Ginnie Springs facing lawsuit after 2 killed, 2 injured over Memorial Day weekend
GILCHRIST COUNTY, Fla. - A popular tourist destination is facing a lawsuit after Memorial Day weekend violence.
Four people were shot at Ginnie Springs that weekend.
Now, a family and their attorneys say the springs’ owners should have seen this coming.
A video sent to FOX 35 shows the chaos at Ginnie Springs on Memorial Day Weekend.
"I don't even know how to describe it," said Philip Chen, who camped there that weekend. "It's just crazy."
In total, four people were shot. Two died.
The first shooting, that Friday night, killed a man named Koty Stewart.
The Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Office is holding two brothers – Fisher and Dallas Watts – responsible for Stewart’s murder.
And now, a lawsuit aims to hold the owners of Ginnie Springs responsible, too.
"This is a totality of failures," said Antoine Pecko, the lead attorney on the wrongful death lawsuit just filed Thursday against Ginnie Springs Outdoors LLC. "It's not just one singular thing that they didn't do. It's a multitude of things that they didn't do."
Attorney Chris Campione was friends with Stewart.
It’s his law firm filing the wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Stewart’s family.
"It's incredibly infuriating when you really get down to it and you start to see the totality of it," said Campeone. "It makes me upset."
The lawsuit alleges the owners and operators of Ginnie Springs knew about criminal and dangerous activity on their premises and even still, didn’t take "reasonable precautions to provide for the safety of [its] visitors."
The attorneys say there were at least 20,000 people at the campground the night Stewart was killed. For some context, that’s a couple thousand more than the entire population of Gilchrist County.
"This concentrated, densely compacted area with all the unruliness, all the wildness going on," said Pecko, "and nobody's there to stop anything, to enforce anything."
Chen had mentioned the masses of people to FOX 35 that weekend.
"It was crowded. It was a lot of people," he said. "I've never seen that kind of thing before."
Ginnie Springs says it’s taking steps to enhance safety and security.
That includes limiting park capacity, strengthening collaboration with law enforcement, increasing staffing, finding a third-party security expert to strengthen security measures, taking better steps to inform guests and policies, and better training their staff.
They have an event coming up for the Fourth of July weekend.