Q: I was held hostage in a liquor store. Where the gunman killed himself. Can I be compensated

A: Potentially, but not an easy case since the liquor store did not exactly do anything wrong, the guy did. You could go after the estate of the gunman, but given he was presumably robbing the place, likely no assets to go after.

A: You first need to identify someone who did something wrong, ie negligent, which cause you to have an injury. So we can identify the gunman obviously. Your injury was wrongful imprisonment or something along that line, being held and not being able to leave.

The big second step here is to identify a wrongdoer who actually have money that would make it worthwhile for you to bring your lawsuit. As my colleague pointed out, the gunman probably isn't a good economic target although in some very weird situations there can be assets or insurance money that one can go after, but don't get your hopes up. The monied target in this story might be the store but you are going to have investigate this.

A business has a duty to inspect for harmful conditions and a duty to fix the harmful condition or post warnings to their customers. For example, an apartment owner was held liable for failing to properly light the parking area of the apartment complex and a tenant was assaulted in the parking lot. So you may have a chance of suing the store if you can find some lack of taking security measures that would have prevented this robbery from either taking place, or from escalating. You would first have to start with what type of security measures are reasonable and normal for this type of business to have, whether this business at least did that much, and whether the business had reason to know that they were at risk for this type of event and should have taken more precautions to protect their customers.

Keep in mind that the duty of a business to protect their customers is not absolute. They have no duty to protect someone from a danger they were not aware of and could not have reasonably anticipated.

In Oregon, State liquor stores are regulated by the State of Oregon. Why don't you call the State Liquor Board and find out if there are regulations as to security for liquor stores. Find out if there are inspections of liquor stores for compliance and ask for the report history for this particular store, if there are inspections. Also investigate whether this store has been robbed before.