A Houston Methodist worker who survived a near-death attack inside a parking garage at the Texas Medical Center is fighting back with a lawsuit, saying the place where she was assaulted failed to keep people safe. She has filed a $10 million claim against the Texas Medical Center over what happened.
According to the lawsuit, the woman was cornered inside a public parking garage at the sprawling medical complex in May. She was then violently attacked for about 15 minutes, an ordeal that left her with very serious injuries.
That she survived at all, after an assault described as near-death, has made her decision to come forward and pursue the case a central part of the story. Rather than move on quietly, she has chosen to take legal action over the attack.
The heart of her lawsuit is an allegation about security. The suit claims that the garage where she was attacked lacked active security patrols and working cameras, shortcomings that, in her account, left visitors and workers exposed inside a facility they had reason to expect would be monitored.
The Texas Medical Center is one of the largest medical complexes of its kind, drawing enormous numbers of patients, visitors and staff who rely on its garages every day. The claim that such a site lacked basic security measures in its parking structures is at the core of the $10 million action.
Authorities said the suspect in the attack has been arrested. The criminal side of the case and the civil lawsuit are separate tracks, with the arrest addressing the alleged attacker and the lawsuit aimed at the medical center over the conditions that the woman says allowed the assault to happen.
For the worker, who had gone to the garage as part of an ordinary day tied to her job, the attack turned a routine setting into the scene of a violent assault. Her case has put a spotlight on how large medical campuses protect the people who park in their garages, and it now moves forward as both a criminal matter and a civil claim seeking accountability.