AUSTIN, Texas – An Austin man is frustrated because an apartment complex refused to pay for damage to his truck. He believes they are liable, but the complex denies it.

“Volleyball, wind, noise, bang, broken window,” Kendall Gunier described what happened on July 28.

Gunier said he was playing volleyball with his friends at Aussie’s on Barton Springs Road late last month.

“We saw signs from the weather that suggested a storm, but we decided to keep playing,” Gunier said.

Wind gusts reached nearly 25 miles per hour.

“While we were playing, we heard a loud bang,” Gunier said.

He said people watched as a chair flew from a balcony at The Catherine apartment complex into the back window of his truck. The glass was shattered, the window was smashed, and a chair was found on the ground right next to Gunier’s truck.

Gunier met with the property manager the next day.

“Would you mind just covering this through your insurance?” Gunier asked the property manager.

MORE STORIES:

“I have been met with hostility. Why should we be responsible for this? It was not our furniture. It was from one of our tenants,” Gunier said the property manager responded.

The property manager told Gunier in an email, “We require each resident to carry renter’s insurance. Since we do not know for sure if the insurance came from one of the apartments in our building or who it may have belonged to, management will not reimburse this cost.”

Gunier believes the complex is liable. A personal injury attorney said not necessarily.

“Unless you can prove that the apartment complex was built in a way that allowed things to fall off,” said personal injury attorney Adam Loewy. “That’s obviously the fault of the building or the apartment complex, but if it’s just a random chair, you have to be able to prove who owned it. Then he’s almost certainly out of luck.”

Gunier has car insurance. He paid his deductible himself and repaired his rear window.

“It’s very important to have adequate insurance. Things happen all the time. A lot of people are uninsured and then random things just happen where you can’t prove who was at fault. In those cases, you have to contact your insurance company and make sure they take care of it,” Loewy said.

Gunier said he hopes that in the future, the apartment complex will warn residents of an approaching storm so they can secure all of their belongings on the balconies and a situation like this will never happen to anyone again.