Brookhaven Wrongful Death Lawyer

Many become shooting victims because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. They may have been at a school when an active shooter started a rampage, at a gas station or shopping center when rival gangs engaged in a gunfight and struck innocent bystanders, or at a nightclub when a drunk and drugged patron opened fire during a bar fight. With guns, violent criminals can victimize anyone without warning resulting in wrongful death.

Police work assault with a firearm, attempted murder, and homicide cases hard, usually identifying the shooter, and that criminal faces many years or life in prison. While punishing the offender provides justice and removes dangerous felons from the streets, shooting victims remain stuck with the aftermath: physical pain, emotional trauma, disabilities, medical bills, lost income, ended careers, inability to support family, interrupted relationships, and forever altered lives.

Hiring a skilled and tenacious litigator is essential to winning all the compensation shooting victims deserve. In most cases, the property owner carries liability insurance that covers the claim. The insurance company always hires crack legal teams to defend it in high-stakes litigation. The defense has numerous arguments against liability that it will assert to get the case dismissed. Insurers seek ways to reduce liability by disputing the plaintiff's damages if found liable.

Your Brookhaven shooting lawyer has the skills and expertise to overcome the defense.

Success in court starts outside the halls of justice through a meticulous investigation. Gathering evidence, including witness statements, information about crime in the area and on the property, and surveillance recordings, provide your litigation team with the building blocks of an unassailable case.

With evidence in hand, your shooting lawyer in Brookhaven files a lawsuit backed up by the fact pattern and case law. They then use the discovery process to develop additional evidence and depose defense witnesses, eliciting the answers needed to undermine defense arguments.

As the lawsuit progresses, your legal team negotiates with the insurer. Personal injury lawyers know what juries have awarded for similar cases and use this knowledge to establish a reasonable settlement figure.

Convincing the defense to pay all damages takes persuasion and persistence. In most cases, they capitulate when the trial date nears and fear losing. However, if the defendant refuses to come to terms, your shooting victim's lawyer can take your case to trial and show a jury how the defendant was negligent.

Georgia law requires property owners to provide adequate security against violent crimes, including shootings. For a premises liability claim to succeed, the plaintiff must prove that the owner was negligent either through some action or failure to perform some action. The fact that a shooting took place on the property is not enough for a plaintiff to win. There must be a specific instance of negligence attributable to the owner.

For instance, if a shooting occurs at a well-secured apartment complex, no premises liability claim will likely exist, provided the property management company took all reasonable security precautions. A claim requires the event to have been foreseeable due to inadequate security.

However, imagine if the shooter had a history of threatening violence against neighbors that someone reported to the management, and then that person shot another tenant over a noise dispute. If management failed to act appropriately after the threats were reported, a negligence case might exist.

In another scenario, a shooting may happen at a normally peaceful motel with adequate security, making a negligence claim less likely. However, a negligence claim would likely succeed if an investigation revealed that the owner accepted money for letting the shooter deal drugs on the property.

Brooks Injury Law reviews shooting cases to determine if a premises liability claim exists. To decide, our investigators discover what security was in place at the scene, the level of crime in the area, and whether violent incidents have occurred on the property previously. Gathering these facts provides the information needed to establish if the shooting was foreseeable to a reasonable owner and if security measures were negligent.

Many avenues of inquiry exist to evaluate the strength of a claim, including interviewing victims, witnesses, and former employees. In addition, we review police reports and other official documents, view relevant photos, videos, and security camera footage, and map the fact patterns of related incidents.

Courts award punitive damages to punish atrocious behaviour and set an example. While the case for punitive damages against a shooter is obvious, they are not typical in premises liability claims against those uninvolved in the crime. However, egregious actions by the property owner can expose them to punitive damages.