A nightmare scenario is becoming a pattern across the country. A family books a short term rental for a birthday or a destination wedding, and a night that should have been ordinary ends in gunfire. In one matter handled by The Haggard Law Firm, a negligent security claim tied to a fatal shooting at a Florida short term rental community resolved for 16.25 million dollars. That figure is no longer an outlier. It signals that juries are taking owner responsibility for guest safety seriously, and that short term rental operators are not shielded from liability simply because they are not a traditional hotel.
Las Vegas sits at the center of this trend. The valley holds one of the densest concentrations of short term rentals in the country, marketed to bachelor parties, destination weddings, and large groups drawn by the Strip. Many of those properties have no front desk, no security staff, no cameras, and a lockbox where a hotel would have a staffed lobby. When violence follows, Nevada law gives injured guests and grieving families a real path to hold the property owner accountable.
What negligent security means in Nevada
Negligent security is a branch of premises liability. The principle is straightforward. A property owner who invites people onto a property owes them a duty to take reasonable steps to protect them from foreseeable harm, and that includes criminal acts committed by third parties. When an owner ignores an obvious risk and someone is hurt or killed as a result, the owner can be made to answer for it.
Nevada codifies a version of this duty for lodging operators in NRS 651.015. Under that statute, the owner or keeper of a hotel, motel, or lodging house is civilly liable for the death or injury of a guest caused by a third party who is not an employee, but only when two conditions are met. First, the wrongful act must have been foreseeable. Second, the owner must have failed to exercise due care for the safety of guests on the property. The statute treats an act as foreseeable when prior incidents of similar conduct occurred on the premises and the owner had notice or knowledge of them.
Even where a short term rental does not fit neatly inside the lodging house definition, the general premises duty still applies. Under Nevada law a paying guest is an invitee, the highest class of visitor, owed the strongest duty of care an owner can owe. An owner who rents to the public for profit cannot collect the nightly rate and then disclaim any responsibility for whether the people sleeping there will survive the night.
Why short term rentals carry unusual risk
Hotels in Nevada operate inside a mature safety framework. They have trained staff, surveillance, controlled access, and incident logs that establish what management knew and when. A short term rental often has none of that, which is exactly why these properties draw the kind of activity that ends in violence.
- Many listings are marketed by capacity, which invites large unscreened gatherings the neighborhood and the structure were never built to hold.
- Keyless lockboxes and remote check in mean no one ever confirms who is actually staying or how many guests arrive after dark.
- There is rarely any camera coverage, lighting plan, or on call security, so a foreseeable problem has nothing standing between it and a guest.
- Owners frequently live out of state and manage the property through an app, leaving complaints and prior incidents unaddressed.
In a destination city like Las Vegas, those gaps are magnified. Properties near the Strip, in Paradise, and across the wider valley are booked for exactly the kind of high volume events that attract uninvited guests and escalate quickly.
The Haggard case and a national pattern
The Florida settlement is worth understanding because it shows how these cases are proven. According to The Haggard Law Firm, the short term rental community had a known history of criminal activity, including prior attacks on tourists, yet the access gates were broken, camera coverage was inadequate, and security staffing was insufficient for a property of its size. Those facts map onto a negligent security theory almost exactly. The danger was foreseeable, reasonable precautions were missing, and a guest died as a result. Mark Bourassa and the firm are handling Nevada cases that follow the same disturbing arc, where a property marketed for profit had no meaningful plan to keep its guests safe.
When a Las Vegas short term rental owner can be held liable
Foreseeability is the heart of every negligent security claim, so the analysis usually turns on what the owner knew or should have known. A Nevada owner faces real exposure when the facts include warning signs that a reasonable operator would have acted on. Nevada applies the same scrutiny here that it applies to parking garage assault claims.
- Prior shootings, fights, or police calls at the property or in the immediate area.
- A listing that advertised large party capacity while providing no security, cameras, or access control.
- Broken locks, dead exterior lighting, or gates that did not work.
- Neighbor or guest complaints about earlier disturbances that the owner ignored.
- Overcrowding well beyond the limit the owner advertised or permitted.
None of these guarantees a recovery on its own, but together they build the picture a jury needs. The question a court asks under NRS 651.015 is whether the owner had a duty to take reasonable precautions against a foreseeable wrongful act, and whether the owner met that duty.
How these cases are proven
Winning a negligent security claim is an evidence project. The owner will insist the shooting was random and impossible to predict, so the case is built by showing the opposite, that the danger was known and could be ignored only by choice. The strongest claims assemble a record long before the lawsuit is filed.
- Police call histories and crime reports for the address and the surrounding blocks, which establish what a reasonable owner should have known about the risk.
- Booking platform records, host messages, and guest reviews, which often reveal earlier complaints about parties, noise, or unsafe conduct at the same property.
- Neighbor accounts and prior incident reports that document a pattern the owner had every chance to break.
- Inspection of the locks, exterior lighting, gates, and camera coverage, or proof that none of it existed.
- A qualified security expert who can explain the reasonable precautions the property needed and how their absence opened the door to the harm.
Because so much of this proof sits in records that owners and rental platforms control, an early legal demand to preserve evidence can decide the outcome. Footage is overwritten on a short cycle, listings get quietly edited, and accounts are deleted, and once that material is gone the truth is far harder to rebuild. A Las Vegas property that hosted a shooting on a Saturday can look spotless and freshly relisted by the following week.
When the shooting is fatal
When a short term rental shooting takes a life, the claim becomes a wrongful death action. Nevada allows the heirs of the person who died, along with the personal representative of the estate, to bring that claim under NRS 41.085. A separate survival action under NRS 41.100 lets the estate recover for the losses the victim suffered before death. Together these claims can reach the medical expenses, funeral and burial costs, lost financial support, and the grief and loss of companionship the family carries forward.
Recovery often comes from more than one source. Many short term rental owners carry homeowner or dedicated short term rental liability policies, some booking platforms extend host liability coverage, and a property run by a separate management company can add another responsible party. Identifying every available policy early matters, because the value of a wrongful death claim frequently exceeds one owner personal assets, and the gap between a single policy and several can be the difference between a token offer and a recovery that actually supports a family.
Families have a limited window to act. Under NRS 11.190, subsection 4, paragraph e, a wrongful death claim in Nevada generally must be filed within two years of the date of death. Evidence in these cases disappears quickly, since rental turnover, deleted booking records, and overwritten camera footage can all vanish within days, so the sooner a family speaks with a lawyer the better the chance of preserving what proves the case.
Comparative fault under Nevada law
Owners and their insurers often argue that the guest shared the blame. Nevada follows a modified comparative negligence rule under NRS 41.141. An injured party can still recover as long as they were not more than fifty percent at fault, though any award is reduced by their share of responsibility. A skilled lawyer anticipates this defense and frames the owner conduct, the missing security, and the foreseeability of the harm so the focus stays where it belongs.
Talk to a Las Vegas negligent security attorney
If you were hurt or lost someone to violence at a short term rental, you do not have to accept that nothing can be done. The Bourassa Law Group handles negligent security and wrongful death claims across Las Vegas and Nevada, and we know how to prove what an owner should have seen coming. Contact us for a confidential review of your case and let us explain your options.
1-800-870-8910