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Yes, an apartment complex can be held responsible when a tenant or a guest is sexually assaulted on the property. The claim is called negligent security, it is separate from anything that happens to the person who committed the assault, and it does not require a criminal charge, an arrest or a conviction.
What a civil claim does need is evidence, and most of the evidence is not yours. It is in the complex’s own records, the gate and camera logs and the calls for service to the address, and those records are on an automatic timer. See what evidence actually matters, and what disappears.
An apartment complex sells safety. Gates, lighting, cameras, courtesy patrol, controlled access, a leasing agent who tells a prospective tenant the property is secure.
When someone is assaulted inside a complex that was not what it was sold as, the complex can be answerable for it. That matters for a practical reason. The person who committed the assault usually has nothing. The complex, its management company and its security contractor carry insurance.
Texas does not make a property owner an insurer of everyone on the property. The general rule is that a landowner owes no duty to protect against the criminal acts of a third party. The claim exists as an exception to that rule, and the exception turns on what the complex knew.
What decides these cases is almost never in dispute at the beginning. It is in the complex’s own records: the calls to police, the incident reports, the work orders for the broken gate, the emails about the camera nobody repaired, the prior complaints about the same person.
Those records exist right now. Some of them are on a deletion schedule, and the shortest of those schedules is measured in days.
A survivor does not have to decide today whether to bring a case. She does have to decide, quickly, whether the evidence is preserved. Those are different decisions and only one of them is urgent.
Texas requires two distinct showings, and they are routinely conflated. A claim that proves the first and ignores the second loses.
Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain, 972 S.W.2d 749 (Tex. 1998), directs a court to consider whether criminal conduct previously occurred on or near the property, how recently it occurred, how often it occurred, how similar it was to the conduct in question, and what publicity it received, such that the landowner knew or should have known.
Those five factors are usually shortened to proximity, recency, frequency, similarity and publicity. They are not a formality. In Timberwalk itself the Supreme Court found the assault unforeseeable as a matter of law, because the only crimes on the property itself were property crimes, and the violent crimes at nearby complexes were few, were not shown to be similar, and were not shown to have been known to the owner.
There is a second route to foreseeability. Del Lago Partners, Inc. v. Smith, 307 S.W.3d 762 (Tex. 2010), holds that the Timberwalk factors are not the only reasons a criminal act might be deemed foreseeable. Where the owner has actual and direct knowledge that an unreasonable risk is imminent and unfolding in front of it, a duty can arise with no prior-crime history at all. In Del Lago that was ninety minutes of open, escalating hostility the owner watched and did nothing about.
For an apartment complex, the second route matters where management had already been told about a specific person. A prior complaint about the same maintenance worker. A restraining order the office was given a copy of. A tenant who reported being followed and was ignored.
This is the part most descriptions of Texas negligent security law leave out, and it is the part that decides cases.
UDR Texas Properties, L.P. v. Petrie, 517 S.W.3d 98 (Tex. 2017), holds that foreseeability and unreasonableness are two separate inquiries. The court was direct about it: the Timberwalk factors were designed to measure foreseeability, and their application cannot, without more, determine the reasonableness of a risk of harm.
What that means in practice is that a plaintiff must put on evidence about the burden the proposed security measures would have imposed on the owner, weighed against the magnitude and probability of the harm. In UDR the plaintiff produced none, and the Supreme Court rendered judgment for the landowner.
So the case is not won by proving the neighborhood is dangerous. It is won by proving what this complex knew, what a reasonable complex would have done about it, and what that would have cost.
The assailant is one defendant and usually the uncollectible one. The others carry the insurance. The same analysis applies to hotels and motels and to any business open to the public.
A pattern changes the case. If the same person had assaulted someone else at the property, if there had been prior reports, if other tenants had complained, if management had been told and did nothing, then foreseeability stops being an argument about neighborhood crime statistics and becomes an argument about what this complex actually knew.
Those records are almost always in the defendant’s possession, and they are almost never produced voluntarily.
Surveillance video at an apartment complex is commonly overwritten within seven to thirty days. Key fob and access-control logs, which show who entered which gate and when, are often purged on a similar cycle. Courtesy patrol logs and incident reports are kept only as long as a policy requires.
A preservation letter costs nothing, commits a survivor to nothing, and keeps every option open. It is the one step that cannot wait, and it can be sent before any decision about a lawsuit is made.
A survivor assaulted at an apartment complex usually has two separate civil claims, and they carry different deadlines.
Against the assailant, for the assault itself. Section 16.0045 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code gives five years where the conduct violates Penal Code Section 22.011(a)(1) or Section 22.021(a)(1)(A), and thirty years where the survivor was a child and the conduct violates one of the child provisions listed in Section 16.0045(a).
Against the complex, its owner, its management company and sometimes its security contractor, for failing to protect against a foreseeable and unreasonable risk. That is an ordinary negligence claim.
The second claim is usually where any recovery is, because complexes and management companies carry insurance and individual assailants generally do not.
A negligent security claim against a property owner is a personal injury claim, and Section 16.003 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code gives two years. The longer periods in Section 16.0045, which run to thirty years for certain offenses, apply to claims arising from the conduct that violates those specific Penal Code provisions. They are not a general extension of every claim connected to an assault.
Anyone who tells a survivor she has thirty years to sue an apartment complex is describing the claim against the assailant, not the claim against the complex.
Texas gives some survivors a statutory right to proceed under a pseudonym and gives others no such right at all. Section 30.013 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code covers plaintiffs who are currently under 18. Chapters 98 and 98B contain their own confidential identity provisions. An adult survivor suing an apartment complex over an adult assault falls outside all of them and must ask the court, which decides case by case. That question is answered in full here.
That is worth knowing before anything is filed rather than after.
Every statute and case linked above was read at its primary source. Texas statutes change every legislative session and case law is constantly changing.
This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
A civil claim is not about punishment. That is what the criminal system is for, and it is a separate process with a separate burden of proof. A civil claim is about the cost of what happened and who should carry it.
Those costs are real and they are usually ongoing. Therapy does not end when the case does. A survivor who moves out of a complex mid-lease pays for the move, the deposit on the next place, and often the remaining rent, unless she knows about Section 92.0161 of the Texas Property Code.
Texas also runs a Crime Victims’ Compensation program through the Attorney General that pays for counseling, relocation and lost wages, and it does not require an arrest or a conviction. It is not a substitute for a civil claim and the two interact in ways that matter at settlement, because the State is subrogated to a recovery for pecuniary loss.
An unallocated settlement can be treated as entirely economic. That is an avoidable outcome and it is avoided at the drafting stage, not afterward.
The first conversation is free, it is confidential, and it does not commit anyone to anything.
If there is a case, we will say so and explain what it would involve. If there is not, we will say that too, and we will say why. A survivor deciding what to do next is better served by an accurate answer than an encouraging one.
What usually cannot wait is the evidence. Surveillance video, gate and key fob logs, incident reports and courtesy patrol records are on deletion schedules measured in days and weeks. A preservation letter can go out immediately. It costs nothing, it commits a survivor to nothing, and it keeps every option open while she decides.
This firm keeps a deliberately small caseload, and on cases that need resources beyond what a small firm can bring, it associates co-counsel. That decision is made in writing, with the client’s consent, and it does not increase the client’s total fee.
If you are an advocate, a SANE nurse or a counselor helping someone right now, you are welcome to call on her behalf with a general question. You do not need her permission to ask us how something works, and we will not ask you for her name.
There is no charge to talk, and no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery.
Call 713-521-0059.
No. A civil claim against a property owner does not require a police report, an arrest, a charge or a conviction, and an acquittal does not end it. The two systems ask different questions and apply different burdens of proof. What a civil claim does need is evidence, and most of it is in the complex’s own records, which are on an automatic timer.
Two years, under Section 16.003 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. The thirty-year period in Section 16.0045 applies to claims arising from specific Penal Code offenses and is not a general extension of every claim connected to an assault. Anyone who tells you that you have thirty years to sue the complex is wrong.
Surveillance video, which is commonly overwritten within seven to thirty days, and access-control or key fob logs, which are often purged on a similar cycle. A preservation letter stops the overwrite. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Section 92.0161 of the Texas Property Code lets a tenant terminate the lease and avoid future rent if the assault happened within the preceding six months. The assault does not have to have occurred at the apartment, and documentation from a licensed health care provider, a licensed mental health provider or a sexual assault advocate under Chapter 420 of the Government Code is enough, with 30 days of written notice to the landlord. No police report is required.
