The Phone Call That Brought You Here
Somebody you love walked into a hospital — the one place in this country where a person is supposed to be safe — and did not walk out. Maybe they were a patient. Maybe they were a visitor. Maybe they worked there, in a uniform, taking care of other people’s parents and children. And on June 16, 2026, at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, gunfire inside Wilmington Hospital shattered the basic promise every hospital makes to every person who walks through its doors.
If you are reading this, you are probably the family member of the person who died, or the person who survived and is now lying in a different hospital bed somewhere, or the parent or spouse who got the call no family is built to receive. We are sorry you are here. We are also going to tell you the truth about what just happened to you, what the law in Delaware actually says about it, and what to do in the next seventy-two hours before evidence you will need is gone forever.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are trial lawyers. We have spent twenty-seven years standing in courtrooms against corporations the size of mountains. One of our partners, Lupe Peña, spent years inside a national insurance defense firm, in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to lowball people exactly like you. We know the playbook on the other side because one of us lived it. We now run it in reverse. The consultation is free, it is confidential, and it is available right now at 1-888-ATTY-911 — twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We also serve your family fully in Spanish, because in too many Delaware hospital hallways right now, that matters.
Before we get into a single statute, here is the first piece of protection we give you for free: do not speak to ChristianaCare’s risk management department. Do not speak to their insurance adjuster. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not sign a medical records release broader than the one your lawyer reviews. Every one of those steps is designed to lower the value of your case before you have even hired a lawyer. We will tell you exactly what to say, and what to refuse to say, before this page is over.
What Happened at Wilmington Hospital on June 16, 2026
Here is what we know from the public record, because the public record is the foundation of every case we will build.
On Tuesday, June 16, 2026, at approximately 3:30 p.m., a 23-year-old male suspect opened fire inside Wilmington Hospital, a facility operated by ChristianaCare in Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington Police Chief Wilfredo Campos confirmed that officers responding to the scene located two gunshot victims. One of those victims later died from his injuries. The second victim’s condition has been withheld from the public, out of respect for the family. The identities of both victims are also being withheld pending family notification, which is standard in the early hours of a Delaware homicide investigation.
According to Chief Campos, the shooting was a “targeted, isolated incident.” That word — targeted — will matter to your case in a way that may surprise you, and we will come back to it. The campus was immediately placed on lockdown. The emergency department was placed on divert — hospital code for “send ambulances somewhere else,” which means that for a period of time on a Tuesday afternoon, the city’s largest hospital could not accept new emergency patients because its own hallways were an active crime scene. Aerial footage showed a heavy police presence around the building. Multiple law enforcement vehicles lined the streets. People were seen exiting the building with their hands raised, in the posture of a hostage-clearance, because that is exactly what it was.
U.S. Senator Chris Coons, who represents Delaware in Washington, issued a public statement that he was “closely monitoring reports of a shooting at Wilmington Hospital” and that he was “praying for everyone’s safety, including patients, health care workers, first responders, and law enforcement officers.”
After a multi-state manhunt, police located and took the 23-year-old male suspect into custody in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Extradition to Delaware and formal charges are pending. The fact that a homicide suspect could cross state lines into Pennsylvania in the hours after a hospital shooting tells you something important about the geography of this case: Wilmington sits on the I-95 corridor, the spine of the East Coast, and any analysis of “foreseeability” — the legal question of whether ChristianaCare should have anticipated this kind of violence — must begin with the fact that this hospital sits minutes from a major interstate with rapid access to three other states.
This is a breaking case. The criminal investigation is in its earliest hours. But the civil case — the one that holds ChristianaCare accountable for the safety failures that allowed a gunman into a healthcare facility — must be built immediately, because the evidence that proves the institution’s failure is already starting to disappear.
Why This Case Is Different From a Street Corner Shooting
When someone is shot on a sidewalk, the legal universe of possible defendants is small. The shooter. Maybe a property owner who left a known hazard unrepaired. That is usually the whole list. The criminal case against the shooter is the case, and when the shooter goes to prison, the family is left with a conviction and a funeral bill.
A hospital shooting is a different animal entirely. The shooter is still a shooter, and we will talk about the intentional tort claims against him in a moment. But the deeper case — the one with the money behind it, the one that pays for a lifetime of lost support, the one that punishes an institution so it changes its behavior — is the case against the institution. In this case, that institution is ChristianaCare, the largest health system in the state of Delaware. The institution had a duty. The institution had a budget. The institution made choices about which entrances to lock, which ones to leave open, whether to put metal detectors at the door, whether to post armed security, whether to train its people for the active shooter scenario. Every one of those choices was on a meeting agenda somewhere. Every one of those choices will be discoverable. And every one of those choices is now evidence in a wrongful death and negligent security case that we will build piece by piece.
The hospital lobby is not the sidewalk. Inside a hospital, the visitor is not a member of the public wandering through a public space — they are an invitee under Delaware premises liability law, the highest category of visitor, owed the highest duty of care. Delaware courts have long held that an invitee is owed the duty to “exercise reasonable care to keep the premises safe,” and where the landowner has reason to anticipate wrongful conduct by third parties, the landowner has a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent it. ChristianaCare knew, or should have known, that violence in its lobby was a foreseeable risk. The only question your jury will have to answer is whether the steps they took to prevent it were reasonable. After June 16, 2026, the answer to that question is going to cost them.
Who ChristianaCare Is — And Why That Matters to Your Case
ChristianaCare is not a small clinic with two exam rooms and a part-time security guard. It is the dominant healthcare system in the state of Delaware, a multi-billion-dollar nonprofit enterprise that operates Wilmington Hospital, Christiana Hospital in Newark, and a network of urgent care centers, outpatient surgery centers, and primary care offices across the state. It employs thousands of people, trains hundreds of medical residents, and accepts hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement every year.
All of that scale matters to your case for three reasons.
First, the money is there. When you sue a major nonprofit health system, you are not suing a corner store. ChristianaCare carries layers of insurance — primary commercial general liability, excess liability, medical malpractice, directors and officers coverage, and in many cases a self-insured retention layer that the health system itself funds. Multiple defendants means multiple insurance towers, and multiple insurance towers means the recovery ceiling is high. When we write a demand letter in this case, we will not be writing to a claims adjuster working out of a strip mall. We will be writing to a risk management department that has been through this kind of exposure before, and that knows exactly what a Wilmington jury will do to a healthcare system that allowed a shooting in its lobby.
Second, the standards are higher. ChristianaCare is accredited by The Joint Commission, the body that accredits the vast majority of American hospitals. To keep that accreditation — and with it, the ability to bill Medicare and Medicaid — ChristianaCare must comply with The Joint Commission’s Environment of Care standards, which explicitly require hospitals to identify and manage security risks facing patients, staff, and visitors. The Joint Commission also requires hospitals to conduct a thorough Sentinel Event review after any unexpected event that causes (or carries significant risk of) death or serious physical or psychological injury. We will be demanding that Sentinel Event report in discovery. The fact that an event of this magnitude occurred will itself become evidence that the prior risk assessment was inadequate, and that the institution’s response failed its own people.
Third, the federal money is conditional. ChristianaCare participates in Medicare and Medicaid, which means it must comply with the federal Conditions of Participation administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Among those conditions is the requirement to “ensure patient safety” as a condition of receiving federal funds. The federal government has been sharpening its focus on healthcare workplace violence for years. OSHA has published specific Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Healthcare and Social Service Workers. We will be using every one of those guidelines as a measuring stick against what ChristianaCare actually did, and did not do, on June 16, 2026.
Scale also cuts the other way, and we want you to understand how. When you sue a powerful institution, the institution fights. It hires the best defense lawyers in the state. It files motions to dismiss. It claims immunity, claiming peer review privilege, claiming quality assurance privilege, claiming the Sentinel Event report is confidential. Our job is to break through every one of those walls. We do it because we have done it before, in other venues, against other large institutions that thought they were untouchable.
The Delaware Law That Governs This Case
Delaware is, for several reasons, a venue that treats corporate defendants seriously and gives victims real tools. We are going to walk you through the actual statutes, in plain English, because the statutes are the weapons and you should know what they say.
10 Del. C. § 3724 — Delaware’s Wrongful Death Statute
Delaware’s wrongful death statute, 10 Del. C. § 3724, defines who has the right to bring a wrongful death claim and what they can recover. The eligible beneficiaries are the decedent’s spouse, parents, and children. If your family fits that description — and in most cases arising from the death of an adult son, a husband, or a father, it does — you have standing to bring the claim. What you can recover under § 3724 is broad. Delaware law allows recovery for the loss of the decedent’s support, the loss of the decedent’s services, the loss of the decedent’s society and companionship, and the mental anguish suffered by the surviving family. There is no artificial cap on those damages in Delaware, which is one of the reasons this venue is favorable to victims in a case of this magnitude.
10 Del. C. § 8132 — Punitive Damages for Willful and Wanton Conduct
Delaware allows punitive damages where the defendant’s conduct is found to be “willful and wanton.” That legal phrase is doing a lot of work. It does not require us to prove that ChristianaCare intended for a shooting to happen. It requires us to prove that ChristianaCare knew, or should have known, of an extreme risk of harm, and that it consciously chose not to take reasonable steps to address that risk. If we can show — as we expect to show — that ChristianaCare had prior “Code Silver” events at this location, that it received security consultant recommendations for metal detectors or armed screening, that it tracked local crime statistics showing elevated risk in the surrounding area, and that it chose not to act, that pattern of conduct is precisely what Delaware law calls willful and wanton. Punitive damages are designed to punish, and to deter. In a case where a healthcare institution failed to protect the people it exists to serve, the deterrent function is exactly what the law is supposed to do.
Modified Comparative Negligence — The 51% Bar
Delaware follows a modified comparative negligence rule. Under Delaware law, a plaintiff can recover damages as long as the plaintiff is not more than fifty percent at fault for his or her own injuries. In a hospital shooting case, this rule matters because the defense will almost certainly argue that the decedent or the surviving victim should have done something to avoid the harm — should have run, should have hidden, should have been somewhere else. Delaware’s 51% bar means that even if a jury assigns some share of fault to the victim, recovery is not barred unless that share crosses the fifty-percent line. We will work to keep your family’s share of fault as low as possible, because under Delaware law, even a small percentage of comparative fault reduces the recovery proportionally — but does not eliminate it.
No Damage Caps in Delaware
Delaware does not impose a statutory cap on compensatory damages in personal injury or wrongful death cases. That makes Delaware meaningfully different from states like Texas, California, or Florida, where artificial damage caps limit what juries can award for non-economic harm like pain, suffering, mental anguish, and loss of companionship. In Delaware, a New Castle County jury is free to return a verdict that reflects the full weight of what was taken from your family, without a legislative ceiling telling them their answer does not count past a certain number. Combined with the strength of the liability case against a healthcare institution that failed in its core duty, the absence of a damage cap is one of the most important features of the venue for your family.
The Foreseeability Standard — The Heart of Your Case
If you take only one legal concept from this page, take this one: foreseeability. Foreseeability is the question of whether the harm that occurred was the kind of harm the defendant should have anticipated and prepared for. Foreseeability is what turns a tragic shooting into a corporate negligence case.
To prove foreseeability in this case, we will be building a record on three fronts, all at once.
Front One: The Location. Wilmington Hospital sits in the heart of a city that has, like every major American city, struggled with violent crime at rates higher than the surrounding suburbs. I-95 runs immediately adjacent to the hospital campus, providing rapid access to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The hospital is a Level III Trauma Center, meaning it receives the most severe injuries from a wide catchment area — patients who arrive by ambulance, by police transport, by helicopter, and by private vehicle, often at night, often under the influence, often with companions who are agitated, frightened, or armed. We will retain a security consultant — most likely a former Secret Service or FBI special agent with healthcare security expertise — to testify that the cumulative risk profile of an urban Level III Trauma Center in a high-crime corridor is exactly the kind of setting that the national standard of care says should be protected by weapon screening at public entrances.
Front Two: The Hospital’s Own History. A hospital does not get to claim that a shooting came out of nowhere if it had previous “Code Silver” events, prior security breaches, prior weapons confiscated at the door, prior internal memos flagging security concerns, or prior consultant recommendations that were not implemented. We will be demanding, in discovery, every internal security assessment, every risk management report, every board-level discussion of security, every prior weapons-related incident report, and every communication with the contracted security vendor for the last ten years. If the hospital received a recommendation to install metal detectors and declined, that decision is evidence. If a prior consultant warned of unsecured entrances and the warning was overridden by a budget committee, that override is evidence. The Sentinel Event report that The Joint Commission requires after this incident will, in many cases, itself document failures that the institution had previously identified and failed to fix.
Front Three: The National Standard of Care. The Joint Commission has been publishing security standards for hospitals for decades. OSHA has been publishing workplace violence prevention guidelines for healthcare workers for years. CMS Conditions of Participation require hospitals to ensure patient safety. Industry best practices for urban trauma centers include weapon screening at public entrances, controlled access points, badge-only entry to high-risk areas, and visible armed security presence. We will show the jury what the national standard of care is, and we will show them, point by point, where ChristianaCare fell short of it.
Foreseeability is not an abstract legal concept. It is the question your jury will answer when they look at the entrance to the emergency department, look at the security camera footage of the suspect walking in, and ask themselves the one question that drives verdicts: could this have been prevented? We are going to make sure the answer is yes, and we are going to make sure the jury sees exactly how.
The Federal Standards ChristianaCare Was Required to Follow
To understand how far below the standard ChristianaCare may have fallen, you need to understand what the standard actually is. Here are the three federal frameworks that govern hospital security, and that we will be measuring ChristianaCare’s conduct against in this case.
The Joint Commission Environment of Care Standards
The Joint Commission publishes a comprehensive set of standards for hospital safety under its Environment of Care chapter. Those standards require hospitals to identify security risks, develop a security management plan, implement that plan, and train staff in security procedures. The standards explicitly address workplace violence, active shooter scenarios, controlled access, and the use of security technology. A hospital that has not conducted a current security risk assessment, has not implemented a written security plan, and has not trained its staff in active shooter response is out of compliance with the accreditation standards it must meet to keep receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding. ChristianaCare is accredited. We will be testing exactly what it did to earn that accreditation, and whether what it did was real, or was a paper exercise that looked good in an audit and failed in a hallway.
OSHA Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence
OSHA’s Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Healthcare and Social Service Workers are not technically regulations, but they are the authoritative federal statement of what reasonable workplace violence prevention looks like in a healthcare setting. The guidelines recommend a written workplace violence prevention program, hazard assessment, engineering and administrative controls, training, and incident reporting and investigation. They specifically address weapons screening in high-risk settings. We will be using these guidelines as a benchmark for what ChristianaCare should have been doing, and we will be asking a Wilmington jury to compare the standard against the reality.
CMS Conditions of Participation
To receive federal Medicare and Medicaid dollars — and ChristianaCare receives a great many federal dollars — a hospital must comply with the CMS Conditions of Participation. Among those conditions is a general requirement that the hospital “ensure patient safety.” The Conditions of Participation have been the federal government’s primary tool for enforcing baseline safety standards in American hospitals for decades. The fact that ChristianaCare is in good standing with CMS is not a defense — it is a starting point we will use to show that the institution made representations about safety that it now has to answer for.
What Negligent Security Looks Like in a Hospital
When we say “negligent security” in a hospital case, we are not talking about an unlocked side door in a low-crime suburb. We are talking about the specific, identifiable security measures that a Level III Trauma Center in an urban environment should have in place to prevent a firearm from entering a space where patients, many of them vulnerable, are receiving care.
The measures that a reasonable urban hospital should have in place include, at a minimum, controlled access points at all public entrances; metal detection or handheld wanding of entrants during high-risk hours; armed security personnel trained in active shooter response; clear lockdown procedures that staff are trained on and have drilled; a security command center with real-time video monitoring; coordination with local law enforcement, including pre-incident planning; a workplace violence prevention committee that meets regularly and documents its work; incident reporting systems that flag prior security events; and a culture, from the boardroom down, that treats security as a patient safety issue and not a line item to be cut.
None of those measures is exotic. None is unprecedented. Hospitals across the country, including other ChristianaCare facilities, employ them every day. The question your jury will be asked to answer is simple: did this hospital, at this location, do the things a reasonable hospital would have done? We believe the answer is no, and we believe the evidence will prove it.
The Evidence Clock — Why Every Day You Wait Matters
This is the section of the page we most need you to read with both eyes open. In a hospital shooting case, evidence is perishable in ways that do not exist in most other kinds of lawsuits. The evidence that proves ChristianaCare’s failure is being created, stored, and deleted on a clock. Every day you wait to retain counsel, that clock ticks down.
Surveillance Footage — 7 to 30 Days to Overwrite
Wilmington Hospital’s surveillance camera system records onto digital storage, and like virtually every digital video recording system in the world, that storage has a fixed capacity. When the storage is full, the system begins to overwrite the oldest footage with the newest. Most hospital video systems operate on a 7-day to 30-day retention cycle, depending on the system’s configuration, the storage capacity, and the hospital’s written retention policy. That means that unless preservation is requested now, in writing, by a lawyer who knows how to send a litigation hold letter that will actually be honored, the footage of the shooter’s entry — which cameras, which doors, whether the entry was through a controlled access point or an unsecured side door, whether the shooter passed through a metal detector or walked past one, how long security personnel took to respond, and what the security staff did in the minutes after the first shot — will be gone forever. We cannot overstate this. The surveillance video is the spine of this case. Without it, we have the hospital’s own description of what happened. With it, we have the truth.
Security Guard Logs and Rosters
Hospitals that outsource their security to a contracted vendor keep guard logs, post orders, and daily activity reports. Those records show who was on duty, at which post, at the time of the shooting. They show whether the hospital was understaffed for the shift. They show whether the security personnel assigned to the emergency department entrance were, in fact, at the emergency department entrance. Internal audits and the routine turnover of security vendor contracts create enormous pressure to “lose” or “reformat” these records. We send litigation hold letters the same day we are retained, and we follow up with a formal spoliation demand. If those records disappear after that letter arrives, we will ask a Wilmington judge to instruct the jury that they may presume the missing records would have been unfavorable to ChristianaCare.
Prior Incident Reports and Code Silver Events
Foreseeability is built out of prior incidents. If the hospital has previously had weapons confiscated at the door, prior altercations in the emergency department waiting room, prior “Code Silver” events, prior reports of unsecured entrances, or prior complaints from staff about inadequate security, those records are the foundation of the case. They are also the records most likely to be quietly reclassified or removed from the active file system once the scope of the exposure becomes clear. We will be demanding every one of them in discovery, and we will be cross-checking them against the police report data and the local crime statistics for the surrounding zip codes.
Hospital Access Control Data
Modern hospitals use electronic badge access on staff doors, on doors to high-risk units, and on many patient and visitor entrances. The badge access system logs every badge swipe, with a timestamp and a user identity. That data can show, among other things, whether the shooter used a valid badge to enter, whether an employee held the door open, whether a propped-open door was a contributing factor, and whether an access-controlled door was malfunctioning. Electronic access data is also perishable. It is routinely purged after a defined retention period, often 30 to 90 days. We move on this the day we are retained.
The Joint Commission Sentinel Event Report
The Joint Commission requires a thorough root-cause analysis and action plan after a sentinel event — and a shooting that kills one person and wounds another in a hospital is, by any definition, a sentinel event. That report is generated by ChristianaCare’s own quality and safety staff, using internal documents, internal interviews, and internal data. It is precisely the kind of document a defendant will claim is confidential and protected. We will be fighting to obtain it, and where we cannot obtain it directly, we will be using its absence at trial to ask the jury the obvious question: if the institution’s own internal review cleared it, why is the institution hiding the report?
The Medical Truth of a Hospital Shooting
Gunshot wounds are unlike almost any other injury in personal injury law. The kinetic energy of a bullet moving at hundreds or thousands of feet per second destroys tissue along its path in ways that surgeons describe bluntly as “permanent cavity” and “temporary cavity” damage. A single round can shatter bone, sever blood vessels, damage organs, and cause bleeding that becomes fatal in minutes if not controlled. Even when the round misses vital structures, the wound track can be devastating, and the infections, complications, and reconstructive surgeries that follow can take years to resolve.
For the family of the person who died, the medical question that matters most in Delaware is the question of survival damages — the conscious pain and suffering the decedent experienced between the moment of the shooting and the moment of death. Under Delaware law, a survival action is a claim brought by the decedent’s estate for the harm the decedent himself suffered before death. If your loved one remained conscious for any period of time after being shot — and the medical records and the timeline of police response will tell us — the suffering, fear, and pain of those minutes and hours is compensable, separately from the wrongful death damages. We will work with our medical experts to establish that timeline from the medical record, from the witness statements, and from the time-stamped surveillance video.
For the surviving victim, the medical record tells a different story. The physical injuries — the wound track, the surgical repairs, the rehabilitation, the scarring, the loss of function — are the foundation. But a hospital shooting also leaves deep psychological wounds. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the norm, not the exception, in shooting survivors. The survivor may have been lying in a hospital bed when the shots were fired, surrounded by staff who were themselves targets, unable to move, unable to flee, listening to sounds no human being is built to hear. That kind of trauma produces diagnosable, treatable, and compensable psychological injury that must be documented by qualified mental health professionals and included in the damages case.
For family members who were not in the hospital, the medical story is also real. The shock, the grief, the anxiety, the sleep loss, the physical manifestations of catastrophic loss — these are not theatrical effects, they are diagnosable conditions, and in a serious Delaware wrongful death case they are part of the damages we pursue. We treat medicine with the seriousness it deserves, because we have sat at the kitchen tables where this kind of injury lives long after the cameras leave.
The Money — What This Case Is Worth
You are reading a page that talks about grief and loss and tragedy, and you are wondering how much money a case like this is worth. You are not wrong to ask. The money is the only mechanism the legal system has to try to make your family whole, and to punish an institution so that it does not let this happen again. Here is how we think about damages in a Delaware hospital shooting case.
Economic damages are the dollars with receipts. For the surviving victim, they include every past and future medical bill — the emergency surgery, the ICU, the rehabilitation, the psychiatric care, the medications, the future reconstructive procedures. For the decedent’s estate, they include the funeral and burial expenses, the loss of the decedent’s future earnings, the loss of the value of the services the decedent provided to the family, and the loss of the financial support the decedent would have contributed over a working lifetime. For an adult who was employed at the time of death, the future-earnings component alone can reach seven figures. We work with forensic economists to model that loss based on the decedent’s actual work history, education, age, and life expectancy.
Non-economic damages are the dollars without receipts. They are the compensation for the physical pain the decedent suffered before death (in a survival action), the mental anguish of the surviving family members, the loss of the decedent’s love, companionship, society, and guidance, and the destruction of the family relationship that will never be recovered. In Delaware, with no statutory cap, a Wilmington jury is free to return a non-economic verdict that reflects the full weight of what was taken. New Castle County juries have shown they will do exactly that when the evidence supports it.
Punitive damages are not compensation. They are punishment, and they exist to deter. If we can prove to a Delaware jury that ChristianaCare’s conduct was willful and wanton — that it knew of the risk, that it had the means to address the risk, and that it consciously chose not to — punitive damages are available under 10 Del. C. § 8132. In a case against a major health system with the resources of ChristianaCare, a meaningful punitive award is the only verdict that sends the message to every other hospital executive in the country that the cost of skipping weapon screening at the door is higher than the cost of installing it.
The range of value in this case, given the strength of the liability, the absence of a Delaware damage cap, the size of the institutional defendant, and the layers of insurance available, is in the multi-million dollar range. We will not promise you a number. We will promise you that we will build the case to its full value, that we will not settle short of what the evidence supports, and that we will tell you the truth about the range at every step of the way. Past results depend on the facts of each case, and a future outcome depends on facts we are still gathering.
The Playbook — What ChristianaCare’s Lawyers Will Do
You should know what is coming, because it is coming whether you are ready for it or not. Within days of the shooting, ChristianaCare’s risk management team will activate. Their lawyers will too. Here is the playbook they will run, and here is how we counter it.
Their play: The quick nuisance-value offer. Within weeks, sometimes days, a hospital’s insurance carrier will reach out with a settlement offer framed as a compassionate gesture. The number is small relative to the full value of the case, and the timing is calculated to land before the family has hired a lawyer, before the medical picture is complete, before the surveillance footage is locked down. We counter by sending our own preservation letters immediately, by completing our own investigation of the security failures, by ensuring the medical record is fully developed, and by making clear to the carrier that nuisance offers will be rejected.
Their play: Blame the shooter. The defense will argue that this is the shooter’s fault, that the hospital is a victim too, and that no amount of security could have stopped a determined gunman. That argument has an answer. In Delaware, the existence of a third-party criminal actor does not relieve a landowner of the duty to take reasonable precautions against foreseeable criminal conduct. The question is not whether the shooter is to blame — of course he is — the question is whether the hospital’s security fell below the standard of care for an urban Level III Trauma Center. The shooter is one defendant. The hospital is another. Both are accountable, in different ways, for the harm they caused.
Their play: Claim the incident was not foreseeable. The defense will argue that shootings in hospitals are rare and that ChristianaCare had no reason to anticipate this specific event. We counter with crime statistics for the area, with the hospital’s own prior security incident reports, with the OSHA guidelines, with the Joint Commission standards, and with our security expert’s testimony about what a reasonable urban hospital security program looks like. Foreseeability does not require the defendant to have predicted the specific event. It requires the defendant to have anticipated the general type of harm and taken reasonable steps to prevent it. The evidence will show ChristianaCare could and should have done more.
Their play: Confidentiality and privilege. The defense will claim that the Sentinel Event report, the internal security assessments, the risk management committee minutes, and the consultant reports are protected from disclosure. Some of those documents are protected. Most are not, or are protected only in part. We are experienced at working with the courts to obtain access to the materials that matter, and where documents remain protected, we are experienced at asking the jury the right question about why the institution is hiding them.
Their play: Delay. Insurance carriers and corporate defendants often try to run out the clock, hoping that a grieving family will eventually accept a low offer rather than fight for years. We do not let that strategy work. We set the case schedule. We push the discovery. We prepare the case for trial from day one, because a case that is being prepared for trial is a case that gets taken seriously.
The First 72 Hours — What To Do and What Not To Do
If you are the family member of the person who died, or the surviving victim, or the witness who is now in shock, here is the short list of what to do in the next three days. None of this is a substitute for the full strategy we will build together. It is the immediate first aid.
Do not give a recorded statement to anyone. Not to ChristianaCare’s risk management. Not to their insurance adjuster. Not to a private investigator who shows up at your door with a business card. Anything you say will be recorded, transcribed, and used to minimize the value of your case. Politely refer all inquiries to your attorney.
Do not sign a broad medical records release. The defense will ask for a complete medical history dating back years, looking for any pre-existing condition they can blame for the outcome. Sign nothing until a lawyer reviews it.
Do preserve your own evidence. Save every text message, every email, every photograph from that day, every voicemail from the hospital, every receipt, every medical bill, every page of the police report you can obtain. The hospital’s evidence is being preserved by us, through formal legal process. Your evidence is your responsibility, and it matters.
Do identify witnesses. Anyone who was in the hospital that day, anyone who saw the suspect, anyone who spoke to the security guards, anyone who heard the lockdown announcement, is a potential witness. Get their names and contact information now, before they scatter. If you can, ask them to write down what they saw and heard while the memory is fresh.
Do not post about the case on social media. Defense investigators monitor the public social media of plaintiffs, claimants, and family members. A single photograph of a family barbecue, a single caption about feeling better, will be pulled and used against you. Go quiet online until you have spoken with a lawyer.
Do follow your medical team’s advice. For the surviving victim, follow every referral. Mental health care, physical therapy, pain management, follow-up imaging — every appointment is part of the damages record. For family members, please see your own doctor if you are experiencing the physical or psychological symptoms of acute grief. The medical record of that care is part of the case.
Do call us. The call is free, confidential, and available right now. 1-888-ATTY-911. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We serve your family fully in Spanish, and we mean it.
How We Build the Case — Step by Step
A hospital negligent security case is not built in a courtroom. It is built at a desk, in preservation letters, in expert consultations, and in depositions, over months and sometimes years. Here is the actual sequence, in the actual order, walked by someone who has done it.
Step 1: Preservation. Within hours of being retained, we send litigation hold letters to ChristianaCare, to the security vendor, to the Wilmington Police Department, to any third-party video monitoring service, and to the relevant CMS and Joint Commission contacts. The letters identify the categories of evidence that must be preserved, demand that no routine destruction occur, and put every recipient on notice that spoliation will have consequences. We follow up with subpoenas where necessary and with motions to preserve where the recipient hesitates.
Step 2: Public records. We pull the Wilmington Police Department incident report, the 911 audio, the dispatch logs, the CAD (computer-aided dispatch) records, the responding officer reports, and the crime statistics for the surrounding area. We pull ChristianaCare’s public filings, including IRS Form 990 disclosures for the nonprofit, the Joint Commission accreditation status, and any prior CMS inspection reports. We pull the Delaware court records for any prior lawsuits against ChristianaCare involving security failures.
Step 3: Records demands. We serve a comprehensive request for production of documents on ChristianaCare, demanding the security policies, the post orders for the day of the shooting, the guard logs, the badge access data, the prior incident reports, the risk management committee minutes, the consultant reports, the budget documents for security, the contracts with the security vendor, the training records for security personnel, the active shooter drill records, and the Sentinel Event report. Where the defense objects, we brief the motions and argue them to the court.
Step 4: Experts. We retain a security consultant — typically a former Secret Service or FBI agent with deep experience in healthcare facility security. We retain a forensic economist to model the financial loss. We retain a medical expert to interpret the medical record, to address the survival damages question, and to project future medical needs. We retain a mental health expert to document the psychological injuries. Every expert is selected for credibility in a Delaware courtroom, and every expert is prepared to testify in plain English to a Wilmington jury.
Step 5: Depositions. We take the depositions of the security guards who were on duty, the security supervisors, the risk management leadership, the hospital administrators responsible for security budgeting, the prior consultants, the treating medical providers, the eyewitnesses, and, where he is available and the criminal case has progressed, the shooter himself. Depositions are where the case is really won or lost, because they are where the defense witnesses are pinned to their story under oath.
Step 6: Mediation and trial. Most cases of this magnitude resolve in mediation, with a neutral mediator, with full preparation for trial on the table. If the carrier will not pay the case’s full value, we try it. Ralph Manginello has tried cases in state and federal court for twenty-seven years. We do not bluff. When we tell a carrier we are ready to try the case, we mean it.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Wilmington Hospital Shooting Lawsuit
Can we sue ChristianaCare even though we don’t know the shooter’s identity yet? Yes. The shooter and ChristianaCare are separate defendants with separate legal theories. The civil case against the hospital does not depend on the criminal case against the shooter, and it does not need to wait for the criminal case to conclude. In fact, waiting can be a mistake, because the evidence we need to preserve against the hospital is perishing right now.
What is the deadline to file a lawsuit in Delaware? Delaware’s statute of limitations for personal injury and wrongful death claims is generally two years from the date of death, with specific rules for when the clock starts in cases involving survival actions. There are notice requirements that can apply when a defendant is a public or quasi-public entity, and there are shorter deadlines that can apply in special circumstances. The safe answer is: do not wait. The earlier we are retained, the more we can do to preserve evidence and build the case at full value.
What if my loved one was a visitor, not a patient? Delaware law treats invitees — including visitors to a hospital — as owed the highest duty of care by the property owner. You have a claim, and you have standing to bring it. Visitors are also covered as beneficiaries under Delaware’s wrongful death statute if they are the decedent’s spouse, parent, or child.
What if the surviving victim was a hospital employee? Workers’ compensation in Delaware generally provides the exclusive remedy against the employer for work-related injuries, but that does not bar a claim against a third party — and it does not bar a claim against the security vendor. Workers’ comp also does not bar a claim against a coworker who acted intentionally. We will evaluate the employment status of the surviving victim and pursue every available avenue.
How long will this case take? Honest answer: a case of this complexity typically resolves in twelve to thirty-six months, depending on the court’s docket, the pace of discovery, and the defendant’s willingness to negotiate. We move as fast as the evidence allows, and we keep you informed at every step.
How much does it cost to hire your firm? We work on a contingency fee — you pay no attorney fee unless we recover for you. The consultation is free. The case evaluation is free. The investigation, the expert retention, the filing fees, the depositions — we front the cost of building the case, and we are repaid out of the recovery. If there is no recovery, you owe us nothing for attorney fees.
What if the family cannot agree on who should bring the case? Delaware’s wrongful death statute identifies the eligible beneficiaries, and where multiple beneficiaries exist, the court can appoint a personal representative to act on behalf of the estate. We routinely work with families in exactly this situation and can guide you through the process.
Will this case go to trial? We prepare every case as if it will go to trial, because cases that are genuinely trial-ready are the cases that resolve at full value. Whether this particular case is tried depends on the evidence, the venue, the defense posture, and your family’s goals. You make that decision. We make the recommendation. We do not make the choice for you.
Is the hospital going to settle quickly to avoid publicity? Possibly, but “quickly” and “fairly” are different things. Early settlement offers in hospital shooting cases are typically a fraction of the case’s full value, structured to land before the security footage is gone, before the medical record is complete, and before the family understands what the case is really worth. We do not let the clock beat the value.
Can we speak to the media? You can, and many families in your position want to. We can help you think through the implications of media exposure — both the catharsis of being heard and the risk of creating evidence the defense will use against you. The decision is yours.
What if the shooter has no assets to recover from? That is the central reason the civil case is against the institution. The shooter may be judgment-proof. The hospital is not. The institution with the insurance, the budget, the federal funding, the board of directors, and the duty is the defendant that can actually pay.
What about a civil case in Pennsylvania, where the shooter was caught? It is possible to file suit in more than one jurisdiction, but venue selection is a strategic decision. We will evaluate the comparative strength of Delaware venue (where the harm occurred and where the defendant is located) and any alternative jurisdictions, and recommend the venue that gives your case the best chance of full value.
Who We Are — Attorney911 Trial Lawyers
You are about to hire a law firm in the worst week of your life, and you are right to want to know who is on the other end of the line. Here is who we are, in plain language.
Our firm is Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We were founded in 2001 by Ralph Manginello, a trial lawyer who has been in courtrooms for more than twenty-seven years. Ralph was a journalist before he was a lawyer, and he explains complicated things the way a good journalist does — by telling the truth, in order, with the connective tissue that lets you follow the argument. Before journalism and law, Ralph was a championship-team point guard, a competitor who learned early that you play to win. He was inducted into the Cheshire Academy Athletic Hall of Fame in 2021. He has tried cases in Texas state and federal court and is admitted to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He has recovered more than $50 million for Texas and out-of-state families over the course of his career, and he has handled complex institutional litigation including refinery and industrial accident cases that put him across the table from the largest defense firms in the country.
Our partner Lupe Peña is a third-generation Texan with deep South Texas roots, including family ties to the King Ranch. Lupe practiced for years inside a national insurance defense firm — the same kind of firm that will defend ChristianaCare in your case. She knows how carriers code claims. She knows the Colossus-style software that defense firms use to undervalue injuries. She knows the negotiation playbook, the reservation-of-rights letter, the lowball demand response, the deposition question designed to lock a victim into a story. She is now on the other side of that playbook, using it for the people it was used against. Lupe is a fluent Spanish speaker and serves our Spanish-speaking clients with the full scope of the firm’s legal work — not a translated summary, the actual representation, in the language the client thinks in.
Our firm is built on a simple commitment: the people we represent get the same quality of work that we would want for our own families. The consultation is free. The case evaluation is free. The contingency fee means we only get paid if we recover for you. We are available 24/7. We are a phone call away, and we are ready to start working for your family today.
You can read more about our attorneys and trial team, our practice areas, and our library of educational videos at our website. You can also learn more about how we handle wrongful death cases of this magnitude and the broader categories of catastrophic injury and institutional negligence that we prosecute.
The Call We Want You To Make
If you have read this far, you already know what you need to do. The shooting at Wilmington Hospital on June 16, 2026 was a foreseeable failure of a foreseeable risk, and the institution that profited from operating the hospital now owes a duty to the family of the person who died and to the person who survived. The evidence that proves that failure is being deleted, reclassified, and buried right now. The clock is running, and the clock is the defense’s best friend.
Call us. The consultation is free. The conversation is confidential. There is no obligation. 1-888-ATTY-911. We are available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We serve your family in English and fully in Spanish. If you cannot call, write to us through our contact page and we will reach back out to you within hours.
This page is legal information, not legal advice for your specific case. The application of Delaware law to the facts of your family’s situation depends on details we have not yet gathered. We provide that advice in person, on the phone, or in writing once you retain us, and we provide it in a way that respects your intelligence, your grief, and your right to make the final decision about what happens next.
The hospital failed your family once. Do not let the aftermath fail you twice. We are ready. We are on the line. Make the call.
