Dickinson Arms-Reo v. Campbell

The essential and undisputed facts of this case are as follows. Jeremy Gartrell, a sixteen-year-old with a long history of delinquency, attended what the court of appeals called a teenage gang "get-together" at a friends room in the Dickinson Arms Apartments in Dickinson, Texas, a small town (pop. 17,578) between Houston and Galveston. When Gartrell left the "get-together" sometime after midnight, he noticed in the parking lot a pickup truck in which Joe Darwin Campbell was sitting, waiting for his girlfriend, a resident of the apartments, to arrive. Gartrell suddenly decided to hijack the pickup, and armed with a .22- caliber pistol, he shot and killed Campbell. Never before had there been a murder or a car-jacking at the Dickinson Arms Apartments. Indeed, no one had been murdered in all of Dickinson for at least five years. In the three and one-half years preceding the incident, police received hundreds of calls from the apartments and reported 184 crimes, including twenty burglaries, thirteen auto thefts, eight other thefts, and thirteen assaults. None of the crimes reported were "violent crimes" as defined by the FBI - murder, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault. In one instance shots were fired, but no one was injured. Some residents had complained that other residents and their visitors seemed dangerous, but the plaintiffs expert could not identify a single stranger-initiated personal crime that had ever occurred at the apartments. In the vicinity, there had been, as the court of appeals summarized the evidence, "`quite a few motor vehicle burglaries, stolen vehicles, lots of vandalism and assault calls", "`[q]uite a bit of drug activity and prostitutes", a gunfight in which no one was injured, and "`a lot of family violence, assaults, child abuse, you name it".