine — the evidence that determines whether the case has a viable premises-liability foundation or collapses to nominal recovery.
We pull the deed records. Through the Midland County Appraisal District and county deed records, we identify every property owner and lessee on the block — the commercial premises where victims were shot and the abandoned building the shooter used. These records identify the defendants who will be named in the lawsuit and whose insurance coverage will be investigated.
We retain the right experts. A board-certified security expert assesses the corridor against industry standards — the ASIS International guidelines, the ANSI security frameworks — and opines on whether reasonable security measures would have detected or deterred the attack. For the victims with catastrophic injuries, a life-care planner builds the year-by-year cost of future care. A forensic economist reduces that cost to present value and projects lost earning capacity. For the psychological injuries, a treating psychiatrist or psychologist documents the diagnosis using validated clinical instruments.
We coordinate among the victims. With eleven victims, coordination among plaintiff counsel is essential to avoid conflicting deposition testimony and inconsistent liability theories. A joint-prosecution or liaison-counsel arrangement may be explored while each victim’s damages presentation is individualized. No two gunshot injuries are identical, and no two recovery stories are identical — but the liability theory must be consistent across all claimants, or the defense will exploit the inconsistency.
We prepare for a Midland County jury. The case will be tried in Midland County, Texas — before a jury of the reader’s neighbors. West Texas jurors may default toward attributing all fault to the shooter, which is why voir dire must carefully explore prospective jurors’ attitudes about property-owner responsibility for third-party criminal violence. The case must be framed around the property owner’s independent duty — the duty to secure the abandoned building, to implement reasonable security measures, to respond to prior crime data — not as a substitute for the shooter’s criminal accountability, but as a separate, independent failure that contributed to the harm.
For an example of how mass shooting litigation works in practice — including the negligent security theories and the defendant-structure analysis that these cases demand — our Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting resource walks through the legal architecture of a large-scale shooting case.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue if the shooter is dead?
Yes. The death of the shooter does not end the search for accountability. Texas law provides a civil remedy against property owners whose failure to implement reasonable security measures or to secure dangerous conditions on their premises creates or enables the conditions for foreseeable third-party violence. The shooter’s estate may be named as a defendant for fault-allocation purposes, but the real recovery path runs through the premises defendants — the property owners who controlled the corridor and the abandoned building.
How long do I have to file a claim in Texas?
Texas has a two-year statute of limitations for both personal injury and wrongful death claims, running from the date of injury or death. That deadline is unforgiving — miss it and the case is over, regardless of the strength of the evidence. Whether any crime-victim tolling provision applies to extend that deadline is a question that must be confirmed for your specific situation. Do not wait. The evidence is on a much shorter clock than the statute of limitations.
What if I was a bystander and was not physically shot?
Texas recognizes mental-anguish damages in violent-crime contexts, and victims who were within the zone of danger and feared imminent serious bodily injury may have claims independent of physical injury. These bystander claims are subject to specific Texas legal requirements that must be evaluated for each person’s situation. The psychological injuries — PTSD, acute stress disorder, anxiety — are real, diagnosable, and compensable, even without a bullet wound.
How much is a mass shooting case worth?
The aggregate value across all eleven victims could range from approximately $3,000,000 to well over $35,000,000, depending on what the evidence reveals about foreseeability. If discovery produces a documented pattern of prior violent crime at the location and the property owner did nothing, the value against a well-insured commercial defendant could reach eight figures. If foreseeability cannot be established, recovery narrows to the shooter’s estate (likely nominal) and the Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund (statutorily capped). Individual claims stratify by injury severity. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What evidence needs to be preserved right now?
Surveillance footage from businesses in the 4600 block (7-to-30-day overwrite cycle), Midland Police Department body-worn camera and dashcam footage, 911 call records and CAD dispatch logs, Midland County deed records identifying property owners, MPD calls-for-service data for a three-to-five-year lookback, City of Midland Code Enforcement records for the abandoned building, scene photographs and measurements, medical records, cell phone records, and employment records. Every one of these is on a clock. A preservation letter freezes them.
Should I talk to the insurance company?
No. Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance representative without your own attorney present. Do not sign a release, a medical authorization, or a settlement agreement. Do not accept a quick check that arrives before the medical results. Everything the insurance company does in the first weeks is designed to minimize what it pays. Your first call should be to a lawyer, not to an adjuster.
What if I was partly at fault for being in the area?
You were on a public commercial corridor at 8:00 a.m. on a weekday. You were a business invitee — a person the property owners invited onto the corridor for commercial purposes. Texas follows a modified comparative negligence standard with a 51% bar, meaning your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault but barred only if you are assigned 51% or more. For a mass-shooting bystander, an allocation of fault to the victims is extremely unlikely. Do not let the defense’s argument that you “should have known” deter you from exploring your rights.
What happens if the property was abandoned?
That is one of the most important questions in this case. An abandoned building in a commercial corridor raises immediate questions about municipal code enforcement, property securing requirements, and whether the structure created a foreseeable hazard. If City of Midland ordinances required the building to be secured — boarded, fenced, or locked — and the owner failed to comply, that code violation may establish negligence per se. The unsecured building may have enabled the shooter to barricade and prolong the assault. The code enforcement records for that building are a critical piece of evidence.
Can I get compensation for PTSD even without physical injuries?
Yes, in many cases. Texas courts recognize mental-anguish damages in violent-crime contexts. If you were in the zone of danger — if you heard the shots, saw the victims, or feared for your life — you may have a claim for psychological injury even without a physical wound. PTSD is a formal medical diagnosis with specific diagnostic criteria, and it is provable through structured clinical interviews and validated symptom checklists. It is not a “soft” injury. It is a recognized psychiatric condition with a measurable lifetime cost.
How do I know if the property owner had prior warning of danger?
That is exactly what the investigation determines. The Midland Police Department’s calls-for-service and crime-report data for the 4600 block, going back three to five years, is the foreseeability engine. If that data shows a pattern of violent crime, drug activity, weapons calls, or trespassing at or near the location — and the property owner implemented no meaningful security response — foreseeability is established. The code enforcement records for the abandoned building are the other half of the notice question. Those records must be demanded through open-records requests immediately.
You Are Not Alone in This
The last thing we want you to hear from this page is that someone is on your side — not in the abstract, but in the specific, trained, hands-on way that actually changes what happens next.
Ralph Manginello has been a Texas-licensed attorney for 27+ years, admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Houston Bar Association. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer — he learned to find the story, find the evidence, and tell it to a jury in a language they can feel. He is the lead counsel in the active $10M+ hazing lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston. He speaks Spanish.
Lupe Peña has been a Texas-licensed attorney for 13+ years, also admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Before he joined this firm, he worked inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. He knows how the other side sets reserves, selects IME doctors, runs surveillance, and stalls. He now uses that knowledge for injured clients. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. He is a third-generation Texan with family roots to the King Ranch.
We handle cases on contingency. That means we do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. You can call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 any hour of the day or night — we have live staff, not an answering service. Hablamos Español.
We have recovered over $50 million for injured clients across our years of practice — including a $5M+ brain-injury settlement, a $3.8M+ amputation settlement, and millions in trucking wrongful-death cases. Those results came from specific facts in specific cases. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we can tell you is that the tools, the training, and the fight are the same ones we would bring to your case from the first phone call.
If you were on West Wall Street in Midland on that Friday morning — if you were shot, if someone you love was shot, if you were there and you cannot stop hearing it — call us. The preservation letter goes out the day you call. The open-records request goes out the day you call. The evidence that is overwriting itself right now stops overwriting the day you call. Everything else — the medical care, the life-care plan, the expert analysis, the lawsuit — follows from that first step.
1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win. We are ready when you are.