What Wrongful Death Looks Like in Houston
The Houston Ship Channel is the busiest port in the United States by total waterborne tonnage, a fifty-mile corridor of refineries, chemical plants, and terminals running east from the Turning Basin through Deer Park and Baytown. The work inside those fences, turnarounds, confined-space entries, hot work, crane lifts, happens on compressed schedules with layers of contractors, and when it goes wrong, it goes wrong catastrophically: explosions, toxic releases, falls, crushing injuries.
The roads are their own hazard. Harris County records more traffic deaths than any other county in Texas, year after year. Tanker trucks and container haulers run Beltway 8, the East Freeway, and I-45 at all hours, and fatigued or unqualified commercial drivers kill people here with grim regularity. Offshore, crews leave Galveston and Port Fourchon for platforms and vessels in the Gulf, where a death falls under federal maritime law rather than ordinary Texas negligence law. And many of these cases pass through the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, in the days before they become legal matters at all: an ICU vigil at Memorial Hermann that ends with a family asking what actually happened.
Answering that question is the job. The company already has its version. Your family is entitled to the truth, and to a lawyer with the resources to dig it out.
The Law: Who Can Bring a Texas Wrongful Death Claim
Texas wrongful death law lives in Chapter 71 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, and it is more specific than most people expect.
Only three categories of family members can bring the wrongful death claim itself: the surviving spouse, the children, and the parents of the person who died. Siblings cannot, no matter how close. Any one of the eligible family members may file for the benefit of all of them, and if none of them files within three months, the executor or administrator of the estate must bring the claim unless the family asks them not to. Wrongful death damages compensate the family’s own losses: lost financial support, lost companionship and guidance, and the mental anguish of the death.
The estate has a separate claim, called a survival claim, also under Chapter 71. It belongs to the person who died and passes to their estate: their conscious pain and suffering before death, their medical bills, their funeral expenses. In a case where someone survived a plant explosion for days before dying, the survival claim can be substantial, and it requires an estate representative, which is why Harris County probate court often becomes part of these cases.
Two more chapters matter. Chapter 16 sets the deadline: two years from the date of death, with narrow exceptions. Evidence disappears much faster than that, so the practical deadline is far shorter. And Chapter 41 governs exemplary damages, the punishment layer available when a death results from gross negligence. Chapter 41 caps those damages in most cases, but the caps lift when the death was caused by certain felonious conduct, including intoxication manslaughter. When a drunk commercial driver kills someone, that provision has teeth.
One more, because this is Houston: Chapter 95 applies when a contractor’s employee is killed working on a plant owner’s property. Plant owners treat it as a shield, but it is really a roadmap. It tells us exactly what to prove: that the owner exercised or retained control over the work, and that the owner actually knew about the danger. So we go get the documents that show both — the work permits the owner signed, the safety orientations the owner ran, the audit reports and prior incident records sitting in the owner’s own files. Owners who direct the work and know the hazards are liable under Chapter 95, and their own paperwork usually says so.
Deaths on the water follow different law entirely. The Jones Act covers the death of a seaman caused by employer negligence, and the Death on the High Seas Act covers deaths more than three nautical miles offshore. These statutes have their own damages rules and their own traps, and a Houston wrongful death firm has to know them cold.
What These Cases Can Become
On September 13, 2018, a Jefferson County jury returned a verdict of $44,370,000 against B&G Crane Service for the death of a rigger killed during a refinery turnaround. Vuk Vujasinovic was lead counsel. Before trial, the defense had offered $500,000. The gap between those two numbers is what preparation looks like: the jury saw the evidence the company hoped no one would ever assemble. Vuk also won a $17.7 million verdict for the family of an ironworker killed on the job.
The firm’s trucking results tell the same story. A $10 Million Result for the family of a two-year-old boy killed by an oilfield trucking company whose driver was a three-time felon with a revoked commercial license, high on cocaine, running on falsified logs. An $8.5 Million Result for a father who was rear-ended by an 18-wheeler, lost one child, saw another badly injured, and then watched the company try to blame him. And on the water: VB Attorneys represented nine crewmembers of the Maersk Alabama after the 2009 hijacking, securing confidential recoveries for each.
None of these outcomes started as a big case. They started as a phone call from a family, and they became what they became because the case was built for a jury from day one.
How We Prepare Your Case
1. Your lawyer leads your case.
The lawyer you hire is the lawyer who leads your case, an experienced trial lawyer, supported by a Board Certified partner, and you can talk to your lawyer directly. Not a case manager.
2. We find the evidence.
In a Houston wrongful death case that means OSHA investigation files and Chemical Safety Board reports, plant entry logs and hot-work permits, contractor safety manuals and job safety analyses, 911 audio and scene photographs, truck electronic control module downloads and driver logs, corporate safety policies, and the medical and autopsy records that establish what your family member endured.
3. We build it for court.
We retain the engineers, economists, and safety experts the case requires, take the depositions that lock the company into its story, and prepare every case as if a Harris County jury will decide it. Companies pay serious money for exactly one reason: they believe the alternative is a trial they will lose. Most cases resolve within one to two years.
4. You decide.
We advise. You alone decide whether to accept a settlement or go to trial. That is not a slogan; it is how the attorney-client relationship is supposed to work.
Where Houston Wrongful Death Cases Are Filed
Most of these cases are tried in the Harris County district courts at the civil courthouse on Caroline Street downtown. The survival claim usually requires opening an estate administration, which happens in Harris County’s statutory probate courts, and coordinating the two proceedings is part of the work. Cases with federal claims, including Jones Act and Death on the High Seas Act cases, may be filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Houston. Where to file is a strategic decision, and it is one of the first we make.
