Collins Family Wrongful Death Lawsuit Against TDCJ

The Collins family’s wrongful death lawsuit against TDCJ is a negligence action the family has formally noticed against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice over the June 2, 2022 murders of Mark Collins and his four grandsons by escaped inmate Gonzalo Lopez. The claim rests on the agency’s own documented findings that a cascade of security failures on and before the May 12, 2022 prison bus transport allowed Lopez to escape, remain at large for 21 days, and reach the family’s Centerville ranch.¹

What the Family Is Claiming

Attorneys for the Collins family notified TDCJ of their intent to sue over the five deaths. The theory of liability is negligence: that TDCJ staff failed to follow the agency’s own established procedures for searches, restraints, body scanning, and transport security, and that those failures directly enabled Lopez’s escape and the subsequent killings.¹

The five people Lopez killed at the ranch were Mark Collins, 66; his grandsons Waylon Collins, 18, Carson Collins, 16, and Hudson Collins, 11, who were brothers and the sons of Chris Collins; and their cousin Bryson Collins, 11, the son of Dustin Collins. Mark Collins is survived by his wife, Lisa Scarbrough Collins, and their three sons, Chris, Dustin, and Matthew.²³

The Record of Security Failures the Suit Rests On

Two post-escape reviews, an internal TDCJ “Serious Incident Review” and an independent assessment by the contracting firm CGL Companies, concluded the escape was preventable and resulted from compounding failures rather than any single mistake.⁴ That record is the factual spine of the family’s negligence claim.

The reviews catalogued specific procedural breakdowns on the day Lopez was transported from the Alfred Hughes Unit in Gatesville:

Officers failed to conduct proper strip searches before transport. A thorough search would likely have uncovered the two metal weapons, each roughly eight to ten inches long, and the handcuff key Lopez had hidden in his mouth.
Staff did not run Lopez through the “BOSS chair,” a body-orifice security scanner designed to detect metallic contraband.
Leg restraints were left loose, and a device meant to block access to the handcuff keyhole was not placed correctly.
Two officers logged that they had searched Lopez’s cell when they had not.
Inmates were routinely told their transport dates ahead of time, giving Lopez time to prepare.
Lopez had previously ordered publications on weapons manufacturing and survival techniques. The mailroom denied the orders but never notified facility administrators, which would have triggered heightened security oversight.

The CGL report concluded that if any one of those procedures had been followed correctly, the escape likely could have been prevented.¹⁴

The staffing picture compounded the procedural lapses. As of April 2022, 32 percent of all TDCJ correctional officer positions statewide were vacant. At the Hughes Unit the vacancy rate reached 43 percent, and on the day of the escape, 42 of 160 top-priority security posts at the unit were unstaffed. Investigators described a culture of complacency in which staff cut corners on security procedures with little supervision from wardens or senior officers.⁴⁵

A separate point weighs on the chain of events between the escape and the killings. A joint investigation by the Houston Chronicle and The Marshall Project reported that authorities had found Lopez’s DNA at a burglarized cabin near the Collins ranch on May 31, two days before the murders, but failed to issue adequate warnings to residents in the area. The ranch sat within the perimeter law enforcement had been searching since the escape.¹

TDCJ’s Own Disciplinary Response

TDCJ’s internal response reinforces the negligence record. The agency initiated disciplinary proceedings against more than two dozen employees. Three staff members resigned. Fifteen others received discipline that included termination, probation, or suspension. The employees involved included a dozen officers, two sergeants, a captain, a lieutenant, and a major, all of whom were found to have failed to properly restrain Lopez, skipped safety checks, or falsified documents.⁶ No criminal charges against the officers who falsified search logs have been publicly reported.

TDCJ also suspended all inmate transports for a week after the escape and, when transports resumed, required a minimum of three correctional officers on every bus, enhanced pre-boarding searches, installed video surveillance on transport vehicles, moved to individual transport for the highest-risk inmates, and expanded on-site medical capabilities to reduce off-site trips.⁷⁸ Those changes do not resolve the past liability, but they corroborate that the earlier practices fell short of what the agency itself now considers adequate.

The Sovereign Immunity Problem

Suing TDCJ involves significant legal hurdles. As a state agency, TDCJ is generally shielded from lawsuits by sovereign immunity. The Texas Tort Claims Act provides a limited waiver of that immunity, but only in state court, and only under narrow circumstances involving the use of tangible personal property or motor vehicles.⁹

That framework shapes what a wrongful death action against TDCJ can look like. Claims that fit the Act’s tangible-property or motor-vehicle categories, the prison transport bus, the restraints, the body scanner that was not used, have a path into state court; claims framed purely as discretionary policy failures do not. The ceiling on recovery, the venue, and the pleadings all turn on fitting the alleged negligence into the waiver’s narrow categories.

What Has and Hasn’t Been Disclosed

The family’s attorneys gave formal notice of intent to sue TDCJ.¹ The specific dollar amount of damages sought by the Collins family has not been publicly disclosed. Lopez himself cannot be a defendant: he was killed on June 2, 2022, in a shootout with officers near Jourdanton after a citizen’s tip led law enforcement to a Chevrolet Silverado he had stolen from the Collins ranch.¹⁰

At the family’s funeral on June 11, 2022, at Champions Forest Baptist Church in Houston, Chris Collins told the gathered crowd, “Please know, we’re going to be all right.”²

1
NBC News. Many Security Lapses Led to Escape of Texas Inmate
2
Houston Chronicle. Funeral Services Today for Tomball Grandfather
3
Klein Funeral Home. Obituary of Mark Collins
4
CGL Companies. Texas Department of Criminal Justice Lopez Escape Review
5
Houston Public Media. Reports Many Security Lapses Led to Texas Inmates Escape
6
Louisiana Illuminator. Chronically Understaffed Texas Prisons Set Stage for Prison Bus Escape and Massacre of Family
7
Axios. Gonzalo Lopez Escape Texas Inmate Transports
8
KBTX. TDCJ Resume Inmate Transportation
9
GovInfo. Espinoza v. Texas Department of Criminal Justice
10
CNN. Gonzalo Lopez Texas Manhunt