Whether an apartment complex can be held responsible is a legal question, answered on the apartment complex page and, for the underlying standard, on the negligent security page.
This article is about the question that comes next: what would prove what the complex knew, and where would it be found.
Why the question is about the property
Texas measures the foreseeability of criminal conduct on a property by the proximity, recency, frequency, similarity and publicity of prior crimes, weighed together rather than in isolation, under Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain. Del Lago Partners, Inc. v. Smith holds those factors are not the only route. UDR Texas Properties, L.P. v. Petrie holds foreseeability alone is not enough, and that a plaintiff must also show the response was unreasonable in light of the burden of preventing the harm.
Read as a records question, that becomes concrete. What happened at this address before. What management was told. What management did.
None of it is in your memory. It would be in somebody's file, and the point of this article is to name the files worth asking about.
The categories worth asking about
Nothing below is a promise that a particular record exists at a particular property. These are the questions, and each is answerable.
Prior offense history for the address
Crime at or near the property before is the spine of the foreseeability inquiry. Any law enforcement record of prior offenses at or near the address would exist independently of anything the complex chose to write down, which is what makes it worth asking for: it is not the defendant's own account of its own property.
Obtaining such records is work a lawyer does. What a law enforcement agency must release, and how it is requested, is not something to work out from a web page.
Complaints by other residents
A complaint made by another resident, before you were hurt, about the same problem, goes directly to what management knew.
Ask which channels this office received complaints through. A resident portal. Email. Maintenance requests. The front desk. Texts to a property manager. The complex's social media. Public reviews sit outside the property's control, which is a reason to look for those too.
If you complained about anything yourself, about a gate, a light, a door that would not lock, a man who kept getting into the building, find that record now. Screenshot the portal. Save the email. Photograph any work order copy you were given.
Maintenance and repair history
Gates, exterior doors, locks, lighting, cameras and access control are the systems to ask a property what records it holds on. A work order opened and closed without the repair being made, or reopened repeatedly for the same gate, would be a document about what management knew and chose. Whether such a document exists here is a question, not an assumption.
Cameras and access control
Whether the property had cameras, whether they worked, where they pointed, and what was retained are four separate questions with four separate answers, and all four are held by the complex or its vendor rather than by you. How long any system holds anything is a question to put to that business. This article is not going to guess.
Security services
If the property advertised a courtesy officer or used a security company, ask what contract exists, whether patrol logs or reports were kept, and which company that was. A security contractor is a separate entity, and identifying it early is part of the investigation. If the property advertised a courtesy officer or on-site security, keep a copy of that advertising.
Your own file
Keep copies of your lease, your application, the community policies you were given, and any correspondence you already have. Those are yours and you already possess them, which puts them in a different category from everything else on this list.
Whether an assault lets you terminate a Texas lease early is a separate question with its own page, breaking a lease after a sexual assault.
Who actually owns and runs the place
One address can involve several entities: an owner, sometimes a limited partnership whose name appears nowhere on the sign, a management company, and possibly a security contractor. Which of them held which duty, and which received which complaint, is early investigation work, covered in how many defendants there are.
What you can do this week
Secure what you already have access to, first. Download or screenshot anything in a resident portal or an email account while you still have the account. If you are moving out, do that before you lose access.
Write down what you remember about the property while it is fresh. The gate. The lighting. The door. The camera you did or did not see. What you had already complained about. What other residents had said. Dates, even approximate.
Do not ask the leasing office to send you its own files before you have spoken to a lawyer. A request from a resident tells a future defendant that a claim is coming, and it is better made by a lawyer, in writing, as a request to preserve rather than to explain.
What to preserve on your own side is on the evidence page.
Why timing matters here
How any business handles its own records is a question for that business, and it is a reason to make the call early rather than late. It is not a reason to conclude that anything is already lost.
A lawyer can write to the owner, the manager and any security contractor asking in writing that they preserve what they hold.
The deadlines underneath all of this
A negligence claim against a property owner or manager carries two years under Section 16.003 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. Claims arising from the specific offenses listed in Section 16.0045 carry thirty years or five.
Which period applies to which defendant depends on the conduct alleged against that defendant, and more than one can be running at once in the same case. That is a calculation on your dates, not a rule of thumb. What affects those periods is set out in what stops the clock.
There is no charge for that conversation and no attorney's fee unless there is a recovery.
Call 713-521-0059.
Authorities
Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain, 972 S.W.2d 749 (Tex. 1998)
Del Lago Partners, Inc. v. Smith, 307 S.W.3d 762 (Tex. 2010)
UDR Texas Properties, L.P. v. Petrie, 517 S.W.3d 98 (Tex. 2017)
Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code ch. 16 (limitations)
This article is general information about Texas law, not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.