Assaulted at a Macon Apartment Complex or Store: Georgia’s New Negligent Security Law

By Ben Sessions on October 27th, 2026 in Personal Injury

If you were shot, assaulted, or robbed on someone else’s property in Macon, whether the property owner can be held responsible is now governed by a statute that did not exist before April 21, 2025 — and it is materially harder than the law it replaced.

What changed

Georgia negligent security claims used to be analyzed under a totality-of-the-circumstances foreseeability test developed by the courts. SB 68 replaced that with a new Article 5 of Chapter 3 of Title 51, O.C.G.A. §§ 51-3-50 through 51-3-57, and § 51-3-53(a) makes it “the sole and exclusive remedy for negligent security against owners or occupiers.”

The definition is broad. “Negligent security” covers any claim against an owner, occupier, or security contractor that sounds in tort or nuisance — including a classic premises liability claim under § 51-3-1 — seeking damages for bodily injury or wrongful death arising from an alleged failure to keep the premises and approaches safe from the wrongful conduct of third persons.

So you cannot avoid Article 5 by pleading around it.

Timing matters: this Article applies only to causes of action arising on or after April 21, 2025. An assault that occurred before that date is governed by prior law.

The five elements, for an invitee

Under § 51-3-51, a plaintiff who was an invitee must prove all of the following:

1. The third person’s wrongful conduct was reasonably foreseeable, because the owner or occupier either:

(A) had a particularized warning of imminent wrongful conduct — information actually known to and deemed credible by the owner, causing a conscious understanding that a third person was likely to imminently engage in wrongful conduct posing a clear danger; or
(B) reasonably should have known a third person was reasonably likely to engage in such conduct, based on one of three things:
(i) prior occurrences of substantially similar wrongful conduct on the premises, of which the owner had actual knowledge;
(ii) prior occurrences of substantially similar conduct on adjoining property or otherwise within 500 yards of the premises, of which the owner had actual knowledge; or
(iii) prior occurrences of substantially similar conduct by the same third person who caused the injury — but only where the owner knew or should have known, by clear and convincing evidence, that the person was or would be on the premises, and had actual knowledge of those prior occurrences.

2. The injury was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of that wrongful conduct.

3. The wrongful conduct was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the third person exploiting a specific physical condition of the premises — a condition that created a risk of wrongful conduct on the premises substantially greater than the general risk of wrongful conduct in the vicinity.

4. The owner failed to exercise ordinary care to remedy or mitigate that specific and known physical condition.

5. That failure was a proximate cause of the injury.

Element three is the one that reshapes these cases. It is no longer enough to show that a property was dangerous and under-secured in general. The claim has to connect the crime to a specific physical condition — a broken gate, a disabled lock, a dark stairwell, a collapsed fence line, a failed access control system — that the assailant exploited, and that the owner knew about and failed to address.

Note the comparator built into that element, because it inverts an intuition. The condition must have created a risk substantially greater than the general risk in the surrounding area. That means a high-crime neighborhood now cuts against the injured person on this element rather than for them: the worse the vicinity, the higher the baseline the plaintiff has to exceed.

If you were a licensee, the standard is much harder

Under § 51-3-52, a licensee can establish foreseeability only through a particularized warning of imminent wrongful conduct. The prior-similar-incidents route is unavailable. And the licensee must show the owner “willfully and wantonly failed to exercise any care” to remedy the known physical condition.

Whether you were an invitee or a licensee is therefore a threshold question with enormous consequences — and it is fact-specific. A tenant, a tenant’s guest, a customer, and a social visitor are not all in the same category.

Where the statute forecloses liability entirely

Section 51-3-54 bars recovery in a list of situations, including injury to a trespasser; injury to a person not upon the premises; where the wrongful conduct did not occur on the premises and in a place from which the owner had the legal right and authority to exclude the third person; where the conduct involved a tenant or a tenant’s guest and eviction proceedings had already commenced; where the injured person came to commit or was committing a felony or certain misdemeanors, subject to exceptions for certain victims; where the premises are used as a single-family residence; and where a warning of imminent misconduct was received and the owner made any reasonable effort to provide that information to law enforcement.

There is an express carve-out in § 51-3-53(b): nothing in the Article limits a claim brought under O.C.G.A. § 51-1-56, Georgia’s civil remedy for trafficking victims, in connection with an alleged violation of § 16-5-46.

The apportionment rule is the most aggressive part

Section 51-3-56 does something unusual.

On a finding of liability, the trier of fact shall apportion fault under § 51-12-33 among the owner or occupier, the third person whose wrongful conduct caused the injury, and any others to whom fault should be apportioned.

No party may offer evidence or argument in the hearing of any juror about: any criminal sentence or punishment imposed or imposable on the third person; the financial resources of any party or nonparty; or the effect of an apportionment of fault on the plaintiff’s recovery.

And then the retrial trigger: if the jury fails to apportion a reasonable degree of fault to the third person, the court shall set aside the verdict and order a retrial of liability and damages. There is a rebuttable presumption that an apportionment is unreasonable if the total percentage of fault assigned to all third persons for their wrongful conduct is less than the total assigned to all owners, occupiers, security contractors, and others who did not engage in wrongful conduct.

In plain terms: a jury that assigns the shooter less than half the fault has produced a verdict presumptively subject to being set aside. And the jury cannot be told what any of this does to the injured person’s recovery.

What this means practically in Macon

These cases are still viable. They are now front-loaded, and they live or die on evidence gathered quickly.

What matters most:

Documented prior crime within 500 yards, and proof the owner actually knew about it. Police call histories, incident reports, tenant complaints, security logs, prior lawsuits, and correspondence with management. Actual knowledge is the element, not constructive notice.
The specific physical condition. Photograph the broken gate, the missing lock, the dark parking lot, the failed camera, the gap in the fence — before it is repaired. Repairs after an incident happen fast.
Prior complaints from residents or employees about that exact condition.
The security contract, if there was one. Section 51-3-57 addresses the liability of security contractors separately.
Whether management had a particularized warning — a threat reported and ignored, a specific individual flagged and not excluded.

Where to go from here

Negligent security claims under Article 5 require evidence that the property owner controls and that disappears on a maintenance schedule. If you were injured by a criminal act on someone else’s property in Macon, the preservation work needs to start now.

Our Macon office is at 544 Mulberry Street, Suite 319. Free consultation, no fee unless we recover for you. (470) 225-7710.

Sessions & Fleischman, LLC — Macon office: 544 Mulberry Street, Suite 319, Macon, GA 31201 | (470) 225-7710
Responsible attorney for the content of this page: Ben Sessions, Georgia Bar No. 141280.

This article is general information about Georgia law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different and past results do not predict future outcomes.

Article 5 of O.C.G.A. Title 51 is new and largely untested in Georgia’s appellate courts.

Contingent attorneys’ fees refers only to those fees charged by attorneys for their legal services. Such fees are not permitted in all types of cases. Court costs and other additional expenses of legal action usually must be paid by the client.

About the author: Ben Sessions is a founding partner of Sessions & Fleischman, LLC and tries injury cases from the firm’s Macon office.