Maria Borja Romero, 3 Injured in Car Accident in Tyler, TX
Tyler, TX -- August 10, 2022, Maria Borja Romero and three others were hurt as the result of an accident where two vehicles crashed.
Public details given by authorities said that the incident occurred just after 3:00 p.m. along Parkdale Drive near Garden Valley.
Investigators said that 34-year-old Maria Borja Romero was driving a Ford F-150 with three minors as passengers. They were on southbound Parkdale when the pickup slowed due to another vehicle apparently going off-road ahead. After slowing, a mail truck rear-ended the Ford.
Romero had incapacitating injuries while her passengers had less severe injuries. The mail truck driver was apparently uninjured. At this time, police say the crash was due to failure to control speed on wet roads. No further information can be confirmed.
As straightforward as all of that sounds, something stands out to me, and I worry authorities may have overlooked something. To put it simply, a Ford F-150 isn't the biggest pickup in the world, but the typical mail truck isn't that big either. Unless this was a larger mail truck, the pickup likely weighed about as much if not more than the mail truck. So how is it that the driver of the mail truck was apparently unharmed while four people in the pickup—relatively far from the impact to the tailgate—were injured, one seriously?
Was there faulty airbags or seatbelts? Was there a seatback failure? Were there other extenuating circumstances the victims couldn't possible account for? Perhaps there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, but I've found ignoring certain possibilities just because they're relatively unlikely is just begging to let something important slip through the cracks. Hopefully authorities here were prudent enough to not let that happen.
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