Someone got inside your building who never should have. No key. No invitation. Just bad intentions and a stroke of good luck in the form of easy access.
Maybe the front entrance hadn’t latched in weeks, or the side door to the parking garage had stayed propped open with a brick since summer. Now you’ve been attacked. You’re hurt, and you’re suspecting the landlord who never fixed that door could bear some of the blame.
Sometimes they do.
A landlord can be liable for an unlocked door when he or she controlled that door, knew or should have known about the risk, and simply let it slide. The answer turns on which door, who left it that way, and what management knew. Those details are easy to lose once the door gets fixed. That’s why it helps to talk early with a lawyer who handles apartment complex assault claims. Here’s who controls which doors, what Washington requires of landlords, what happens if you left your own door unlocked, and what to do next.
It Depends on Whose Door It Was
Your individual apartment door and the building’s front door get treated very differently. You control your own unit. The landlord usually controls everything you share with your neighbors, like the lobby entrance, side doors, garage gates, and stairwell doors, along with the closers and latches that are supposed to lock them behind you.
That control is what creates responsibility. A door that depends on a self-closing hinge and a latch only works if someone maintains both. When the closer wears out and the door stops catching, or the strike plate works loose, the building is open to anyone who simply pulls on the handle. As usual, nobody even notices until something goes wrong.
Control alone doesn’t make a landlord liable, though. Washington courts have recognized that landlords can owe tenants a duty to protect against reasonably foreseeable criminal acts, which usually means management knew or should have known about a risk like earlier break-ins, prowlers, or complaints about the same door. A broken entrance in a building with a string of break-ins is a very different case from a first-ever incident.
What Washington Requires of Your Landlord
Washington’s tenant safety laws start with the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act, which requires landlords to:
- Keep rentals fit to live in
- Provide reasonably adequate locks and keys
- Take reasonable care with master and duplicate keys
Seattle adds its own rules on top of this, including a requirement that landlords change locks between tenants and give each tenant keys to both the unit and the building entrance, according to the city’s guide to rental repair laws.
The law also gives you a way to force the issue. Once you give written notice of a defect to the manager or whoever collects the rent, the landlord has a set amount of time to start repairs, from as little as 24 hours for conditions that are imminently hazardous to life to 10 days for most others.
None of that automatically makes a landlord liable for a crime. Still, a landlord who got a written complaint about a broken entry lock and let the deadline come and go will have a hard time arguing it acted reasonably. That dated piece of paper also answers the question every negligent security case asks.
What did they know, and when?
What If You Left Your Own Door Unlocked?
It happens. You ran down to the laundry room, or you figured the building’s front door would keep strangers out.
Leaving your own door unlocked doesn’t automatically end your claim. Washington uses pure comparative fault, so any share of fault assigned to you reduces your compensation by that percentage, but it does not bar recovery. If a jury found you 20 percent at fault, your damages would drop by 20 percent.
The details still matter. An intruder who got through a broken building entrance before reaching your door is a different case from one who walked past a lobby door that locked just fine. And if you had a broken door lock you’d already reported that unlocked door points straight back at the landlord.
What to Do After an Intruder Gets In
Get medical care first, even if your injuries seem minor. Then start building a record before the door gets fixed and everyone’s memory gets conveniently fuzzy.
- Call the police and get a report number. You can request the full report later through the Seattle Police records request center.
- Take photos of the entry point before anyone repairs it, including the latch, the strike plate, the closer, or the propped-open gate.
- Notify management in writing about the break-in and the door and keep a copy.
- Gather your old repair requests, emails and texts about that door, and ask neighbors whether they complained too.
- Write down when you last saw the door working and when you first noticed it wasn’t.
A Door Is Only as Good as Its Latch
A worn-out closer, a loose strike plate, or a gate propped open for weeks can turn a building’s front door into a welcome mat. When a landlord controlled that door and ignored the warning signs, Washington law can hold it accountable.
Law Offices of Justin R. Boland, PLLC, represents people hurt by violent crime in Seattle apartment buildings and other properties that should have been safer. Justin R. Boland began his career as a prosecutor before turning to civil litigation for injured people, and our firm works on a contingency fee basis. This means you don’t pay attorney fees unless we recover for you.
If an intruder got in through a door your landlord was supposed to keep secure, reach out to our firm for a free sit-down. The repair requests you already sent just might turn out to be the strongest evidence you have.
