$102.7 Million Verdict for Quadriplegic Shot Outside Tootsie's Cabaret

On the night of July 31, 2002, Sami Barrak sat in his car in the parking lot of the Sierra Shopping Center in Miami-Dade County, waiting for a friend to come out of Tootsie's Cabaret, the strip club that anchored the property. A man approached the car and tried to rob him at gunpoint. After a brief exchange, the robber shot Barrak in the neck and walked away. Barrak survived, but the bullet severed his ability to move or even breathe on his own: he was left a quadriplegic dependent on a ventilator for the rest of his life. The gunman was never identified.

The lawsuit that followed did not chase the shooter. It went after the landlord. Report Investment Corporation owned the shopping center and, under Florida law, owed the people its tenants drew onto the property a reasonably safe premises. The evidence at trial made that duty look abandoned: roughly 26 violent crimes had been reported on the property in the seven years before the shooting, the parking lot where Barrak was attacked was poorly lit and unpatrolled, camera coverage was inadequate, and the only guard on duty that night was there for the club, not the lot. The company itself conceded it had never spent a dollar of its own on security or safety at the center.

Michael Haggard of The Haggard Law Firm in Coral Gables tried the case, No. 02-26271-CA, before Judge Kevin Emas in Miami-Dade circuit court, working with co-counsel Manuel Epelbaum and Robert J. Dickman Jr. The defense was mounted by the Conroy Simberg firm. The trial ran roughly five weeks, and the jury deliberated about a day and a half before returning its verdict in late 2007: $102,714,734.09, including $1.4 million in past medical expenses, $28 million for the lifetime of round-the-clock care ahead, $2.5 million for past pain and suffering, $70 million for future pain and suffering, and the balance in lost earnings. At the time it was described as the largest jury verdict ever returned in a negligent security case in the United States.

The number on the verdict form is not the number anyone collected, and the postscript came fast. Within about a week of the verdict, the case settled for $26 million, the total limits of the available insurance policies. That is how nine figure premises verdicts against modestly capitalized property owners usually resolve: the verdict established what the harm was worth, and the insurance defined what could actually be paid. For Barrak, the settlement funded the ventilator-dependent care the jury had priced out. For the industry, the verdict became a benchmark, cited for years as the high-water mark of what a jury will do to a landlord who knew its property was dangerous and spent nothing to make it safe.