Wrongful death lawyer in Texas City

A wrongful death claim belongs to you and your family, not to the person you lost. It exists so the people left behind can recover for what they lost: income, support, and a relationship that isn’t coming back. Two questions decide most of what happens next: who Texas lets bring the claim, and what it can actually pay for.

Who Texas lets step forward

Under Texas law, this right sits with close family only: a spouse, the children, or the parents. Any one of them can bring the claim on the family’s behalf, and more than one often does. That right doesn’t change based on what kind of vehicle caused the crash. A wreck involving an 18-wheeler still gives the same family members standing to file, even though the claim against a trucking company often looks different underneath.

What the family’s claim can include

This claim generally reaches both the practical and the personal. On the practical side, funeral and burial costs, and the financial support the person would have kept providing to your family. On the personal side, the loss of their companionship and guidance, which Texas treats as a real, compensable loss, not just a sentiment. None of it replaces the person you lost. It’s meant to account for what their absence actually costs going forward.

A separate claim can exist for what they went through

A wrongful death claim is built around what your family lost. A different kind of claim, called a survival claim, can address what the person who died went through themselves in the time between the crash and their death: their own medical bills, their own pain, and the income they lost before they died. That claim usually runs through the estate rather than through any one family member directly, and it can exist alongside your wrongful death claim rather than instead of it.

The clock starts on a different day

A wrongful death claim runs on a two-year deadline, same as most injury claims in Texas, but it doesn’t start on the day of the crash. The statute, § 16.003(b), keys the death claim to when the person died, which is a different start than the crash claim’s. When the crash and the death happen on different days, weeks, or even longer apart, that gap matters. The statute of limitations guide goes over the general two-year rule that would apply to a survival claim or an ordinary injury claim instead.

If the crash involved a drunk driver, expect a criminal case to run alongside your own, on its own schedule, often slower. The drunk driving page straightens out how that criminal case and this civil claim relate, and why one doesn’t have to finish before the other starts. Cost is often the next question on people’s minds, and the lawyer cost guide handles what a contingency arrangement looks like for a claim like this one. This claim has its own clock and its own owner. Deciding who steps forward is worth doing early, before grief makes that decision by default.