Widow Brings $2 Million Wrongful-Death Suit Against Nashville's MDHA Over Edgehill Stray-Bullet Killing
Won by Rocky McElhaney Law Firm.
Tia Fitzpatrick-Young's $2 million wrongful-death suit accused Nashville's housing agency of letting crime build at the Edgehill complex, where a stray bullet from a dice-game dispute killed her husband, Glen Young Jr.; the outcome was not publicly reported.
What happened
On August 24, 2018, Glen Young Jr. went to the Edgehill public housing complex in Nashville to check on his sick sister. He was 59 and worked at Kroger. While he was there, a dispute broke out over a dice game in the development, and shots were fired. A stray bullet struck Young in the chest. He did not survive.
Young had no part in the dice game. He was a visitor who happened to be in the wrong place when the gunfire started, and by some accounts he had stepped to a door to look outside after hearing the shots. His widow, Tia Fitzpatrick-Young, was left without him. She brought her case to the Rocky McElhaney Law Firm in Nashville.
On August 8, 2019, the firm filed a $2 million complaint against the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA), the public body that owns and runs Edgehill. The claim rested on negligent security under premises law. It argued that MDHA knew the complex had become a dangerous pocket of crime and did too little to make residents and their guests safer.
To show the danger was foreseeable, the complaint pointed to Metro police records. In the six months before Young died, 106 crimes were reported in and around the complex. Of those, 36 were serious offenses, the majority being assault, burglary, and weapons-related violence. The firm's position was that a landlord who lets that pattern build owes a duty to the people who live there and the people they invite.
MDHA pushed back. Its executive director, Jim Harbison, said, "The safety of our residents and guests have been and always will be a paramount concern." The agency also had precedent in its favor. A similar negligence suit filed against MDHA in 2016 had been dismissed with prejudice, which made the road for Fitzpatrick-Young's claim a steep one.
The filing drew local news coverage in Nashville in August 2019. The final resolution does not appear in the public record, so whether Fitzpatrick-Young recovered anything, and how much, is not known from the available reporting. Glen Young Jr. was 59 years old.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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