A single police report from three years ago can end up as the centerpiece of a lawsuit you never saw coming. Once a plaintiff’s attorney learns that a break-in, an assault, or even a string of car burglaries once happened on your property, that old report becomes their argument that you knew trouble was on the way and did nothing to stop it.
Fahl & Donaldson defends Texas property owners and managers who are facing exactly this argument in premises liability defense cases, and we have seen how quickly a stale incident report gets stretched into a claim that a later, unrelated crime was foreseeable. Understanding how that argument works, and where it tends to fall apart, is the first step toward building a real defense.
What Prior Incidents Have to Do With Foreseeability
Texas courts generally do not require a property owner to protect visitors from the criminal acts of strangers. The exception is foreseeability, and the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in Timberwalk Apartments v. Cain set the framework Texas courts still use to decide whether a crime was foreseeable enough to create a duty. A land occupier’s liability guide from the Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center walks through those factors well, weighing how close prior crimes occurred to the property, how recently and how often they happened, how similar they were to the incident at issue, and how widely known they were at the time.
That framework cuts both ways. It gives plaintiffs a path to hold an owner liable when a real pattern exists, but it also gives defense counsel a detailed checklist for challenging a claim that leans on a single, dissimilar, or poorly documented incident from years earlier.
How a Single Prior Incident Gets Stretched Into a Pattern
Plaintiffs’ attorneys often start with whatever incident report they can find and then work backward to make it sound like a pattern. A car break-in from four years ago gets cited as proof that a violent assault last month was inevitable, even though the two crimes share little beyond having happened on the same block. General area crime statistics get introduced to imply a dangerous property, even when nothing similar had ever occurred there before.
We saw this dynamic play out in our recent post on how inadequate security lawsuits get built against Texas apartment owners, where a handful of loosely related reports were presented as if they told one continuous story. The strength of that story depends heavily on how carefully the reports are read.
A few questions tend to decide whether a prior-incident argument actually holds up in court.
- Proximity: Did the earlier crime happen on the property itself, or somewhere nearby that plaintiffs are stretching to include?
- Recency: How many years separate the prior incident from the one now being litigated?
- Similarity: Was the earlier crime the same type of offense, or is the comparison built on a loose category like general property crime?
- Documentation: Is there an actual police report or incident log, or is the claim based on rumor, a tenant complaint, or a secondhand account?
- Publicity: Would a reasonable owner have actually known about the incident at the time, or is that knowledge being assumed after the fact?
Weak answers to those questions are usually where a foreseeability claim starts to unravel.
Building a Defense Around the Prior Incident Record
The first move in defending against this kind of claim is obtaining the complete incident history yourself, not just the report the plaintiff has chosen to highlight. Property management files, maintenance requests, prior security assessments, and law enforcement records often paint a very different picture than the isolated report attached to the petition.
From there, the work is often about drawing distinctions the plaintiff would rather blur. A retail robbery is not the same as a residential assault, and an incident two miles away is not the same as one in the parking lot. In cases involving apartment complex negligence claims, we frequently find that the prior “similar” incidents cited by opposing counsel are neither similar in nature nor close enough in time to have given any real notice. We also look closely at whether the criminal actor’s own independent decision to commit the crime breaks the chain between anything the property owner allegedly failed to do and the harm that followed, since Texas law still allows fault to be apportioned toward the person who actually committed the crime.
Fahl & Donaldson Defends Property Owners Facing Negligent Security Claims
Fahl & Donaldson has represented businesses and property owners across the Texas Gulf Coast for decades, and our attorneys bring more than one hundred years of combined trial experience to premises liability and negligent security defense. Attorney Glenn J. Fahl has tried more than seventy-five cases to verdict, and that experience shapes how we dig into an incident history from day one, looking for the gaps between what a plaintiff claims you knew and what the record actually shows.
If your property is named in a lawsuit built around a prior criminal incident, waiting to respond only gives the other side more time to shape the narrative. Contact our office to discuss the facts of your case with our team.