A landlord can be sued for failing to take at least minimal steps to alleviate the risk posed by a violent tenant, a Court has ruled.
The Plaintiff was a former tenant of the Defendant's apartment complex who occasionally returned to visit family still living there. A tenant with a history of intimidating behavior had previously brandished a firearm at visitors and other tenants. At least one such previous incident involving the Plaintiff's family was reported to the property manager in writing. When the tenant observed the Plaintiff on the premises, he got a shotgun, shot the Plaintiff twice and beat him before the police arrived to subdue him. The Plaintiff sued, claiming the landlord had breached a duty to protect him from the tenant. The landlord argued the law required a showing that the tenant had committed a nearly identical prior crime before a duty to protect visitors could be implied. But the Court disagreed and stated, "to establish heightened foreseeabillity, the law requires ‘prior similar criminal incidents (or other indications of a reasonably foreseeable risk of violent criminal assaults in that location) and does not require a showing of prior nearly identical criminal incidents'.
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