Carbon monoxide, brain damage and a fight for justice

Police did not swarm the scene with flashing lights or drawn guns.
Yet what happened inside a Dallas apartment complex was as devastating and as unforgivable
as any cold-blooded murder.

In 2015, a silent killer seeped into the home of Ti Courtney McMullen and her two young
children — two-year-old Chase and six-month-old Chastin.
The killer was not a person. It was carbon monoxide, made deadly by an indifferent landlord.

A rusted, open exhaust pipe in the boiler room next to their unit turned the apartment into
a gas chamber. McMullen never smelled the odorless fumes or saw the invisible cloud of carbon
monoxide drifting through her home. She only felt a pounding headache so fierce she feared she
was about to have a seizure.

By the time emergency responders reached the family, Chase and Chastin had suffered
irreversible brain damage.

Deny. Delay. Defend.

For nine years, McMullen waged a David-and-Goliath legal battle against the apartment’s
owners and their insurer, Chubb Insurance.
Instead of quickly fixing a dangerous boiler exhaust pipe, the landlord chose delay tactics,
denials and legal maneuvering.

In the latest season of the True Crime Reporter™ podcast, listeners are taken inside
the courtroom for an insider’s look at how this disturbing case unfolded.

Dallas personal injury attorney Ted Lyon’s firm ultimately forced the apartment complex to
replace the boiler and install modern carbon monoxide detectors — changes that now protect
future tenants.

A mother’s worst nightmare

McMullen, who worked on the True Crime Reporter production team, was a devoted
mother. Her phone is filled with videos of Chase racing around in a Batman costume and baby
Chastin toddling along beside him in a little T-shirt that read “Little Sis.”

On one of those days, Chase refused to take off his Batman suit, so she let him wear it to
the grocery store. His face lit up when the cashier called out, “Hey, Batman!”

In video after video, McMullen’s affection for her children is obvious — their laughter
filling the background as they play with toys, balls and whatever they can find around the
house.

On the witness stand, McMullen struggled to hold back tears as she described how playful and
talkative Chase had been, always dancing and singing, and how Chastin smiled wherever her big
brother went.

All of that changed in 2015.

One evening, McMullen came home exhausted from a long day at work. The first thing she
noticed was the heat — the apartment felt stifling, as if the air itself were suffocating
her. She turned down the thermostat and headed to the kids’ bedroom.

Chase and Chastin were lying silently on the bed. It was unusual. They always slept together
and never liked to be apart. Their skin felt clammy when she touched them. They would not
wake up.

Panicked, she began screaming for help, called 911 and ran outside with both children in her
arms. The apartment manager rushed over and attempted CPR on Chastin while they waited for
paramedics.

Emergency crews soon arrived and rushed both children to the hospital. Doctors intubated them
and placed them in medically induced comas to try to protect their brains from further damage.
McMullen could only stand by, praying to hear her baby say “Mama” again.

When days had passed and she finally walked back into the hospital room, she had hoped to see
smiles and hear laughter. Instead, there were blank stares. When McMullen tried to sing “Happy
Birthday,” the children didn’t respond. They no longer laughed, sang or spoke.

Today, Chase and Chastin remain locked in their own world. They rarely engage with others.
McMullen says they do not pick up on the things other children their age easily understand.

A case no one wanted

Seeking justice, McMullen first approached another law firm. When that firm abandoned the
case, she turned to Dallas personal injury firm Lyon & Lyon.

Attorney Ted Lyon later told me that this was the most emotionally difficult trial of his
career. He assigned the case to one of the firm’s rising stars, attorney Richard Mann.

When the law gets personal

Mann was just five years into his legal career when he took on McMullen’s fight. His own
children were the same ages as Chase and Chastin — a fact that made the case deeply personal.

As Mann’s children learned to talk in full sentences, Chase and Chastin remained trapped at a
developmental level closer to toddlers. While his children grew out of diapers and started
school, McMullen’s children could not.

An indifferent landlord

Before the poisoning, McMullen had repeatedly complained to the apartment office about not
having hot water. Maintenance workers came and went, but the problem persisted. On the
morning of the incident, she remembered the water turning icy cold.

Evidence later showed that a rusted and broken exhaust pipe from the boiler, located right
next to her unit, vented carbon monoxide directly into the walls and ceiling of her
apartment.

During the trial, photographs revealed the condition of the pipe — visibly rotted, cracked
and open. Yet when asked under oath, the maintenance supervisor claimed he did not recognize
what was wrong with it. The apartment complex had no working carbon monoxide detectors.

A gas company technician had previously warned the property about the dangerous condition of
the exhaust, but nothing was done. The jury heard that fixing the problem would have cost far
less than what was ultimately spent fighting the lawsuit.

Part one ends with McMullen and her attorneys still battling uphill — against a landlord that
denied responsibility and an insurance company determined to delay.
In part two, the fight moves into the courtroom.

In part one, Ti Courtney McMullen, a mother of two small children, was seeking justice from a
negligent landlord after carbon monoxide poisoning left both children with permanent brain
damage. Dallas personal injury attorney Ted Lyon’s firm stepped into what other lawyers had
walked away from.

Deny. Delay. Defend.

Attorney Richard Mann suspected early on that the apartment owners were hiding behind
insurance and delay tactics to limit their liability. The complex initially disclosed only a
$1 million policy. Mann pushed. Eventually, his team uncovered a $51 million umbrella policy
with Chubb Insurance.

Even then, the defense strategy was simple: deny and delay. They would fight every motion,
contest every piece of evidence and hold out as long as possible.

A shameless defense

As trial approached, the defense introduced a new, deeply disturbing theory. They suggested
that the children’s brain injuries were not caused by carbon monoxide at all, but by sexual
abuse.

Mann was stunned. There was no evidence — not a hint — to support the claim. He believed the
defense was trying to inflame the jury and distract from the landlord’s negligence.

Two highly paid expert witnesses were brought in to support the defense narrative: a
neurologist, Dr. David Rosenfeld, and a neuropsychologist, Dr. Francisco Perez. In court,
both men admitted they had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to review the case and
testify.

Rosenfeld had even been promoted as a “gold standard” expert in brain injury cases. Yet
McMullen’s attorneys pointed out that he often testified for the NFL in concussion-related
lawsuits — almost always siding with the league and downplaying the link between hits to the
head and brain damage.

Perez fared little better under cross-examination. The jury heard that he was nicknamed
“Dr. No” because of how consistently he sided with defendants in injury cases.

The fight in court

The trial played out in George Allen Courts Building in downtown Dallas. Day after day, Mann
and Lyon presented evidence showing the jury how the exhaust pipe had rotted, how complaints
from tenants had been ignored and how the children’s lives had been irrevocably changed.

McMullen never gave up. She sat through the entire trial, listening to experts question how
her children had been injured and why they no longer acted like other kids their age.

When it was time to close, Mann called on a verse from the Bible that had guided him through
the case: “You have been called for such a time as this.”
He locked eyes with the jury foreperson. “This is your moment,” he said. “You have the power
to change these children’s lives.”

A verdict nine years in the making

After a day and a half of deliberations, the jury returned a verdict in August 2024. They
awarded $51 million in damages.

Ninety percent of the blame was placed on the apartment complex and its management company.
Thirty million dollars was set aside for the children’s medical care. Another eight million
was earmarked for future medical needs and punitive damages designed to punish the owners for
their negligence.

A future no longer lost

Today, McMullen’s children require constant therapies and special attention, but the money
from the verdict means they will receive the care they need for the rest of their lives.

McMullen says the children now interact more with other people. They attend a special-needs
school. Therapists work daily to help them relearn basic skills that carbon monoxide stole
from them as infants.

She also works with other parents whose children have special needs. Many of them come to her
not knowing what help is available or how to navigate a system that often seems indifferent.

“Before, they couldn’t express anything,” she says of her children. “Now they come to me and
tell me what they want, what they need.” She once feared they would never know what it felt
like to live a normal life. Now she dares to imagine they might.

The verdict did not erase the trauma, but it gave McMullen something she had been seeking for
nearly a decade: accountability.

Epilogue

In the newest season of the True Crime Reporter podcast, I go deeper into this case,
the emotional toll of the trial and what it revealed about landlords, insurers and the legal
system that is supposed to protect tenants.

You can hear exclusive audio from the courtroom and extended interviews with McMullen and her
attorneys — voices that rarely make it into the written record but show why justice in this
case mattered so much.