• February 17, 2023

McKinney, TX -- February 2, 2023, a Fairview teenager was injured due to an accident where her vehicle was struck by a semi-trailer.

Investigators said that the crash happened at around 11:55 p.m. along US Highway 75 near Virginia Parkway. Initial details said that a 15-year-old from Fairview was in a Chevy Silverado that was disabled after losing control on ice. Some time later, a tandem tractor-trailer crashed into the pickup.

The teenager had incapacitating injuries due to the crash. No other injuries were listed. Right now, additional details are unavailable. With all the winter weather we saw early this year, there has been no shortage of serious accidents like this. But my caution to people is never to just write everything off as weather related—not entirely.

In a crash like this, for example, it's important to consider there was a gap of time between the victim apparently losing control of their vehicle and the semi hitting it. The questions to answer, then, are: how much time passed between the collisions, and how visible was the disabled vehicle? In other words, was the secondary collision avoidable?

This late at night, if a vehicle was sideways to traffic, it's unlikely that even the most skilled of professional truck drivers could avoid a collision. Maybe that happened here. But I've also had situations where evidence showed that other drivers went around a disabled vehicle before a crash or that the vehicle was otherwise clearly visible and reasonably avoidable. If investigations show something like that happened here, then what was the truck driver doing that prevented them from evading the crash in time?

Like I said, I've seen these situations go both ways and even in completely unexpected ways. The point here is that these details aren't likely telling the whole story. As a father, I know I would want to know every single detail about a crash that nearly cost my daughter her life, regardless of what caused the crash.

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