Smith County, TX — September 25, 2024, a 28-year-old Shreveport woman was injured in a single-vehicle crash on Interstate 20 in Smith County.
Officials say the incident happened just before 8:00 a.m. on I-20 near State Highway 110. According to investigators, the victim was driving a Chevy Malibu west on the highway. Police allege the car was traveling too fast for the wet conditions when it lost control and slid off the road. It hit a light pole and rolled one or more times, then came to rest on its roof.
The Malibu driver suffered serious injuries in the crash. No other people or vehicles were involved.
No further information is currently available.
Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman
Police seem to think speeding was the primary culprit here and may be why the victim left her lane. I have no specific reason to doubt their findings, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know that preliminary reports should be taken with a grain or two of salt. I’ve seen many instances where police reports make at best an incomplete picture, and at worst are entirely mistaken.
Many people, police sometimes included, are tempted to just blame a driver for a single-vehicle wreck and think no more of it. While it’s true that driver mistakes cause many such crashes, they can’t be taken for granted or assumed. Other factors, things out of the drivers’ control, also contribute to them and a proper investigation must take those factors into account. If the roads were wet, how big a factor was that in the car’s loss of traction? Is there adequate signage in the area? What’s visibility like on that stretch of road? Was the Chevy in good repair? Did anyone check it for malfunctions or defects, like faulty brakes or insufficient safety features? Could something have incapacitated the driver?
The point of those and many other questions is not to complicate things, but to clarify them. It may be tempting to blame everything on a single factor like speeding, but that’s reductive and possibly unfair to the injured victim. Instead, a proper investigation will account for all the potential factors, then find evidence which supports or refutes each one. That approach stands the best chance of connecting all the dots, but it’s also time- and resource-consuming. Did Smith County authorities commit enough resources to this crash to get things right?
