Lawsuit filed against Jason Billingsley, landlord, property manager by alleged attack victims: ‘This could’ve been prevented’

The two people whom police say Jason Billingsley tried to kill in a brutal September attack filed a lawsuit Monday against him and the companies that employed him as a building maintenance worker.

Billingsley, 32, is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Baltimore tech entrepreneur Pava LaPere. He also faces charges of attempted murder, rape and arson in the Sept. 19 attack against April Hurley and Jonte Gilmore, which happened days before LaPere was found dead in Mount Vernon.

Billingsley worked at Hurley’s Edmondson Avenue apartment building in Upton and identified himself as a maintenance worker before attacking her, charging documents said. Police say he strangled Hurley, sexually assaulted her and slashed her throat, before setting both her and Gilmore on fire. They were able to escape the basement apartment through a window.

“The fact that I’m sitting here with you guys today is honestly a miracle. Sometimes, it’s still unbelievable that I’m here,” Hurley told reporters at the downtown Baltimore office of Murphy, Falcon & Murphy law firm on Monday.

“Jason Billingsley literally tried to take my life. He tried to take my life, and this could’ve been prevented, and he would have never had the chance if these people, my former landlord and my former property manager, didn’t hire him,” she said.

The complaint Hurley and Gilmore filed in Baltimore Circuit Court on Monday alleges that the building’s owner, Property Pals LLC, and its property management company, Eden’s Homes, employed Billingsley and therefore share liability for his alleged assaults, trespass and false imprisonment. The companies were also negligent in hiring and supervising Billingsley and should have flagged his criminal history, the complaint alleges.

Property Pals LLC could not be reached for comment Monday. Eden’s Homes did not return a call or email seeking comment Monday, and a resident agent listed for the company said Monday she was unsure if she would be retained to represent Eden’s Homes in the case.

Hurley’s attorney Malcolm Ruff said the “heinous” home invasion, sexual assault and “torturing” had impacted her ability to work and her family life. Her throat still bears a large scar from the attack.

After luring Hurley out of her apartment by saying there was flooding, Billingsley grabbed her and began hitting her in the face with a gun, the complaint says. He later bound Gilmore and Hurley with duct tape, sexually assaulted Hurley and cut her throat with a knife, before dousing both of them with gasoline and lighting them on fire, attorneys wrote. The Office of the Public Defender, which is representing Billingsley in the criminal cases, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Andrew O’Connell, a partner at Murphy, Falcon & Murphy, said “Ban the Box” laws intended to promote the employment of formerly incarcerated people don’t prevent employers from conducting adequate background checks of potential employees. “Eden’s Homes and Property Pals brazenly hired somebody with a lengthy history of committing violent acts, violent crimes,” O’Connell said.

Billingsley’s criminal record includes a conviction for a first-degree sex offense in 2013, when a woman accused him of forcing her to perform a sex act, strangling her and brandishing a knife. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison with all but 14 suspended. Maryland’s parole commission denied him parole, but he was released in October 2022 after earning diminution credits, as required by state law.

State lawmakers this year introduced legislation to ban diminution credits for certain sex crimes, including a House bill named for LaPere, but those bills didn’t make it out of committees in either chamber this session.

While authorities searched for Billingsley after LaPere’s killing, Baltimore Police faced criticism for failing to warn the public sooner about the attempted murder of Hurley and Gilmore, which police initially called an arson. The police department is not a party to the lawsuit filed Monday.

Police Commissioner Richard Worley told reporters in September that police knew why Billingsley entered the Edmondson Avenue apartment and that he was “not going to say too much more because I don’t want to talk bad about victims.” He later apologized and called those comments “victim-blaming.”

Ruff did not answer a question Monday about whether attorneys believe Billingsley had targeted Gilmore and Hurley, saying that attorneys expected more information to be revealed as the civil case proceeds. He suggested that police treated LaPere’s death differently than the attack against Hurley because LaPere was white and lived in Mount Vernon.

“These incidents happened less than a mile away from each other. But Ms. Hurley’s incident happened on the other side of [Martin Luther King Jr.] Boulevard,” Ruff said. If police had not categorized the violent attack as an arson, perhaps LaPere might still be alive, he said.