$127.5 Million DOJ Settlement for Parkland Families After FBI Failed to Act on Tip About the Shooter

On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 students and staff members and wounding 17 others. It was among the deadliest school shootings in American history. In the weeks that followed, investigators confirmed something that would form the basis of a federal civil lawsuit: the FBI had received a specific, credible warning about the shooter five weeks before the attack.

On January 5, 2018, a caller to the FBI tip line reported that the gunman had acquired firearms, was posting disturbing content online, and had expressed an intent to, in the caller's words, 'slip into a school and start shooting the place up.' The caller added, 'I know he's going to explode.' The FBI's own protocols required that the tip be forwarded to its Miami field office for follow-up. It was not. No local law enforcement agency was alerted.

Families of those killed and injured filed civil lawsuits against the United States government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging the agency's negligence in processing and acting on that warning was a cause of the deaths and injuries. Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen, a Coral Gables-based firm with decades of experience in catastrophic civil cases, represented three families whose children were killed and two students who suffered serious gunshot injuries, a total of five of the roughly 16 plaintiff-families who sued the DOJ.

Stuart Grossman and Neal Roth, founding partners of the firm, led the litigation alongside partner Alex Arteaga-Gomez. The core legal argument was straightforward: the FBI created a discrete, foreseeable danger when it accepted the tip but then failed to process it according to its own procedures, and that failure contributed directly to the attack going forward unchecked.

In November 2021, the parties reached an agreement in principle. The Department of Justice announced in March 2022 that it had finalized a $127.5 million civil settlement resolving more than 40 cases. The DOJ noted the settlement did not constitute an admission of fault. Individual family allocations were not publicly disclosed. The settlement was the first time the federal government agreed to pay survivors and families for law-enforcement failures connected to the Parkland attack, and it came before any trial.