Galveston County, TX — January 6, 2024, Luis Aguillon-Torres and one other were killed and Prishilla Gomez Guillen was injured in a wrong-way car accident at around 3:21 a.m. on Interstate 45.
Current reports say that the crash happened along southbound lanes of I-45 near F.M. 646. The accident reportedly involved a car which police say was going the wrong direction into oncoming traffic. As a result, that vehicle collided head-on with another driver, identified by authorities as Prishilla Gomez Guillen.
Due to the crash, a passenger in Gomez Guillen’s vehicle sustained fatal injuries. Authorities identified the passenger as Luis Aguillon Torres. The alleged wrong-way driver also died in the crash. Gomez Guillen was taken to a hospital with reportedly serious injuries.
Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman
While the cause of the crash has yet to be confirmed, I’ve already seen plenty of commenters online who think they know what happened here. All of them are saying this must have been a drunk driving wreck. This may ruffle some feathers, but they’re probably right. While anything is possible, and investigators should let the evidence speak for itself, pretty much everyone knows that when a wrong-way driver crashes into someone, it’s almost always because they were intoxicated.
Everyone and their uncle condemns drunk driving, but there is an issue intertwined with drunk driving that doesn’t get enough attention: alcohol providers over-serving their customers.
Bear with me for a second, because I know some folks hear a lawyer talking about negligent bars, and they just think I’m trying to shift the blame away from the drunk drivers. But let me put things into perspective. I’ve seen a few members of the public demand action in the form of harsher punishments for drunk drivers, elected officials who will “get tough” with drunk drivers, and changes to the roads themselves to help prevent vehicles from getting on the wrong side of the road.
Would those changes help? To some degree, sure. But at the end of the day, whether drunk drivers see longer sentences from more aggressive prosecutors or their vehicles are stopped before they cause a crash, another drunk driver will come along eventually because these changes don’t get to the root of the problem. Across the hundreds of cases where our firm confronted negligent alcohol providers whose actions led to serious accidents, I can’t recall a single business that had to deal with consequences of their own unlawful behavior and didn’t immediately clean up their act.
Put simply, the vast majority of wrong way crashes involve alcohol, and the vast majority of wrong-way drivers are so intoxicated that any business who served them probably broke the law. By all means, investigate all possibilities, and utilize every tool in the toolbox to make the roads safer. But letting alcohol providers off the hook when they may have contributed to a deadly crash is just treating the symptoms instead of the illness.
call us 
Email Us 
Text us