A Soldier Shot in an Apartment Parking Lot, and a $38.6 Million Negligent Security Verdict

On May 6, 2014, Dylan Salazar was sitting in his pickup truck in the parking lot of the Sportsman's Royal Manor apartment complex in Las Vegas. Two men approached and tried to take the vehicle. Salazar was shot during the attempt and died. He was 23 years old, and he served as a specialist in the Nevada Army National Guard.

His family brought a wrongful death claim against Sportsman's Royal Manor LLC, the company that owned and operated the complex. The theory was ordinary premises liability: a property owner has a duty to take reasonable steps to protect the people on its land from foreseeable criminal acts, and the family argued the owner had failed that duty for years. Benjamin Cloward and Ian Estrada of the Richard Harris Law Firm tried the case.

The property had a reputation that neighbors captured in a grim nickname, "The Killing Fields." Police records put hard numbers behind it. Between January 2010 and May 2014, the complex generated more than 5,000 calls to police, spread across 63 categories of incident. The plaintiffs argued that the owner knew the property was dangerous and still kept security at a level that could not address it. For the period the trial examined, a single guard on duty was responsible for the entire complex.

Four years of crime data is hard for a jury to absorb from a spreadsheet, so the trial team built a set of courtroom demonstratives. An animated timeline mapped where and when the thousands of incidents had happened. Another exhibit traced the route one guard would have had to cover alone. Staffing charts broke the coverage down hour by hour. Together the exhibits connected the owner's staffing decisions to the conditions Salazar faced the night he was killed.

In February 2020, the Clark County jury returned a verdict of $38,625,000 against Sportsman's Royal Manor. TopVerdict ranked it the second-largest wrongful death verdict in the United States that year, and it is regarded as the largest negligent security wrongful death verdict in Nevada.

The owner appealed. Before the Nevada Supreme Court ruled on the merits, the parties reached a settlement and stipulated to dismiss the appeal, and the case returned to the district court to vacate the underlying judgment under the terms of their agreement.