If You Are Reading This in the Hours After Wilmington Hospital
You came to this page because someone you love went to work inside ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital on Tuesday, June 16, 2026, and did not come home the same person. Maybe they did not come home at all. Or maybe they came home alive, wounded, and now sitting in a different hospital bed trying to process what happened inside a building that was supposed to be one of the safest places in Delaware.
We are sorry. We are sorry for the phone call you received, for the drive to the hospital you did not want to make, for the silence in the house now, for the questions you cannot stop asking — how, why, who knew, who could have stopped this.
Before we say one word about the law, we want you to hear two things. First: what happened at Wilmington Hospital was not just a “crazy person with a gun.” The law in Delaware, the law of every state, treats workplaces — especially hospitals — as places where employers have affirmative legal duties to protect the people inside them. Those duties exist whether or not a shooter was known to be dangerous, and they include things like access control, metal detection, behavioral threat assessment, panic-button systems, and background screening. Whether ChristianaCare met those duties is the central question of every civil claim that follows.
Second: in the next seventy-two hours, evidence that will decide every dollar your family recovers or does not recover is being created, deleted, or quietly swept into hospital counsel’s files. Personnel records of the shooter. Security-camera footage. Badge-access logs. Threat-assessment records. OSHA 300 logs. Witness memories. LPR data that tracked the suspect’s car to Philadelphia. All of it has a clock. We are going to tell you exactly what that clock looks like and what we send to stop it — and we are going to tell you the Delaware law that decides whether your family is locked into a small workers’ compensation check or whether the hospital is exposed for the full value of what it failed to prevent.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page is legal information, not legal advice for your specific situation — and your situation deserves its own conversation. That conversation is free, confidential, and available twenty-four hours a day. We speak English and Spanish. The number is at the bottom of this page.
What We Know About the Shooting at Wilmington Hospital
On Tuesday, June 16, 2026, at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, a shooting occurred inside Wilmington Hospital, a ChristianaCare facility in the 500 block of West 14th Street in Wilmington, Delaware. According to preliminary law enforcement information, one hospital employee shot two other hospital employees in what is described as an alleged intra-workplace, targeted attack. One of those employees was killed. The second was wounded and remains hospitalized.
The hospital was placed on lockdown. ChristianaCare diverted emergency department patients to other facilities. A 23-year-old male suspect fled in a Toyota RAV4. License plate reader cameras tracked the vehicle across state lines into Pennsylvania, and the suspect was taken into custody in the Olney section of Philadelphia at approximately 9:30 p.m. that Tuesday night. Charges and extradition to Delaware are pending. The identities of the deceased, the wounded employee, and the suspect have not been publicly released as of the time this page was written, out of respect for the families and pending formal notification.
Those are the facts we will work from. Every additional paragraph on this page takes those facts and walks them through what Delaware law makes possible — and what the hospital’s defense team will try to make impossible. We handle this subject with the restraint of a eulogy and the precision of a trial lawyer, because the people at the center of it are someone’s parent, someone’s spouse, someone’s child, someone’s coworker who showed up for a shift and never came home.
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Why a Hospital Is Legally Different From a Random Street
A hospital is not a sidewalk. A hospital is not a parking lot. Under Delaware premises-liability law, the people who own and operate a hospital owe heightened duties to the people they invite inside — and that includes the people they employ, who are invited in five days a week, every week, for years. The duty is to protect invitees from foreseeable criminal conduct by third parties, and foreseeability in the healthcare context is not a stretch — it is the industry baseline.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented for years that healthcare workers experience violent injury at roughly five times the rate of all industries combined. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has formally identified workplace violence in healthcare as a recognized hazard under the General Duty Clause, 29 U.S.C. § 654(a)(1), which requires every employer to furnish a workplace “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” The Joint Commission, which accredits American hospitals, has issued Sentinel Event Alert #59 specifically on workplace violence prevention and imposes Environment of Care standards (EC.02.01.01, EC.04.01.01) requiring hospitals to conduct violence risk assessments and implement controls. The federal Medicare program, through 42 C.F.R. § 482.13(c)(2), conditions hospital participation on protection of patients and staff from harm.
What that means in plain English is this: ChristianaCare did not get to choose whether workplace violence was a risk it had to plan for. The federal government, the accreditor, and the Medicare program all said it was — repeatedly, in writing, for years. The question is whether this hospital met the standard or fell short, and that question is decided by what the personnel file of the shooter shows, what the security footage shows, what the threat-assessment team records show, what the prior incident reports show, and what the badge-access and metal-detection protocols actually were on the afternoon of June 16.
That evidence is the case. And it has a clock.
Delaware’s Workers’ Compensation Act — and Why It Is Not the End of the Story
When a Delaware employee is hurt or killed at work, the default rule is that workers’ compensation is the exclusive remedy against the employer. That rule comes from 19 Del. C. § 2301 et seq., the Delaware Workers’ Compensation Act. Under that exclusivity, an injured worker (or the family of a deceased worker) cannot sue the employer in tort for ordinary negligence — they file a workers’ comp claim and receive statutorily defined benefits. For a death in Delaware, those death benefits are capped under 19 Del. C. § 2334 — and depending on the number of dependents, the maximum recoverable against the employer through comp alone typically falls in a range that, while meaningful, is a fraction of what a Wilmington jury can return in a wrongful-death verdict.
For many families whose loved ones are killed at work, that exclusivity is the only door available. But in Delaware — as in most states — the door has exceptions. Two of them matter here.
First, the intentional-tort exception. Where the employer’s conduct rises to an intentional tort — not a negligent omission, but a deliberate act intended to cause injury, or knowledge that injury is substantially certain — workers’ compensation exclusivity does not bar the civil suit. Second, the willful or wanton conduct exception, where the employer’s behavior shows such a conscious disregard for employee safety that the law treats it as outside the bargain the Workers’ Compensation Act was designed to cover.
These exceptions are not easy to invoke, and we are not going to pretend they are. Delaware’s exclusivity bar is more employer-favorable than many states, and any good trial lawyer is going to be honest with a family about what it takes to pierce it. But the negligent-hiring, negligent-retention, negligent-supervision, and negligent-security theories in a case like this are exactly the kind of theories that, with the right evidence, can meet those exceptions — because they are not about a single bad act by a single employee. They are about what the hospital as an institution knew, when it knew it, and what it chose to do or not do about it.
If the shooter had a documented history of threats, prior discipline, prior restraining orders, prior behavioral red flags, prior domestic violence, prior drug use, prior termination from a healthcare job for violent conduct — and that history was either not discovered, not acted on, or actively papered over — that is the architecture of a claim that goes past workers’ comp and into the full measure of Delaware wrongful-death damages. The same is true if the hospital’s security program was so deficient that, on any reasonable reading of the regulatory and accreditation standards that govern it, the shooting was the foreseeable consequence of a system that was not built to stop it.
The negligent-hiring/retention theory is, in practical financial terms, the fulcrum of the entire case. Without it, the family is largely confined to the workers’ comp cap. With it, the full Delaware wrongful-death statute opens — including punitive damages where wanton negligence is proven.
Negligent Hiring, Retention, and Supervision — the Theory That Can Pierce Exclusivity
Delaware law recognizes that an employer has a duty to exercise reasonable care in hiring, retaining, and supervising employees, particularly where the employee is placed in a position where they could cause foreseeable harm to others. In a hospital setting, that duty extends to every staff member who interacts with patients, visitors, and other employees. The legal question is not whether the hospital was perfect — perfection is not the standard. The legal question is whether the hospital knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known, that this particular employee posed a risk of serious harm, and whether it acted on that knowledge.
The proof of that question lives in records. The personnel file. The hiring application. The background check report. The reference checks. The drug screen. The performance reviews. The discipline history. The EAP referrals. The prior complaints. The restraining orders, if any. The training records on workplace violence, de-escalation, and weapons policy. The records of any supervisor who received warnings and what that supervisor did about them.
If those records show a clean file and a sudden, unforeseeable act of violence by an employee who had given no warning, the negligent-hiring theory becomes difficult. If those records show warning signs that were missed, ignored, or buried — or if the records themselves have been “lost” or “purged” under routine retention in the days since the shooting — the theory becomes the heart of the case. That is why the personnel file is the first preservation letter that goes out the day a family calls. Not the second week. The day.
And that is also why ChristianaCare’s response to this shooting will be studied with particular care. The hospital will be on defense footing now. Its compliance and legal teams will be coordinating with its insurer. Documents will be reviewed for privilege. Routine retention schedules will be either carefully followed or quietly accelerated, depending on what those schedules say. Witness accounts will be taken in a controlled way. The hospital’s public statements will be sympathetic. Its internal posture will be different. Families who do not have counsel of their own in those first seventy-two hours are at a disadvantage that is difficult to undo later. The preservation letter, the litigation hold, and the independent investigation begin to close that gap.
Negligent Security — the Premises-Liability Theory
Separate from the negligent-hiring theory, Delaware premises-liability law gives the deceased employee’s family and the surviving victim a second line of attack against the hospital: negligent security. Under Delaware law, a possessor of land who holds it open to invitees — including its own employees — owes a duty to take reasonable precautions against foreseeable criminal conduct by third parties. Hospitals are paradigmatic examples of that duty because they are open to the public, operate twenty-four hours a day, treat people in crisis, hold controlled substances, and employ workers who are often alone with patients and visitors in vulnerable moments.
The foreseeable-conduct analysis is fact-specific, and the relevant facts include (1) prior workplace-violence incidents at this campus, (2) industry knowledge of healthcare workplace-violence statistics — the OSHA and BLS data we have already mentioned, (3) any prior specific threats by the shooter, (4) the adequacy of metal detection, badge access control, panic-button systems, and visitor-management procedures on June 16, and (5) post-incident revelations of warning signs that were not acted on. A hospital’s own internal risk assessments, its OSHA 300 logs, its Joint Commission survey results, its threat-assessment team records, and its prior incident reports are all discoverable evidence of what the hospital actually knew about the risk it was sitting on.
Under the OSHA General Duty Clause, an employer that knows of a recognized hazard and fails to implement feasible abatement measures is in violation of federal law. OSHA citations are paid to the government, not to the family — but the investigative file behind them is powerful evidence in a civil wrongful-death and survival case, and the standard of care the citation articulates is precisely the standard a Wilmington jury will be asked to apply.
Wrongful Death Damages in Delaware — 10 Del. C. § 3724
Delaware’s wrongful-death statute, 10 Del. C. § 3724, permits the personal representative of a deceased employee to bring an action for the benefit of the surviving spouse, children, parents, and — where there are no survivors in those categories — the estate. Recoverable damages include:
- Loss of the deceased’s financial contributions, including future earning capacity, projected raises, pension and retirement contributions, and the value of household services the deceased would have provided;
- Loss of the deceased’s society, comfort, guidance, and companionship — the non-economic damages that, in plain terms, reflect what the family actually lost;
- Funeral and burial expenses (typically in the $10,000 to $20,000 range for a Delaware service, often more for arrangements the family did not have time to plan);
- The family’s emotional distress damages, where the statute and the case law permit them.
Delaware does not impose a general statutory cap on wrongful-death damages. Wilmington juries in New Castle County have returned seven-figure non-economic awards in workplace-death cases in recent years, particularly where the defendant’s conduct showed disregard for employee safety.
Critically, 10 Del. C. § 3724 also permits punitive damages where the defendant’s conduct shows wanton negligence or willfulness. This is where the negligent-hiring, negligent-retention, and negligent-security theories acquire their sharpest edge. If discovery shows that ChristianaCare knew — or, given what its own threat-assessment program should have surfaced, should have known — that the shooter posed a foreseeable risk, and if it failed to act, punitive damages become available. Punitive damages are not a windfall. They are the law’s way of saying that conduct so far below the standard of care deserves punishment and deterrence, and they are often the leverage that moves a corporate defendant from a low settlement offer to one that reflects the real value of the life lost.
The Survival Action — 10 Del. C. § 3701
If the deceased employee survived for any period of time between being shot and death, Delaware law permits a separate survival action under 10 Del. C. § 3701 for the conscious pain and suffering, the medical expenses incurred, and the lost earnings between injury and death. The survival claim belongs to the estate and is brought by the personal representative alongside the wrongful-death claim. The damages in a survival action are often substantial — they compensate for what the deceased themselves endured — and they are recoverable in addition to the wrongful-death damages, not in place of them.
Where the conscious-pain-and-suffering period is short, the survival damages are smaller. Where the period is longer and the medical record documents the dying process, the survival damages can be among the most contested components of the case, because defense counsel will push to minimize what the deceased subjectively experienced while the family’s counsel will rely on medical records and expert testimony to establish the reality of it. We will tell you plainly: survival damages depend on the medical record, and that record is part of what the preservation process protects.
The Second Victim — the Personal-Injury Case and What Not to Sign
The second employee who was shot and survived has a different case, with different damages, but the same urgency. Their recoverable damages include all medical expenses (likely six figures given ED admission and possible surgery), lost wages, lost future earning capacity if there is permanent impairment, pain and suffering, and the psychological trauma of having been shot by a coworker in a place they had every reason to believe was safe.
The single most important warning for the surviving victim and their family is this: do not sign anything ChristianaCare HR puts in front of you in the next thirty days without counsel review. Hospital counsel and HR will move quickly. They will offer what sounds like a sympathetic package — continuation of pay, help with medical bills, an “expedited” workers’ comp filing, perhaps a modest lump sum — and the document they hand you will include a release of all claims, often broader than the family realizes. That release, once signed, is extremely difficult to undo. It does not just close the workers’ comp claim. It can close the negligent-security claim, the negligent-hiring claim, the intentional-tort exception argument, the punitive-damages exposure, and the future-medical-coverage question.
If you are the surviving victim, or the family of one, your case is not a workers’ comp case. It is a civil case with workers’ comp elements. Treating it only as the latter — and signing a release that closes the former — is the single most expensive mistake a family can make in the days after a hospital shooting. The consultation to find out what you are actually being asked to sign is free. The cost of signing without it can be permanent.
Evidence That Disappears in 30 to 90 Days — What Must Be Preserved Now
Every civil case in America is decided by evidence, and every piece of evidence has a clock. In hospital-shooting cases the clocks are short, the custodians are sophisticated, and the records are exactly the kind that defense counsel knows to look for first. Here is the evidence that must be preserved, who holds it, and how fast it can legally be lost.
The shooter’s personnel file. Hiring application, background-check report, reference checks, drug screen, performance reviews, discipline history, attendance, EAP referrals, prior complaints, restraining orders, training records. This is the foundation of the negligent-hiring and negligent-retention case. It is held by ChristianaCare’s Human Resources department. It can be “purged” under routine retention policies, sealed under personnel confidentiality, or quietly transferred to in-house counsel for “review” — all of which can render it effectively unavailable. The preservation letter goes out within twenty-four hours of a family calling. That letter is the single most important piece of paper in the first week of the case.
Hospital security infrastructure. Security logs, badge-access records, CCTV footage from the ED, lobby, and any courtyard or entry where the shooter entered, panic-button logs, visitor-management sign-in sheets, metal-detection logs (if any), and the timeline of law enforcement response. CCTV in most hospitals overwrites on a thirty-to-ninety-day rolling cycle. Litigation hold letters to ChristianaCare’s security director, IT department, and outside CCTV vendor must go out immediately. Without that hold, the footage can be legally erased before any civil subpoena reaches it.
Compliance and accreditation documents. ChristianaCare’s Workplace Violence Prevention Program documents, written risk assessments, OSHA 300 logs, threat-assessment team records, prior incident reports, Joint Commission survey results, and CMS-compliance documentation. These records are routinely destroyed on rolling three-to-five-year retention cycles, and they are the documents that prove or disprove whether the hospital knew of the foreseeable risk it was sitting on. They are central to the negligent-security case and to the willful/wanton-conduct argument that can pierce workers’ comp exclusivity.
License Plate Reader data. The LPR cameras that tracked the suspect’s RAV4 from Wilmington into Philadelphia are held by Delaware and Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies and their LPR contractors. LPR data can purge on thirty-to-ninety-day cycles depending on the operator. Delaware Freedom of Information Act requests and parallel Pennsylvania Right-to-Know requests must go out promptly to preserve the trail.
The Toyota RAV4 itself. Held by Wilmington Police as evidence in the criminal case. It will be released after the criminal proceedings conclude unless a civil preservation request and motion is filed. The vehicle may contain GPS, OnStar, or infotainment data establishing the shooter’s movements, communications, and mental state in the hours before the shooting.
The shooter’s cell phone. Almost certainly the subject of a criminal search warrant. Call detail records, text messages, social media, photos, and search history are motive, planning, and mental-state evidence. The phone will be returned to the defendant after the criminal case concludes. Civil litigants must move now for access to a copy of the extracted data, or be barred by the criminal case’s discovery schedule.
Eyewitness accounts. ED staff, hospital guides, patients, and visitors saw what happened. The public saw what happened — there is broadcast footage from a news helicopter showing people exiting with hands up. Memories fade within weeks. Recorded witness statements from law enforcement are FOIA-able. Independent witness interviews, conducted promptly, preserve testimony that will never again be as fresh as it is right now.
Broadcast and internal media. Local news helicopter and broadcast footage has its own retention schedule — typically thirty to ninety days. Preservation letters to the relevant stations must go out the same week.
The list above is not exhaustive. It is the floor. Every item on that list is the kind of evidence that, if it disappears, cannot be reconstructed. The preservation effort is not glamorous. It is paper, postage, and persistence. It is also the single largest determinant of whether a family’s case results in a meaningful recovery or in a denial that the records existed.
The Insurance and HR Playbook — What the Hospital Will Do in the First Thirty Days
Within hours of the shooting, ChristianaCare’s risk management team will begin coordinating with its insurer and its outside counsel. The hospital’s communications strategy will be sympathetic in public and defensive in private. From the family’s perspective, the playbook has a recognizable shape. Knowing the plays lets you counter them.
Play one: workers’ compensation as the only remedy. The hospital’s first move will be to direct both families to file workers’ comp death-benefit or injury claims, characterizing the civil case as foreclosed by Delaware’s exclusivity rule. The counter is that Delaware’s exclusivity bar is not absolute — the intentional-tort and willful/wanton-conduct exceptions exist precisely for situations where the employer knew of the danger and failed to act, and the negligent-hiring/retention/supervision theory is how those exceptions get proven.
Play two: the quick settlement with a broad release. Especially for the surviving victim, HR will offer continuation of pay, expedited medical-bill processing, perhaps a modest lump sum, and a “compassionate” package — all attached to a release that closes the negligent-security claim, the negligent-hiring claim, and any punitive-damages exposure. The counter is to have any document reviewed by independent counsel before signature. A release signed in the first thirty days is almost always too broad, and once signed it is almost never undone.
Play three: blame the shooter as unforeseeable. The defense will argue that no employer could have predicted the conduct of a single rogue employee. The counter is the OSHA healthcare-violence data, the Joint Commission standards, the prior incident reports (if discoverable), the threat-assessment records (if preserved), and the personnel file. If the hospital had the warning signs and ignored them, “unforeseeable” is not a defense — it is an admission of what the hospital should have seen.
Play four: sympathetic public statements while building the defense. ChristianaCare will issue statements expressing grief, commitment to employee safety, and cooperation with law enforcement. Those statements are admissible in subsequent civil proceedings as evidence of the hospital’s asserted standard of care, and they create expectations the hospital will be held to in discovery and at trial. The family’s counsel will obtain and preserve every public statement.
Play five: selective evidence preservation. The hospital will preserve the records that help its defense and may quietly let other records purge under “routine” schedules. The counter is a comprehensive litigation-hold letter to every relevant custodian — HR, security, IT, risk management, compliance, ED leadership, the shooter’s direct supervisor — on day one.
Play six: HR benefits coordination. The hospital will frame every dollar it advances as a workers’ comp benefit, attempting to lock the family into the comp-only framework. The counter is to treat every dollar advanced as exactly what the contract says it is, and to preserve the right to make a separate civil claim for the full range of damages Delaware law allows.
Play seven: character attacks and surveillance. Defense counsel may seek to minimize the deceased’s damages by investigating personal history, medical history, and social media. The counter is privacy discipline in the family — no social media about the case, no interviews beyond a single written statement if any, and forward all media inquiries to counsel.
The playbook is not a guess. It is the standard playbook that corporate defense counsel runs in every high-exposure wrongful-death case in America. The families that recognize it and prepare for it are the families that recover in full. The families that do not are the families that, six months later, are signing releases for a fraction of what the case was actually worth.
How Cases Like This Are Actually Won in Wilmington
Here is how a hospital-shooting wrongful-death case is actually built, week by week, in a Delaware courtroom.
Week one. Litigation hold letters go out to ChristianaCare’s general counsel, the Wilmington Hospital administrator, the shooter’s HR file custodian, and the security-services vendor. Delaware FOIA requests go to Wilmington Police Department and Delaware State Police for incident reports, 911 audio, dispatch logs, and LPR data. Parallel requests go to Philadelphia Police and the Pennsylvania State Police for the arrest and LPR evidence. A petition is filed for the appointment of a personal representative for the deceased’s estate in the Delaware Court of Chancery or Superior Court, establishing standing for the wrongful-death and survival claims.
Weeks two through eight. Subpoenas issue for the shooter’s personnel file, the hospital’s OSHA 300 logs, the Workplace Violence Prevention Program, the threat-assessment team records, the prior incident reports, the badge-access logs, the visitor-management sign-in sheets, and any third-party security-services contract. Independent witness interviews are conducted. A healthcare-security expert — typically a former hospital security director or a former Joint Commission surveyor — is retained to evaluate the standard of care. A forensic psychiatrist or psychologist is retained to evaluate behavioral warning signs the hospital should have recognized.
Months three through nine. Discovery continues. Depositions are taken of ChristianaCare’s HR leadership, security director, ED director, the shooter’s direct supervisor, the threat-assessment team members, the IT custodian responsible for badge and CCTV systems, and the third-party security vendor’s account manager. The deposition of the shooter himself may be pursued, subject to the Fifth Amendment considerations that attach in parallel criminal proceedings.
Months nine through twelve. Expert reports are exchanged. Mediation is scheduled — Delaware courts encourage mediation in civil cases, and a corporate defendant like ChristianaCare will typically agree to mediate. Pre-mediation, a demand is served that frames the negligent-hiring/retention theory, the willful/wanton-conduct argument that can pierce exclusivity, and the punitive-damages exposure under 10 Del. C. § 3724. Where the insurance carrier fails to accept a demand within policy limits where liability is reasonably clear, Delaware common-law extra-contractual exposure can attach — the same bad-faith dynamic that exists in many states.
Trial. If mediation does not resolve the case, trial occurs in the New Castle County Superior Court in Wilmington. Voir dire addresses the fact that ChristianaCare is the largest employer in Delaware — venire saturation is a real issue, and counsel for the family will work to seat a jury that can evaluate the hospital’s conduct without reflexive deference to a familiar regional name. Trial proceeds through the negligent-security theory, the negligent-hiring/retention theory, the willful/wanton-conduct argument, and the damages case.
The number the case settles or tries for depends on the facts. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But the architecture of the case — preservation, subpoena, experts, deposition, demand, mediation, trial — is the architecture that has produced meaningful recoveries for families of workplace-violence victims across the country, including in Wilmington.
What Families Should Do in the Next Seventy-Two Hours
For the family of the deceased:
- Write down, today, everything you remember about the deceased’s last weeks at work. Schedule changes. Comments about coworkers or supervisors. Anything that struck you as off. Anything you wish you had asked about.
- Preserve the deceased’s personal phone, computer, and any personal notes. Do not delete anything.
- Forward every media inquiry to your lawyer before responding. Do not give statements to reporters, law enforcement, hospital HR, or insurance adjusters without counsel present.
- Do not post about the case on social media. Defense investigators will read it.
- Request a copy of any workers’ comp death-benefit paperwork the hospital or its insurer sends. Do not sign anything beyond standard benefits-acceptance paperwork without counsel review.
- Ask the funeral home for an itemized statement of all expenses. Those numbers will be part of the damages case.
- Identify witnesses — family members, friends, coworkers, the deceased’s own doctors and therapists — who can speak to who the deceased was before the shooting. Their testimony will be central to the non-economic damages case.
For the surviving second victim and their family:
- Seek complete medical and psychological evaluation, even for symptoms that feel minor. Document every symptom, every appointment, every prescription.
- Preserve every communication from ChristianaCare HR. Screenshot emails. Save voicemails.
- Do not sign any release, severance, or “expedited benefits” document in the first thirty days. Have your own counsel review everything.
- Tell your treating physicians everything. The medical record you build now is the record that will be used to value your case later.
- Consider speaking with a counselor experienced in trauma. PTSD rates after targeted workplace violence are high, and the documentation of treatment matters for both recovery and damages.
For both families: the structural complexity of a hospital-shooting case — the workers’ comp exclusivity question, the negligent-hiring/retention theory, the negligent-security theory, the wrongful-death and survival statutes, the punitive-damages exposure, the venue in Wilmington — is real, and the right answer for your family depends on facts only your family and your counsel can work through together. The consultation to begin that work is free, confidential, and available twenty-four hours a day.
What Your Case May Be Worth — Honest Framing
We are not going to quote you a number over a webpage. No honest trial lawyer does that, and any lawyer who quotes a number without knowing your family’s specific facts is either guessing or selling. What we can tell you is the range of outcomes that real hospital-shooting cases have produced, and the factors that move a case within that range.
At the low end — where the workers’ comp exclusivity bar holds and the family cannot pierce it — recovery is limited to Delaware workers’ comp death benefits, which are capped under 19 Del. C. § 2334. The maximum recoverable in that lane, depending on the number of dependents, is in the range of several hundred thousand dollars. The second surviving victim’s case, if confined to workers’ comp, faces similar caps on temporary and permanent disability benefits.
At the high end — where the negligent-hiring/retention evidence pierces exclusivity and the case proceeds as a full Delaware wrongful-death action — the value range opens significantly. Lost future earnings for a working Delaware hospital employee, with projected raises and pension contributions, can produce seven-figure economic damages. Loss of society, comfort, and guidance damages for a spouse and children, with no statutory cap in Delaware, can produce a second seven-figure layer. Survival damages for conscious pain and suffering can add a third. And punitive damages under 10 Del. C. § 3724, where wanton negligence is proven, can multiply the total in a way that reflects the law’s purpose of punishment and deterrence.
The second surviving victim’s case value depends heavily on the permanence of the injury. A full physical recovery with documented PTSD runs in the low to mid six figures. A permanent impairment — physical or psychological — can move the case into seven figures, and the negligent-security theory adds a punitive layer similar to the wrongful-death case.
The wide range between the low and high outcomes is driven almost entirely by one variable: can the family prove the negligent-hiring/retention case well enough to pierce workers’ comp exclusivity? That is the question the personnel file, the threat-assessment records, the prior incident reports, and the depositions will answer. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Why This Firm — and What the First Conversation Looks Like
Attorney911 is The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Our principal, Ralph Manginello, has practiced since 1998 — twenty-seven years in courtrooms, including federal court — and he founded the firm in 2001 on a single idea: that people in a legal emergency deserve someone who picks up the phone now, not next week. The firm has recovered more than fifty million dollars for Texas families since 1998, and Ralph’s litigation pedigree includes participation in the BP Texas City refinery explosion litigation — one of the largest industrial-mass-tort cases in American history. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, the federal trial bar that matters most for complex corporate defendants.
Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, came to the plaintiff side from inside a national insurance defense firm. He spent years in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like the ones we now bring for victims. He knows how defense counsel codes reserves, how claims are valued down before the MRI results are in, how the recorded-statement call is engineered to be quoted against the claimant later. He now runs that playbook in reverse, and he does so fluently in Spanish — Hablamos Español.
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The firm is headquartered in Houston, with additional offices in Austin and Beaumont, and we take cases throughout Texas and in other jurisdictions where we can associate with qualified local counsel. Delaware is one of those jurisdictions. Delaware does not license Texas attorneys pro hac vice without a Delaware-admitted attorney of record, and the right structure for a Delaware hospital-shooting case is one in which we serve as the Texas-based referral partner and co-counsel, working alongside a Wilmington or Philadelphia plaintiffs’ firm with Delaware bar admission and the healthcare-liability and wrongful-death experience the case demands. We are happy to make that introduction, or to work with a Delaware attorney the family has already selected.
You can reach us twenty-four hours a day at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free, there is no fee unless we win, and we serve families in English and Spanish. We also publish a free library of plain-English legal guides at the links below — covering wrongful death claims, workers’ compensation, what not to say to an insurance adjuster, and the step-by-step process of a personal injury claim from preservation through mediation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a hospital legally responsible when one of its employees is shot by another employee at work?
Under Delaware premises-liability law, a hospital owes its employees — who are invitees for purposes of the duty — reasonable protection against foreseeable criminal conduct by third parties, including other employees. Under Delaware common-law principles of negligent hiring, negligent retention, and negligent supervision, the hospital may also be directly liable where it knew or should have known that the shooter posed a risk of serious harm and failed to take reasonable action. The workers’ compensation exclusivity bar in 19 Del. C. § 2301 et seq. is the central issue in nearly every hospital-shooting case, and the intentional-tort and willful/wanton-conduct exceptions are the doors through which full civil liability can be reached.
Can my family sue ChristianaCare in Delaware if my loved one was killed at Wilmington Hospital?
Yes, but the claim depends on which theory is available. If your loved one was a ChristianaCare employee killed in the course of employment, the default remedy against the employer is the Delaware workers’ compensation death benefit under 19 Del. C. § 2334. A full civil wrongful-death action under 10 Del. C. § 3724 against ChristianaCare requires evidence that supports an exception to workers’ comp exclusivity — most commonly the negligent-hiring, negligent-retention, or negligent-security theories, or the willful/wanton-conduct exception. The shooter himself can be sued in tort for assault, battery, and wrongful death, though recovery depends on whether he has any collectable assets or insurance. The case venue for any Delaware civil action will be New Castle County Superior Court in Wilmington.
How long do we have to file a wrongful death case in Delaware?
Delaware’s general statute of limitations for wrongful death is two years from the date of death, and the survival action under 10 Del. C. § 3701 is also subject to a two-year clock. Waiting to investigate until the statute approaches can permanently impair the case, because evidence in a hospital-shooting matter typically has a thirty-to-ninety-day window before CCTV footage, LPR data, and certain corporate records can be lost. The earliest weeks after the shooting are when the preservation, the subpoena work, and the witness interviews have the highest return.
What if my loved one was a contract employee or a temporary worker at the hospital, not a direct ChristianaCare employee?
The analysis is different but not necessarily worse. Contract and temporary workers may have claims against both the staffing agency that placed them and the host hospital. The hospital’s duty to provide a reasonably safe workplace extends to all people it invites onto its premises in the course of its operations, including non-employees. The negligence theories — negligent security, negligent hiring where the hospital participated in screening, and premises liability generally — apply with equal force. Workers’ compensation coverage may run through the staffing agency rather than the hospital, which can change the procedural posture of the comp claim but does not eliminate the civil case against the hospital itself.
Will the hospital try to blame the shooter alone and claim the shooting was “unforeseeable”?
That is the defense’s standard first move, and it is precisely why the negligent-hiring, negligent-retention, negligent-supervision, and negligent-security theories matter. The foreseeability analysis turns on what the hospital knew, when it knew it, and what it did or did not do about it. OSHA has formally recognized healthcare workplace violence as a recognized hazard for years. The Joint Commission requires hospitals to conduct violence risk assessments and implement controls. CMS Conditions of Participation require hospitals to protect patients and staff from harm. If the personnel file, the threat-assessment records, the prior incident reports, or the security program shows warning signs the hospital ignored, “unforeseeable” is not a defense — it is an admission.
What should we do if ChristianaCare HR offers a quick settlement or asks my family to sign paperwork in the first few weeks?
Do not sign anything without independent counsel review. Hospital HR and risk management will move quickly, especially with the surviving victim. The package will often look sympathetic — continuation of pay, expedited medical-bill processing, a modest lump sum — and the document attached will be a release of claims that is typically far broader than the family realizes. That release can close not just the workers’ comp claim but also the negligent-security claim, the negligent-hiring claim, the punitive-damages exposure, and the future-medical-coverage question. Once signed, broad releases are extremely difficult to undo. The free consultation exists precisely so families can find out what they are being asked to sign before they sign it.
What evidence disappears fastest after a hospital shooting, and what do you do to stop it?
Hospital CCTV footage typically overwrites on thirty-to-ninety-day rolling cycles. Personnel files can be purged under routine retention. Corporate compliance and accreditation documents are destroyed on three-to-five-year schedules. LPR data can purge on thirty-to-ninety-day cycles depending on the operator. The shooter’s cell phone will be returned to him after the criminal case concludes. Witness memories fade within weeks. The response is a same-day litigation-hold letter to ChristianaCare’s general counsel, the Wilmington Hospital administrator, the HR custodian of the shooter’s file, the security-services vendor, the IT department responsible for badge and CCTV systems, and the relevant law enforcement agencies — plus parallel Delaware FOIA and Pennsylvania Right-to-Know requests for the LPR trail and incident reports. The preservation effort is paper, postage, and persistence, and it is the single largest determinant of whether the case results in a meaningful recovery.
Can my family afford a lawyer for a case like this?
The firm works on a contingency fee — there is no fee unless we win. The initial consultation is free, confidential, and available twenty-four hours a day. Costs of investigation, expert retention, and litigation are advanced by the firm and recovered out of any recovery. For a Delaware hospital-shooting case, the fee arrangement with the Delaware local-counsel firm we associate with is structured so the family pays nothing upfront and nothing out of pocket at any stage. The financial risk of pursuing the case belongs to the lawyers, not the family. That is how it should be, and that is how it works. If you would like a plain-English explanation of how contingency fees work in injury cases, see our guide on contingency fees and what personal injury lawyers actually do for clients.
Does the firm handle Delaware cases, or only Texas cases?
The firm is headquartered in Texas, with offices in Houston, Austin, and Beaumont, and we have built a network of qualified local-counsel relationships in other jurisdictions where our clients need representation. For a Delaware hospital-shooting case, we serve as the Texas-based co-counsel and referral partner, working with a Wilmington or Philadelphia plaintiffs’ firm that holds Delaware bar admission and brings the local healthcare-liability and wrongful-death experience the case requires. We are glad to make that introduction, or to coordinate with Delaware counsel the family has already selected. The point is that the family gets both the local-knowledge advantage and the large-case resource advantage, with no duplication of effort or fee structure.
What if the deceased had no spouse or children — can a parent still bring a claim?
Under 10 Del. C. § 3724, Delaware’s wrongful-death statute specifies the order of beneficiaries — surviving spouse, children, parents, and then the estate where no statutory beneficiary exists. A parent who was financially or emotionally dependent on the deceased adult child, or who suffered loss of society and guidance as a result of the death, may have a wrongful-death claim. The damages analysis for a parent’s claim is different from a spouse’s or child’s claim, but the legal right to bring the case exists where the statutory relationship is documented. The personal representative appointed for the estate brings the action for the benefit of the statutory beneficiaries.
Is there a cap on damages in Delaware wrongful-death cases?
Delaware does not impose a general statutory cap on wrongful-death compensatory damages, and 10 Del. C. § 3724 expressly permits punitive damages where the defendant’s conduct shows wanton negligence or willfulness. The absence of a statutory cap is one reason Delaware verdicts in workplace-death cases can be substantial — Wilmington juries in New Castle County have returned seven-figure non-economic verdicts in recent years. The cap that does exist is the workers’ comp death-benefit cap under 19 Del. C. § 2334, and that cap is precisely why the negligent-hiring/retention theory — which can pierce exclusivity and unlock the full wrongful-death statute — is the financial fulcrum of the case.
How long will the case take from start to finish?
For a Delaware hospital-shooting wrongful-death case, the realistic timeline runs twelve to twenty-four months from the preservation effort through discovery, expert work, mediation, and trial. Cases that resolve at mediation often resolve in the twelve-to-eighteen-month range. Cases that try take longer. The timeline is influenced by the criminal case running in parallel against the shooter — Delaware courts will often stay civil discovery that could interfere with the defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights in the criminal matter, and the civil case will move more freely after the criminal case resolves. We will give you a more specific timeline once we know the specific facts of your family’s case.
The Next Step Is a Free, Confidential Conversation
If you are the family of the deceased, or the surviving victim, or someone who loves either of them, you do not have to decide today whether to pursue a civil case. You do have to decide today whether the evidence in your family’s case is being preserved, and you do have to decide today whether the documents ChristianaCare is putting in front of you are documents you should sign without counsel review. Those two decisions are the ones that cannot wait for the statute of limitations clock to make them for you.
You can reach us twenty-four hours a day at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. We serve families in English and Spanish — Hablamos Español. We will listen first, answer your questions in plain language, and tell you honestly whether the right structure for your family is direct representation, a Delaware local-counsel relationship we coordinate, or a referral to a Wilmington or Philadelphia plaintiffs’ firm with the specific healthcare-liability and wrongful-death experience the case demands.
If you would like to read more before you call, our library of free plain-English guides covers wrongful death claims in detail, what to do after an accident, what not to say to an insurance adjuster, how contingency fees work, and the step-by-step process of an injury case from preservation through mediation. We have also published specific guidance on workers’ compensation, brain injuries, and the long-term medical questions families face when a loved one’s injury changes who they are. None of those guides replaces counsel for your specific case, but each one is written to make sure you walk into the first conversation with your lawyer already knowing the questions to ask.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page is legal information, not legal advice for your specific situation. What we can promise is this: we will treat your family with the seriousness the moment demands, we will preserve the evidence while it can still be preserved, and we will tell you the truth about what Delaware law makes possible — even when the truth is more complicated than a billboard would suggest.
Wrongful Death Claims — what the law actually allows and how the case is built
Workplace Accidents — including negligent hiring, retention, and security
Workers’ Compensation — and the exclusivity bar that may or may not apply
What Not to Say to an Insurance Adjuster
How Contingency Fees Work in Injury Cases
The Definitive Guide to Commercial Truck Accidents
Contact the Firm — Free, Confidential, 24/7
Ralph Manginello — Managing Partner
Lupe Peña — Associate Attorney and Former Insurance-Defense Insider