Can I Sue a Property Owner in Massachusetts for an Attack by Someone Else?

Usually not, and the reason is not the one most people expect. Massachusetts does not start from the idea that a landlord, a store or a bar is responsible for keeping criminals away from you. It starts from the opposite idea: “As a general rule, a landowner does not owe a duty to take affirmative steps to protect against dangerous or unlawful acts of third persons.” A claim exists only when two separate things are true, and both have to be proved. First, the risk of that kind of attack had to be reasonably foreseeable to the owner. Second, and this is the part that decides most modern cases, there had to be some reasonable security measure the owner could have taken that probably would have prevented it. In the Supreme Judicial Court’s most recent decision on the subject, a property with a documented history of fights, a shooting and gunfire in the parking lot still produced no liability, because nothing the landlord could have done would have stopped the particular killing. If you were hurt in an attack on someone else’s property, the Jim Glaser Law line at (617) JIM-WINS is answered 24 hours a day, and the first telephone consultation is offered without charge.

The Starting Point Is No Duty

Lawyers call these cases negligent security. Massachusetts law does not. There is no separate negligent security cause of action in the Commonwealth and no special heightened duty that switches on when the injury was caused by a person rather than by a wet floor. There is one duty of reasonable care owed by an owner or occupier to lawful visitors, the same duty at work in an ordinary slip and fall or premises liability case, and the fight in a third-party crime case is about how far that duty reaches.

The default answer is that it does not reach the crime at all. In Luoni v. Berube, 431 Mass. 729 (2000), the SJC put it plainly: “As a general rule, a landowner does not owe a duty to take affirmative steps to protect against dangerous or unlawful acts of third persons.” The same opinion states the way out: “An exception to this rule may be found where there is a special relationship between the defendant landowner and a plaintiff.”

That is the whole architecture. Everything below is either an exception or a limit on an exception.

Where a Duty Actually Comes From

Massachusetts recognizes a handful of routes by which the duty of reasonable care extends to protecting you from another person’s crime. Knowing which one your facts sit in matters more than anything else in the case, because each has a different shape.

A special relationship. Some relationships carry an affirmative protective obligation. Whittaker v. Saraceno, 418 Mass. 196 (1994), lists the Massachusetts examples in a single sentence and, importantly, tells you who is not on the list: “A commercial landlord does not have a special relationship with tenants,” and it names the three relationships that do carry one: a college and its students, a common carrier and its passengers, and a hotel and its guests. Those three come from Mullins v. Pine Manor College, 389 Mass. 47 (1983), Sharpe v. Peter Pan Bus Lines, Inc., 401 Mass. 788 (1988), and Fund v. Hotel Lenox of Boston, Inc., 418 Mass. 191 (1994), and Whittaker cites Restatement (Second) of Torts section 314A for the category.

A business open to the public. If you were a paying customer, the rule is older and broader than people assume. Carey v. New Yorker of Worcester, Inc., 355 Mass. 450 (1969), involved a patron shot in a restaurant and bar by another patron who had been staggering drunk through the aisle for some time. The court held that the operator, “in possession of real estate open to the public for business purposes”, owed this: “It owed a duty to a paying patron to use reasonable care to prevent injury to him by third persons whether their acts were accidental, negligent, or intentional.” That last clause is the one to remember. The duty is not limited to accidents.

A landlord, in the common areas. Whittaker states the commercial landlord rule: “the common law imposes on a commercial landowner a duty to take reasonable precautions to protect persons lawfully in common areas of rental property against reasonably foreseeable risks.” The words “common areas” are doing real work, and we come back to them below. Whittaker also draws the residential line: “The duty of a residential landlord in this respect normally would be a higher one than that of a commercial landlord.”

A duty the owner took on voluntarily. This is the most useful and the most overlooked. Mullins held that “It is an established principle that a duty voluntarily assumed must be performed with due care.” Pine Manor College had a fence, guards and a locking system, and the court reasoned that “Adequate security is an indispensable part of the bundle of services which colleges, and Pine Manor, afford their students.” A voluntary undertaking is not automatically a duty, and Mullins says what else is needed: “It must also be shown that either (a) the failure to exercise due care increased the risk of harm, or (b) the harm is suffered because of the students’ reliance on the undertaking.” In plain terms, if a building advertises cameras, a gate, a doorman or a patrol, and then runs them badly, the advertisement is evidence and so is your reliance on it.

Question One: Was This Kind of Attack Foreseeable?

Foreseeability in Massachusetts is not a checklist. Whittaker says “All the circumstances are examined in defining the scope of a duty of care based on the reasonable foreseeability of harm.”

A great deal of content written outside Massachusetts tells readers that they must produce evidence of prior similar crimes. That is not the Massachusetts rule. Whittaker says the previous occurrence of similar criminal acts on or near the premises “is a circumstance to consider, but the foreseeability question is not conclusively answered in favor of a defendant landlord if there has been no prior similar criminal act.” Prior crimes help, and their absence hurts, but neither is decisive. The SJC restated the point in 2023, quoting Mullins: “Prior criminal acts are simply one factor among others that establish the foreseeability of the act of [a] third party”.

Cutting the other way, the SJC is equally blunt that near-universal risk is not foreseeability. From Whittaker: “The possibility of criminal conduct occurring is present in almost every aspect of daily life. In that sense the possibility of a violent attack is always able to be foreseen.” And so, the court said, “society should not place the burden of all harm caused by random violent criminal conduct on the owner of the property where the harmful act occurred, without proof that the landowner knew or had reason to know of a threat to the safety of persons lawfully on the premises against which the landowner could have taken reasonable preventive steps.”

The risk has to match. This is where careful cases are won and sloppy ones are lost. In Foley v. Boston Housing Authority, 407 Mass. 640 (1990), a housing project manager had been threatened by tenants roughly twice a week for years. He was then attacked by a fellow employee. The SJC accepted that an attack by a tenant was foreseeable and still ordered judgment for the housing authority, because “it cannot be said that an attack on Foley by a fellow employee was foreseeable.” The governing sentence is worth memorizing: “There is no duty owed when the risk which results in the plaintiff’s injury is not one which could be reasonably anticipated by the defendant.” Documented crime on a property proves nothing unless it is the kind of crime that happened to you.

What foreseeability looks like when it is present. Fund v. Hotel Lenox is the clearest example. The hotel was in a medium to moderately high crime area, transients were routinely removed, break-ins were frequent near the fire escape including four in the two weeks before the murder, the fire escape alarm repeatedly failed, a dumpster made access easier, and one security officer was covering two hotels five blocks apart. On that record the SJC held that “The hotel had a security system that could be found to fail to meet the standard of reasonableness”, and that the evidence “would warrant a finding that the failure of the hotel to take reasonable precautions to protect its guests created a risk that an intruder, bent on stealing guests’ property, would be able to gain undetected access to the hotel, its corridors, stairwells, fire escape, and rooms.”

Whittaker adds a nuance that helps claimants: property crime can be the warning. “We recognize that a personal property crime foreseeably could escalate to violence if the criminal is confronted in the course of committing the crime.” A run of car break-ins in a garage is not irrelevant to a later assault in that garage. In Whittaker itself it was not enough, because the property crimes had happened in the parking area and never inside the office portion of the building, and because “The building was not open to the public.”

Question Two: Could Anything Have Stopped It?

This is the limb the older cases underplay and the newest one turns on, and it is the reason a case that looks strong on paper can fail.

The current formulation from the Supreme Judicial Court is that “the existence of a duty of care depends upon the foreseeability of a risk of harm that the defendant has an ability to prevent.” Hill-Junious v. UTP Realty, LLC, 492 Mass. 667 (2023), applied it to facts that would make most people assume liability. A man was shot and killed outside the exit of a nightclub that leased the basement of a commercial building in Randolph. The property’s history included a fight in the lot, an assault inside the club, multiple fights, a drug arrest outside it, a patron breaking windows with a baseball bat, a shooting of three people outside the club, gunshots with shell casings recovered from the lot, and a patron hit on the head with a bottle. After the killing the local licensing board cut the club’s alcohol hours and found a “pattern of operation” that worried police, who had specifically warned against the open mic nights.

The landlord won anyway. The court did not need to decide what the owner knew: “Of course, UTP’s duty is not circumscribed by what it knew; the duty also encompasses what it should have known.” It then assumed the point against the landlord and moved on: “even if UTP should have known of the prior acts of violence identified by the plaintiff, that would not be conclusive on the question of duty.” What defeated the claim was the second limb. The shooter had come to the club, recognized the decedent, and formed a plan to kill him in retaliation for a family member’s death; he had even asked the club’s own security staff whether the front door was “the only exit.” Against that, the plaintiff’s expert proposed better exterior lighting and a security presence near the exit. The court held that “the record cannot reasonably support a conclusion that security measures, including those suggested by the plaintiff’s expert, such as additional exterior lighting and an additional security presence near the nightclub’s exit, would have prevented the shooting that occurred”, adding: “And no rational basis exists to conclude that lighting could have prevented the killing.” The conclusion was that “the targeted, execution-style shooting that occurred here was not reasonably foreseeable to UTP; therefore, UTP had no legal duty to prevent it.”

The Appeals Court reached the same result on a supermarket stabbing in Luisi v. Foodmaster Supermarkets, Inc., 50 Mass. App. Ct. 575 (2000), where the SJC later summarized the holding as one in which “no reasonable preventive measures taken by the defendants could have prevented the sudden and unprovoked attack on the plaintiff.” Luisi also states the general limit: “a possessor of land is not a guarantor of the safety of persons lawfully on its premises”, and “The duty owed is limited to guarding against reasonably foreseeable risks of harm.”

When preventability is a jury question. Sharpe v. Peter Pan Bus Lines is the counterweight, and it deserves an honest description because it is routinely overstated. A sixteen year old waiting for a bus in the Springfield terminal was stabbed to death by a stranger. The terminal sat in an area police called one of high criminal activity, there had been robberies in its restrooms and assaults inside it, management called police weekly, and there was no uniformed security officer and no security plan. The SJC said “We have little hesitancy in ruling that the evidence warranted a finding that each defendant failed to fulfil its high duty of care concerning security in the terminal.” On causation it held that “The presence of uniformed police or security personnel provides a deterrent effect”, that “The fact that a physical attack could not have been prevented, once a person had decided to undertake it, however, does not fully answer the causation question”, and that the real question is “whether the jury would have been warranted in finding that it was more probable than not that sudden, unprovoked attacks, such as Werner’s attack on Sharon, could have been prevented.” A security expert testified that a uniformed guard probably would have prevented it, and the jury was entitled to agree.

Two cautions about Sharpe. It was decided against the high duty of care of a common carrier rather than the ordinary landowner standard, and it was decided that way because the defendants never contested it. The court noted that “Peter Pan did not raise by its motion for a directed verdict the point that it had no duty to Sharon at the time she was attacked”, so it never passed on whether a duty existed. Sharpe is strong on what expert deterrence evidence can do. It is not authority that a bus terminal, a store or a landlord always owes you a guard.

Control Decides Who Has to Answer

The most common practical mistake in these cases is suing the wrong party, and Massachusetts law sorts defendants by control.

Common area or leased premises. In Luisi, the mall landlord was let out on a second, independent ground: the duty stated in Whittaker runs to “persons lawfully in common areas of rental property”, and “Here, the plaintiff’s injuries did not occur in a common area but within the premises leased to Foodmaster.” Where the attack physically happened can decide which defendant is in the case.

Owners who hand over possession. In Heath-Latson v. Styller, 487 Mass. 581 (2021), a man was shot at a large late-night party in a house the host had rented for the weekend through a short-term rental platform. The SJC affirmed dismissal against the homeowner. The reasoning was that the owner had given the renter exclusive possession, had no control of the premises during the rental, and, beyond turning over a property in reasonably safe condition, owed the guest no further duty to protect against a third party’s crime. Advertising that the property was in a safe area and had gates did not change it.

Tenancy attenuates the owner. The Appeals Court made the same point in Belizaire v. Furr, 88 Mass. App. Ct. 299 (2015), holding that the existence of a tenancy “substantially increases the plaintiff’s burden in establishing that the defendant owed the victim a duty to protect against the criminal acts of third parties.”

Read the lease, and do not over-read it. In Hill-Junious the lease obliged the tenant nightclub to carry a million dollars of liability insurance naming the landlord as an additional insured, gave the landlord exclusive control of the common areas, and contained an indemnity clause. None of that mattered on duty, because “The lease, however, did not place any obligation on UTP to provide security for City Limits or its patrons.” Whittaker is a warning in the other direction: the trial judge there found a duty in a lease rider that allocated to the tenant a share of the costs of “snow removal, landscaping, security and maintenance for common roadways and open areas”, and the SJC held that all this meant was that the tenant paid its share if the landlord chose to spend money on external security. A cost-sharing line is not a promise.

One clause that never survives: M.G.L. c. 186, sec. 15 makes a lease provision whose effect is to “preclude or exonerate the lessor or landlord from any or all liability to the lessee or tenant, or to any other person, for any injury, loss, damage or liability arising from any omission, fault, negligence or other misconduct of the lessor or landlord” on the premises or in its stairways, hallways and other appurtenances “against public policy and void.” A landlord’s hold-harmless clause is not a defense. Other kinds of signed release can be, which is a separate subject covered in our article on whether liability waivers are enforceable in Massachusetts.

The Question Massachusetts Has Not Answered

Whether a buyer of commercial property has a legal duty to investigate the property’s criminal history before buying it is unresolved in Massachusetts.

It was the heart of the plaintiff’s case in Hill-Junious. Her security expert opined that it would be unreasonable for a commercial landlord to buy a property with a nightclub on it without first asking about past violence there, and the buyer testified she had known nothing about the incidents. The Superior Court judge observed that “the plaintiff did not cite any precedent in support of her claim that a commercial landowner has a duty to inquire about any history of past criminal activity on its property.” The SJC then decided the appeal without reaching it, assuming the knowledge question against the landlord and ruling on preventability instead.

So the honest answer is that no Massachusetts appellate decision found for this article establishes a duty to inquire, and none rejects one either. Anyone who tells you the law is settled on that point is guessing.

Bars, Clubs and Liquor Licensees

Assaults at licensed premises are their own pattern, and Carey remains the template: a patron who was visibly, loudly drunk, known to staff as a troublemaker, previously removed by police and previously refused service, who was nonetheless served two more rounds. The court held it was open to the jury to find the defendant’s employees should have realized the need for repressing him and that “The defendant is in error in claiming that there were no warnings of trouble.”

The most valuable evidence in a bar case is therefore usually about the assailant’s behavior in the minutes and hours before the attack, not about the neighborhood. That is a different question from the licensee’s separate liability for over-serving a person who then causes harm, which runs through M.G.L. c. 138, sec. 69 and is covered in our article on who can be held responsible after a Massachusetts drunk driving crash.

If the Property Belongs to a City, a Housing Authority or the State

A claim against a public landowner is not the same claim. It runs under the Massachusetts Tort Claims Act, with a written presentment deadline, a damages cap, and statutory exclusions that were written with exactly this fact pattern in mind, including one that removes claims based on a failure to prevent harmful consequences of a third person’s conduct that the public employer did not originally cause. Those rules, and the four written exceptions to that exclusion, are set out in our article on suing a Massachusetts city, town or state agency. Read it before doing anything else, because the presentment deadline is shorter than the ordinary limitations period and missing it ends the claim.

What a Strong Massachusetts Case Usually Looks Like

Reading these decisions together, the cases that succeed cluster tightly. Doe v. New Bedford Housing Authority, 417 Mass. 273 (1994), surveyed the field and described the pattern: “the factual background of those cases consistently involves situations where the landlord either voluntarily had agreed to provide security services and did so negligently, or failed to provide or to maintain proper security devices such as locks or appropriate external doors.”

Griffiths v. Campbell, 425 Mass. 31 (1997), states the same idea as a rule: “the cases in which we have imposed liability are those in which a person legally on the premises is attacked, and the owner or landlord knew of or should have known of both the previous attacks and the potential for a recurrence based on a failure to take measures to make the premises safer.” It also holds, in the same breath, that “Landlords may be liable for ignoring criminal activities that occur on premises and were known or should have been known to them”, and then rejected liability where a landlord knew of a single drug raid and a police detective was later killed executing a warrant, because “As a matter of law, the murder of Detective Griffiths was not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants.” The SJC’s summary of why courts stop somewhere is worth quoting: “There must be limits to the scope or definition of reasonable foreseeability based on considerations of policy and pragmatic judgment.”

In practice, the facts that carry a Massachusetts negligent security case are physical and specific. A lock that did not work. An exterior door that did not latch, or that violated the sanitary code. A gate or a camera that was advertised and then left broken. A guard who was promised, paid for through rent or a fee, and not there. A prior attack of the same kind, reported and ignored. What does not carry a case is a general sense that the neighborhood is dangerous or that the owner should have done more.

What the Criminal’s Own Fault Does to Your Recovery

Two points that surprise people.

First, the person who attacked you is usually the least useful defendant. A criminal defendant is rarely insured and rarely has assets, which is why these cases are brought against the property owner in the first place.

Second, the attacker’s intentional conduct does not get compared against your own to reduce your recovery. Massachusetts comparative negligence, M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85, provides that “Contributory negligence shall not bar recovery in any action by any person or legal representative to recover damages for negligence resulting in death or in injury to person or property, if such negligence was not greater than the total amount of negligence attributable to the person or persons against whom recovery is sought”. In Flood v. Southland Corp., 416 Mass. 62 (1993), the SJC held that the statute does not reach intentional wrongdoing at all: “Section 85 of G. L. c. 231 speaks only of contributory negligence and of negligence attributable to plaintiffs and defendants”, and “Intentional tortious conduct cannot be negligent conduct.” Your own conduct can still be weighed, and the general mechanics are explained in our article on comparative negligence when you are partly at fault.

Flood is also worth knowing for how forgiving the foreseeability question can be once some risk is established. The store clerk knew two young men outside were, in the court’s words, “pretty high,” that one had a knife, and that they were gathered where he could not see them. That was enough: “A jury would be warranted in such circumstances in determining that a risk of harm, the stabbing of someone, was reasonably foreseeable”, and “The way in which the stabbing occurred and the fact that the plaintiff might be the one to be harmed need not have been reasonably foreseeable.”

If the Owner Is a Charity, the Recovery May Be Capped

This one is severe and most people have never heard of it. M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85K provides that where a tort is committed in the course of an activity carried on to accomplish directly the charitable purposes of a charitable corporation, trust or association, “liability in any such cause of action shall not exceed the sum of twenty thousand dollars exclusive of interest and costs”. The cap does not apply where the tort was committed “in the course of activities primarily commercial in character even though carried on to obtain revenue to be used for charitable purposes.”

Mullins is the illustration. The jury awarded $175,000 against Pine Manor College and its vice president for operations, and the trial judge reduced the judgment against the college to $20,000 under section 85K. If the property where you were attacked is owned by a private college, a church, a nonprofit shelter or a similar organization, whether the activity was charitable or commercial in character can matter more than liability itself. The caps that apply to different Massachusetts defendants are collected in our article on what a spinal cord injury case is worth in Massachusetts.

Deadlines

The ordinary deadline is three years. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that “actions of tort, actions of contract to recover for personal injuries, and actions of replevin, shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues.” A claim against a public landowner has its own earlier presentment requirement, and a death claim has its own statute. The full picture, including the discovery rule and the tolling rules for minors, is in our article on the Massachusetts personal injury statute of limitations, and a claim brought by a family after a fatal attack is governed by the rules in our article on Massachusetts wrongful death claims.

What Actually Helps in the First Two Weeks

These cases are won on evidence that disappears fast, and the evidence is different from a car crash.

Surveillance video is the single most important item and it is routinely overwritten in days. A written preservation demand to the property owner and to any adjoining business with a camera should go out immediately. The police incident report, and the reports of earlier incidents at the same address, establish the prior-crime picture; those are usually obtainable through the department’s records officer. If the property is licensed to serve alcohol, the local licensing board file can contain exactly the kind of findings that mattered in Hill-Junious. Photographs of lighting, doors, locks, gates and camera positions, taken at the same hour of night as the attack, are far more persuasive than a description written later. Names of staff and witnesses matter, because turnover is high. Finally, be careful what you post; in Massachusetts an insurer will look, and the ground rules are set out in our article on social media and your injury claim.

If the attack happened in a licensed care facility rather than a store or apartment building, a separate statutory reporting and investigation scheme applies, and it is described in our article on nursing home neglect and abuse claims. If the injury is a head injury, the medical documentation problem is different too, and is covered in our article on Massachusetts traumatic brain injury claims. Whether it is worth hiring a lawyer at all, and what it costs, is answered in our article on what Massachusetts personal injury lawyers charge.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is a Massachusetts property owner responsible for a crime that happens on the property?

A: Usually not. The general rule stated in Luoni v. Berube, 431 Mass. 729 (2000), is that “a landowner does not owe a duty to take affirmative steps to protect against dangerous or unlawful acts of third persons.” A duty arises only through an exception, such as a special relationship, a business open to the public, a landlord’s obligation in common areas, or a security undertaking the owner assumed voluntarily. Even then the owner is liable only for a reasonably foreseeable risk that the owner had an ability to prevent.

Q: Do I have to prove there were similar crimes on the property before?

A: No. Massachusetts rejects a rigid prior-similar-incidents rule. Whittaker v. Saraceno, 418 Mass. 196 (1994), says the previous occurrence of similar criminal acts on or near the premises is “a circumstance to consider, but the foreseeability question is not conclusively answered in favor of a defendant landlord if there has been no prior similar criminal act.” Prior crimes are powerful evidence and their absence is a real obstacle, but neither one decides the case by itself.

Q: The property had a long history of violence. Is that enough to win?

A: Not by itself, and Hill-Junious v. UTP Realty, LLC, 492 Mass. 667 (2023), is the proof. The property there had a record of fights, an assault inside the nightclub, a drug arrest, windows broken by a patron with a baseball bat, a shooting of three people and gunfire in the parking lot. The landlord still won, because the killing was a planned, targeted shooting and the court held “no rational basis exists to conclude that lighting could have prevented the killing.” You have to show a measure that probably would have made a difference.

Q: What is the legal test in Massachusetts?

A: The Supreme Judicial Court frames it as one question with two parts: “the existence of a duty of care depends upon the foreseeability of a risk of harm that the defendant has an ability to prevent.” In practice a claim has to satisfy both. Was this kind of attack a reasonably foreseeable risk in all the circumstances, and was there a reasonable security measure that probably would have prevented it.

Q: Does it matter where on the property I was attacked?

A: It can decide which defendant is liable. A landlord’s duty under Whittaker runs to “persons lawfully in common areas of rental property”. In Luisi v. Foodmaster Supermarkets, Inc., 50 Mass. App. Ct. 575 (2000), the mall landlord was dismissed in part because “the plaintiff’s injuries did not occur in a common area but within the premises leased to Foodmaster.” A lobby, stairwell, hallway, parking lot or walkway is usually the landlord’s; the inside of a leased store is usually the tenant’s.

Q: My apartment building advertised security cameras and a locked entry that never worked. Does that help?

A: Yes, and it is often the strongest fact available. Mullins v. Pine Manor College, 389 Mass. 47 (1983), holds that “a duty voluntarily assumed must be performed with due care”, and requires a showing that “either (a) the failure to exercise due care increased the risk of harm, or (b) the harm is suffered because of the students’ reliance on the undertaking.” Doe v. New Bedford Housing Authority, 417 Mass. 273 (1994), describes the recurring successful pattern as a landlord who “either voluntarily had agreed to provide security services and did so negligently, or failed to provide or to maintain proper security devices such as locks or appropriate external doors.”

Q: Is a residential landlord held to a higher standard than a commercial one?

A: Normally yes. Whittaker states that “The duty of a residential landlord in this respect normally would be a higher one than that of a commercial landlord.” That said, the same case makes clear that commercial landlords are not exempt: the SJC corrected the trial judge, holding that “commercial landlords, contrary to what the judge said, may well have a duty of care to guard against foreseeable criminal acts of third parties.”

Q: I was attacked in a bar. Is that different?

A: The evidence is different. Carey v. New Yorker of Worcester, Inc., 355 Mass. 450 (1969), held that a restaurant and bar “owed a duty to a paying patron to use reasonable care to prevent injury to him by third persons whether their acts were accidental, negligent, or intentional”, and the facts that mattered were the assailant’s visible drunkenness, the staff’s knowledge of him, and continued service. In a bar case, what happened in the room in the minutes before the attack usually matters more than the neighborhood’s crime statistics.

Q: The attack happened in a house someone rented for a party. Can I sue the owner?

A: Probably not, on those facts alone. In Heath-Latson v. Styller, 487 Mass. 581 (2021), a man was shot at a large party in a home rented for the weekend through a short-term rental platform, and the Supreme Judicial Court affirmed dismissal against the owner. The owner had given the renter exclusive possession and had no control of the premises during the rental, and, beyond handing over a property in reasonably safe condition, owed no further duty to protect a guest from a third party’s crime.

Q: Can the lease or a sign say the landlord is not responsible?

A: Not for the landlord’s own negligence. M.G.L. c. 186, sec. 15 makes any lease provision whose effect is to “preclude or exonerate the lessor or landlord from any or all liability to the lessee or tenant, or to any other person” for injury arising from the landlord’s negligence on the premises or its stairways, hallways and other appurtenances “against public policy and void.” A different document, a pre-injury release you signed to use a facility, can be enforceable, which is a separate question.

Q: Does the attacker’s fault reduce what I can recover from the property owner?

A: Not through the comparative negligence statute. Flood v. Southland Corp., 416 Mass. 62 (1993), holds that M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85 “speaks only of contributory negligence and of negligence attributable to plaintiffs and defendants” and that “Intentional tortious conduct cannot be negligent conduct.” Your own negligence can still reduce your damages under that section, and bars recovery entirely if it was greater than the negligence of the parties you are suing.

Q: What if the property is owned by a charity or a private college?

A: The recovery may be capped. M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85K limits liability for a tort committed in the course of activity carried on to accomplish directly a charitable purpose so that it “shall not exceed the sum of twenty thousand dollars exclusive of interest and costs”, with no cap where the activity was “primarily commercial in character even though carried on to obtain revenue to be used for charitable purposes”. In Mullins the jury awarded $175,000 and the judgment against the college was reduced to $20,000 under that section.

Q: How long do I have to bring a Massachusetts negligent security claim?

A: Generally three years. M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A provides that tort actions “shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues”. If the property owner is a city, town, housing authority or state agency, a separate and earlier written presentment requirement applies under the Massachusetts Tort Claims Act, and missing it can end the claim before the three years run. Confirm your own deadline with a lawyer rather than counting from a general rule.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Whether a particular owner owed you a duty depends on the relationship, the location of the attack, what the owner knew, what security existed, and what would have prevented the specific crime, which only a lawyer reviewing the facts can assess. For advice about a specific situation, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS.