$6 Million Settlement After Child Killed by Stray Bullet at Griffin Apartment Complex With Fabricated Security
Won by The Mabra Firm.
An 11-year-old girl was shot and killed by a stray bullet while sleeping in her Griffin, Georgia apartment; her family's legal team overcame an assault-and-battery insurance exclusion by proving the complex had misrepresented its security features, recovering the full $6 million policy limit.
What happened
In the early morning hours of March 14, 2023, gunfire erupted at an apartment complex in Griffin, Georgia. A stray round traveled through a bedroom wall and struck Asijah Love Jones, 11, as she slept. She died from the wound. A man was later arrested and charged in the shooting under Georgia's street gang statute.
According to the family's legal team, ownership had represented that the property was a gated community with working security cameras and on-site security guards. Those claims were not accurate. The gates did not function, the cameras were non-operational, and the guards who were present had limited authority and no meaningful mandate to protect residents.
The civil case turned on how extensive and well-documented the complex's crime problem was before Asijah was killed. Discovery showed management had received internal communications acknowledging a resurgence of gang activity on the property. Incident records revealed multiple prior shootings and other violent crimes. The owners, the plaintiffs argued, had full knowledge of what their tenants faced and continued misrepresenting conditions to prospective and current residents.
The insurer raised an assault-and-battery exclusion in the property's policy. That provision would have capped coverage at a $500,000 sub-limit, reducing the family's recovery by more than ninety percent. Attorneys Jeb Butler of Butler Kahn and co-counsel Ronnie Mabra of The Mabra Firm routed around the exclusion by pressing claims under Georgia's Fair Business Practices Act. Their argument centered on the complex's affirmative misrepresentations about security, framing the legal theory around deceptive conduct rather than the shooting itself.
The insurer agreed to pay the full $6 million policy limit. The settlement was reported by the Daily Report on January 14, 2025. No reduction or remittance on appeal has been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from The Mabra Firm
All The Mabra Firm proven verdicts →The widow and four daughters of Christopher Crump, a 32-year-old Army veteran, received $32.5 million after his car became trapped under a Tyson Foods tractor-trailer with defective lighting in the pre-dawn darkness, a result reported as Georgia's largest single-plaintiff pre-trial wrongful death settlement at the time.
A 15-year-old was shot and killed near the entrance of Creekside Forest Apartments in South DeKalb, where security guards were alleged to be taking cuts of drug deal proceeds and the complex gate sat broken, leading to a $3 million settlement at the full insurance limit.
Malcolm Jordan, 22, was struck from behind by an Arnold Moving Company box truck whose driver was allegedly texting while driving, causing Jordan's disabled car to spin into a guardrail and catch fire; he died twenty days later from his injuries, and a federal jury awarded nearly $4 million to his parents and the mother of his young child.
Related premises liability verdicts
Anapol Weiss shareholder Kristen Gibbons Feden helped secure $1.6 billion in default verdicts for 104 women sexually abused as children by former Long Island pediatrician Stuart Copperman, one of the largest cumulative civil awards against a single individual in U.S. history.
A Dallas jury awarded $1.1 billion against a trust fund heir who beat a 2-year-old into a permanent vegetative state in 2021, a verdict the firm calls the largest child-assault award in U.S. history.
A Clayton County jury awarded $1 billion to a woman who was raped at age 14 by an armed security guard her employer hired without verifying he was licensed to carry a weapon.
Joseph Bruno and Bruno & Bruno served as lead plaintiffs' counsel in a landmark class action brought by more than 8,000 Gentilly residents exposed to a butadiene tank-car fire in 1987, securing a jury verdict that included $2.5 billion in punitive damages against CSX Transportation alone, later reduced to $850 million on appeal and affirmed by Louisiana's Fourth Circuit.