In 2023, the families of Edward Dixon and Taborez White were rocked by the news of their deaths in two separate shootings within the same Miami Gardens community. Now, over a year after their deaths, their families have banded together in a lawsuit, claiming that Cedar Grove Apartments, the complex where the shootings took place, didn’t do enough to protect them.
“He was in the prime of his life when he was ripped from this Earth and us,” Marcia Dixon, Dixon’s mother, said in a press conference Wednesday.
Dixon went to the apartment complex to visit a friend in January 2023 when he was shot, his mother told local media.
In July 2023, about six months later, White was outside his home when he was shot and killed.
The family of another victim shot at the property — a 19-year-old who was seriously injured — are also listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Attorneys for the families told reporters that the dangers from the string of shootings were foreseeable and that they happened “time and time before” without any extra security.
Anyone with information about these shootings may leave an anonymous tip with Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers at 305-471-TIPS.
What is Negligent Security?
Negligent security is a term used to refer to a legal theory within tort law holding property owners responsible for providing the necessary security measures to mitigate the risk of crimes such as theft or assaults.
In almost five decades of personal injury practice, Leesfield & Partners attorneys have established the firm as one of the top inadequate and negligent security law firms in the state with the development of creative trial techniques. It is generally accepted that there is no duty to prevent against the criminal actions of a third-party, however, property owners and or management companies must take reasonable measures where these such acts are foreseeable.
To successfully prove a negligent security claim, plaintiff attorneys must first prove that the property owner and or management company breached their duty of care to ensure a visitor’s safety. Such reasonable measures to promote a visitor’s safety includes the installment of security cameras, proper lightning and security guards who roam the property, especially in areas where criminal acts are more common such as parking garages and other secluded areas. A plaintiff’s attorney must then prove that the property owner’s failure to implement these such security measures paved the way for this incident to occur.
A History of Representing Victims and Survivors
“While property owners have a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect individuals lawfully on their premises, this duty extends only to preventing criminal acts that the owner knew of or should have reasonably anticipated,” said Leesfield & Partners Trial Lawyer Evan Robinson in a recent article published in the Daily Business Review.
The duty of reasonable care, which many property owners have attempted to evade in past cases, is the crux of plaintiff attorneys’ arguments in negligent and inadequate security cases.
For example, in one negligent security case handled by the firm, a woman staying at the Resort Hotel in Key West was violently attacked by a man in a parking lot on the property. She suffered severe and permanent injuries to her face and head. The man was allowed to enter the parking garage and meander through it with a hammer for 20 minutes due to the hotel’s lack of security measures.
The settlement amount with the hotel is confidential, however, the firm did secure $40,580,000 with the remaining defendant.
The firm previously recovered $15 million for the family of a person killed at an apartment complex. The details of that case are confidential.
Justin B. Shapiro, a Partner and Trial Lawyer with the firm, secured $16 million for a couple who was brutally and savagely attacked while staying at a South Miami hotel. The attacker in that case was allowed to walk through the lobby and go up the elevator to the couples’ room where he knocked on the door. The husband opened it and suffered through a five-minute-long beating before the attacker turned his ire on the wife who he beat and raped.
Three hotel and security employees witnessed parts of the attack but did nothing to intervene. This property had a storied history of violence including various robberies, including some in which the victims were held at gunpoint, violent assaults and three shootings in which one guest was shot four times. Despite advice from their private security company and the Miami-Dade Police Department to have armed guards on the property, the hotel refused to hire such guards in order to save money.
The firm previously represented a client left as a paraplegic after a shooting at an unguarded ATM. Attorneys secured $3 million in that case.
Attorneys secured $3.2 million for a foreign exchange college student was left with neurological injuries and paralysis.
The firm secured a multi-million settlement for a woman attacked by a crewmember aboard a cruise ship who had access to her room.