$100 Million Verdict for Family of Former Florida Senator's Son Shot Dead in Negligently Secured Condo
Won by Morgan & Morgan.
A Miami-Dade jury awarded $100 million to former Florida state senator Daphne Campbell for the death of her son Jason, shot while sleeping at the Monte Carlo Condominium after an intruder walked in through failed security. Morgan & Morgan attorneys Thomas Hasty, Grant Gillenwater, Chuck Fernandez, and Patrick Chucri tried the negligent security case with co-counsel from Ver Ploeg & Marino.
What happened
Jason Campbell was 23 years old and asleep in a unit at the Monte Carlo Condominium in Biscayne Gardens when Lakoria Washington got into the building in 2021 and shot him to death. He was the son of Daphne Campbell, a former Florida state senator, but the lawsuit his family brought was not about who he was. It was about how a stranger was able to walk into a residential complex, reach a sleeping man, and kill him.
The family sued the Monte Carlo Condominium Association, its property manager AKAM On-Site, and the building's security contractor, EMS Protective Group. Over four years of litigation, Morgan & Morgan attorneys Thomas Hasty, Grant Gillenwater, Chuck Fernandez, and Patrick Chucri, working with co-counsel from Miami's Ver Ploeg & Marino, assembled a record of recurring security gaps at the property: prior criminal incidents management knew about, access points that went unfixed, protections that existed on paper but not at the door Washington walked through.
Negligent security cases ask a jury to hold a property owner responsible for a criminal's act, and defendants lean hard on the argument that the shooter alone bears the blame. The Miami-Dade jury that heard the Campbell case rejected that framing almost entirely. On July 15, 2025, it returned a $100 million verdict and spread the fault across the companies that controlled the building: 57 percent to property manager AKAM, 18 percent to the condominium association, 18 percent to EMS Protective Group, and just 7 percent to the tenant of the unit.
The verdict landed in the middle of Florida's post-Surfside reckoning over how residential buildings are run, and coverage from Local 10 News, the Miami Times, and the Insurance Journal framed it as one of the state's largest negligent security awards. For an industry that treats security contracts as a line item, a nine-figure allocation of fault to a property manager was the kind of number that gets read aloud in boardrooms.
No verdict returns a son. What the Campbell family won, after four years, was a public finding that Jason's death was not just a crime but a failure, one with names, fault percentages, and a price attached.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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