Midland Crash Claims: What Families of the Critically Injured Need to Know After a Fatal University Van Wreck
If you are reading this from a hospital waiting room — whether that waiting room is in Midland, in Lubbock where your loved one was flown, or in another country where you are trying to understand what happened on a Texas highway — you are in the worst hours of your life. We are going to tell you exactly what the law allows, what the insurance company is already doing, and what evidence is disappearing while you sit with your phone in your hand. That is what we do. We are Attorney911, The Manginello Law Firm, and we handle catastrophic motor-vehicle cases in Texas. We have not been retained on this crash and we are not representing anyone involved. What follows is the education and the protection we would give you on the phone at 3 a.m., free of charge, so that whatever you decide, you decide with the truth in your hands.
The headline tells you the shape of the disaster: a deadly crash involving University of the Southwest golf teams, with Canadian students critically injured, on the roads around Midland, Texas. That means there are families who lost someone and families whose someone is fighting to survive. Both of those families have legal rights that the State of Texas gives them, and both have an insurance machine that has already started working to minimize what those rights are worth. The gap between what the law gives you and what the insurance company offers you is the entire reason this page exists.
Your Rights Under Texas Law After a Fatal or Critical-Injury Crash in Midland
Texas law gives you two years from the date of the crash to file a personal-injury or wrongful-death lawsuit. That is the statute of limitations, and it is not a suggestion — it is a hard wall. After it passes, no court in Texas will hear your case, no matter how strong it is. The controlling statute is the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, and the deadline is two years from the date of the injury or the death.
Under Texas law, a person must bring suit for personal injury not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues. For wrongful death, the same two-year window applies, running from the day of the death. If the deceased person had a personal-injury claim that survived their death, the survival claim must also be filed within two years of the injury.
Two years sounds like a long time when you are standing in a hospital hallway. It is not. The evidence in a highway crash case — the kind of evidence that decides whether you can prove what happened — can be legally destroyed in a matter of weeks. We will walk you through exactly what that evidence is and how fast it dies, because that clock, not the two-year deadline, is the one that should worry you right now.
Texas follows a modified comparative negligence rule with a 51 percent bar. What that means in plain English: if the person who was hurt or killed was partly at fault for the crash, their recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault. If they were 50 percent or less at fault, they can still recover — just reduced. If they were 51 percent or more at fault, they cannot recover anything. That is exactly why the insurance adjuster’s first move is always to try to pin fault on the injured party. Every percentage point they can assign to your loved one is money off the settlement, and if they can push it past 50 percent, the claim disappears entirely.
Texas does not cap non-economic damages (pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of companionship) in ordinary motor-vehicle cases. That is a significant advantage Texas gives you that many other states do not. Some states limit what a jury can award for the human cost of an injury — the grief, the pain, the life that was taken. Texas does not do that for car and truck crashes. A jury can award what the harm is actually worth, without a statutory ceiling pressing down on it.
Punitive damages are available in Texas when the defendant acted with gross negligence — a conscious, voluntary act or omission showing an indifference to the safety of others. Texas caps punitive damages under its statute, but the cap does not apply to intentional acts or certain drunk-driving situations. For a highway crash, gross negligence could mean a driver who was far over the speed limit, who was texting, who had been awake for 20 hours, or who was operating a commercial vehicle with known mechanical defects.
Who Can Be Held Responsible After a University Van Crash Near Midland
A crash involving a university athletic team’s van creates a defendant structure that is more complex than an ordinary two-car collision. The at-fault party may not be a single person — it may be a stack of entities, each with its own insurance, each ready to point at the others.
If the crash was caused by another vehicle — a passenger car, a pickup truck, or an oilfield commercial truck — that driver and their insurance company are the first target. In the Permian Basin, the roads around Midland carry some of the heaviest commercial truck traffic in the United States. Water haulers, sand trucks, crude-oil tankers, and frac-equipment transports run the same highways as passenger vehicles, and the oil boom has put thousands of heavy trucks on roads that were never built for this volume. A crash between a university van and an 80,000-pound commercial truck is not a collision — it is a demolition, and the people in the smaller vehicle are the ones who pay.
If the university van itself was involved — whether the driver lost control, crossed a center line, or was struck by another vehicle that a third party sent across the road — the question of who owned, operated, maintained, and insured that van opens multiple defendant paths. University of the Southwest is a private institution in Hobbs, New Mexico. Because it is private, it does not have the sovereign-immunity shield that a public university would raise. Its commercial auto policy — the coverage that applies to a van carrying student athletes — is likely far larger than a personal auto policy. A passenger van used by a university may carry commercial coverage of $1 million or more, and if the van meets the federal definition of a commercial motor vehicle, the federal financial-responsibility minimum for a passenger carrier jumps to $5 million.
If another commercial entity was involved — a trucking company, an oilfield services contractor, a leased vehicle — the federal trucking regulations may apply, including hours-of-service rules that limit how long a driver can be on the road, mandatory drug and alcohol testing after a fatal crash, and electronic logging device requirements that create a paper trail of the driver’s hours. Those records are on a clock — federal law only requires trucking companies to keep driver logs for six months. After that, the company is legally allowed to destroy them.
For a family whose loved one was a passenger in the van, the analysis is different from a family whose loved one was driving. A passenger has no fault of their own — they were along for the ride. Their claim runs against every at-fault party, whether that is the other vehicle’s driver, the van driver, the university, or a commercial trucking company. The passenger’s claim is the cleanest one, and it is often the one the insurance company moves fastest to settle — because a quick settlement with a critically injured passenger, before the full extent of their injuries is known, is the cheapest outcome for the insurer.
The Evidence That Is Already Disappearing
This is the section that matters most in the first 72 hours, and it is the section most families never read in time.
Every crash leaves a trail of evidence. Some of it is physical — the vehicles, the debris field, the skid marks, the road conditions. Some of it is digital — the vehicle’s event data recorder (the “black box”), the dashcam footage, the truck’s engine control module, the GPS trail. Some of it is human — the witness statements, the first-responder observations, the police report. And some of it is institutional — the 911 call recordings, the dispatch logs, the medical transport records.
Here is what happens to each of those, and how fast:
The vehicles themselves. The wrecked van and any other vehicle involved are the single most important pieces of physical evidence. They show the angle of impact, the crush zones, the seat-belt engagement, the airbag deployment, the mechanical condition of the brakes and tires. But once a vehicle is declared a total loss, the insurance company can send it to a salvage yard. Once it is at the salvage yard, it can be crushed and sold for scrap metal. That can happen in a matter of weeks — sometimes days. Once the vehicle is crushed, the evidence inside it is gone forever. A preservation letter — a formal demand that the vehicle and all its components be kept intact — is what stops that. That letter has to go out before the crusher does.
The event data recorder (EDR). Nearly every modern vehicle carries a black box that records the seconds before and during a crash: speed, braking, throttle position, steering input, airbag deployment timing, seat-belt status. If the airbags deployed, federal law requires the EDR data to be locked so it cannot be overwritten. If the airbags did not deploy, the data can be overwritten by the next hard stop or even the next ignition cycle. For a commercial truck, the engine control module (ECM) records hard-brake events and last-stop data — but it overwrites itself when the truck is driven again. If the carrier puts that rig back on the road, the evidence is gone.
Surveillance and dashcam footage. Business security cameras, traffic cameras, and dashcams may have captured the crash. But most security camera systems overwrite on a rolling loop — commonly 30 days, sometimes far less. Nobody is required to save that footage unless they have been formally asked to. Every day that passes without a preservation demand is a day closer to the footage recording over itself.
The police report. The Texas Department of Public Safety or the Midland County Sheriff’s Office will complete a crash report. That report typically takes 5 to 14 days to become available. It will include the officer’s assessment of fault, diagrams of the crash scene, witness identifications, and the road and weather conditions. The report is important — but it is not admissible in a Texas civil trial as evidence of fault (the officer’s opinion is hearsay). It is a roadmap, not a verdict. The case still has to be proven with independent evidence.
Witness statements. People who saw the crash will tell you what they remember. But memory degrades fast — within 72 hours, the details begin to blur and the brain starts filling gaps with plausible-sounding reconstructions. The witnesses who are most helpful are the ones who are identified and interviewed within the first few days, while the memory is still sharp.
911 recordings and dispatch logs. The 911 calls from the scene contain real-time observations from witnesses and first responders, made before anyone had time to think about liability. These recordings are preserved by the Midland County 911 dispatch center, but they are subject to retention schedules. They should be requested early.
The preservation letter — a formal, written demand that every party and every third-party data holder freeze all evidence related to the crash — is the single most important first step. At our firm, the preservation letter goes out the day you call us. Not the next week. The day. Because every day without it is a day the evidence is one step closer to being legally gone.
What the Injuries Really Are: The Medicine of a Critical Highway Crash
When the headline says “critically injured,” it means the kind of injuries that keep someone in an intensive care unit for weeks, that require multiple surgeries, and that may change the rest of their life. A high-speed crash on a West Texas highway — whether it was a head-on collision, a rollover, or a high-energy side impact — produces forces that the human body was never designed to absorb.
Traumatic brain injury is one of the most common and most misunderstood critical injuries in a serious crash. The word “mild” in “mild traumatic brain injury” is a hospital triage term — it means the person was still able to respond to questions, scoring a 13 to 15 on the 15-point Glasgow Coma Scale. It says nothing about the future. More than a third of people who scored at the very top of the “mild” range — a 13 — turned out to have life-threatening bleeding inside the skull. The brain does not have to hit the skull for damage to occur. In a crash, the head whips forward and stops, but the brain keeps moving — twisting, stretching, and tearing the billions of nerve fibers that connect one region to another. This is called diffuse axonal injury, and it does not show up on a standard CT scan about 90 percent of the time. The damage is microscopic — the wiring coming apart, fiber by fiber. A person with this injury may look fine to a visitor. Across the dinner table, the family sees what the scan cannot: the lost words, the short fuse, the personality that shifted. At least one in seven people with a so-called mild brain injury never fully recovers. For the families of brain-injury survivors, the injury is real even when the imaging was clean.
Spinal cord injury from a highway crash happens when the forces of impact fracture or dislocate vertebrae and the bone fragments or the displacement damages the spinal cord. The higher on the spine the injury, the wider the paralysis. A neck-level (cervical) injury can mean loss of movement and sensation from the neck down — tetraplegia. The lifetime cost of care for a young adult with a high cervical spinal cord injury runs into the millions of dollars. That figure covers medical care and living expenses only. It does not count the wages the person will never earn, the career they will never have, or the daily toll on the family.
Internal organ damage is the injury that kills silently. The liver, spleen, and bowel can rupture on impact, and the bleeding may not be obvious until the person goes into shock hours later. The pelvis can shatter, and the fracture itself can cause life-threatening bleeding from the pelvic vessels. In a crash severe enough to be called “deadly,” the people who survived are likely living with some combination of these — broken bones, organ damage, brain injury, and the long cascade of complications that follows.
The drive-time reality of Midland. Midland Memorial Hospital is the primary hospital in Midland, but it is not a Level I trauma center. A Level I trauma center has the full range of specialists — neurosurgery, orthopedic trauma surgery, critical care — available 24 hours a day. Critically injured patients from a highway crash near Midland may need to be flown by air ambulance to a Level I center. The closest Level I trauma centers to Midland are in Lubbock (University Medical Center, roughly 120 miles northeast) and El Paso (roughly 280 miles west). Those flight miles are not just medical distances — they are minutes that decide whether a bleeding brain or a severed spinal cord gets the intervention it needs in time. And those same miles become part of the damages calculation: the air-ambulance bill, the distance the family has to travel, the days spent sleeping in a hospital waiting room 120 miles from home.
For the Canadian students and their families, there is an additional layer: the family may be thousands of miles away, trying to understand the U.S. medical system, the Texas legal system, and what their child’s insurance covers in a foreign country. The coordination of Canadian health coverage with Texas medical providers is its own maze. The air-ambulance flight alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The hospital bill for a multi-week ICU stay after a critical crash can run into hundreds of thousands — sometimes more than a million dollars — before the person ever leaves the hospital.
The Insurance Reality: What Coverage Exists and Who Pays
In a crash this severe, the question is not just “who was at fault” — it is “where is the money.” The insurance tower determines what a case is actually worth, and it is layered in ways most families never see until it is too late.
Texas minimum auto liability. Texas requires every driver to carry at least $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident in bodily-injury liability coverage, plus $25,000 in property damage. That is the floor. For a crash that killed people and critically injured others, one night in an ICU can pass $30,000. A minimum-policy driver is an underinsured disaster for the families on the other side.
Commercial auto coverage. If the at-fault vehicle was a commercial truck, an oilfield vehicle, or a university van, the coverage floor is dramatically higher. Federal law requires interstate motor carriers of non-hazardous property to carry at least $750,000. Passenger carriers carry higher minimums — up to $5 million depending on the vehicle’s seating capacity. A university van carrying student athletes may be covered under a commercial auto policy of $1 million or more.
Excess and umbrella policies. Above the primary policy, there may be one or more excess layers — umbrella coverage that sits on top of the primary and pays when the primary is exhausted. A university, a trucking company, or a commercial fleet may carry $5 million, $10 million, or more in stacked excess coverage. Finding those layers is part of the investigation. The insurance company does not volunteer them.
Uninsured/underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) coverage. Texas insurers must offer UM/UIM coverage, and unless you rejected it in writing, you have it. If the at-fault driver had no insurance or not enough insurance, your own UM/UIM coverage steps in to cover the gap. In a crash this severe, UM/UIM may be the difference between a recovery that pays for lifetime care and one that does not. Many families do not know they have this coverage — it sits in their policy, unused, because nobody told them to look.
The hospital lien. Under Texas law, a hospital that treats an injured person can file a lien against any settlement or judgment the injured person receives. The lien covers the first 100 days of hospital treatment. This means the hospital gets paid out of your settlement before you do. The lien is not a negotiation — it is a legal claim on your recovery. Managing the hospital lien, negotiating it down where the law allows, and making sure the family is not left with nothing after the hospital and the lawyers are paid is a core part of what we do.
For a case involving fatalities and critical injuries, the total available coverage across all defendants and all policies may be several million dollars or more. But the insurance company’s first offer — the one that arrives while you are still in the hospital, while the medical bills are still climbing, while you do not yet know whether your loved one will walk again — will be a fraction of that. That is not an accident. It is the playbook.
What the Insurance Company Is Already Doing
Within hours of a crash this severe, the insurance company has opened a file. An adjuster has been assigned. And the adjuster’s job — the thing they are measured on, the metric that determines their bonus — is to close that file for as little money as possible. Here are the plays they run, in the order they run them:
Play 1: The friendly “just checking in” call. Within days, someone will call you or your family member. They will sound warm and concerned. They will ask how you are feeling. They will say they “just want to get your statement” or “just need to understand what happened.” This call is recorded. Everything you say will be transcribed and used to limit your claim. If you say “I’m doing okay” — which is what most people say, because it is what we say when someone asks — that sentence will appear in a deposition two years later as proof that you were not seriously injured. The counter: do not give a recorded statement. Not yet. Not without counsel. You are not required to. The adjuster’s request for a statement is not a legal obligation — it is a fishing expedition with a microphone.
Play 2: The fast settlement check. A check may arrive in the mail, sometimes within the first few weeks. It will come with a release — a document that, once signed, closes your claim forever. The check will look like a lot of money in the moment, because you have bills and you are scared. But it is designed to arrive before the medical results come back — before the MRI shows the brain injury, before the surgeon says the spine will not recover, before the life-care planner calculates what 40 years of wheelchair costs look like. Once you sign the release, the case is over. Even if the injury turns out to be ten times worse than anyone knew. The counter: never sign anything from an insurance company without having a lawyer read it. The cost of that review is zero if the lawyer works on contingency. The cost of signing without it could be everything.
Play 3: The request for your medical records — all of them. The adjuster will ask you to sign a blanket medical authorization. It will look routine. It is not. A blanket authorization gives the insurance company access to your entire medical history — every doctor’s visit, every prescription, every therapy session, going back years. They are looking for pre-existing conditions they can blame your current symptoms on. Did you see a chiropractor for back pain five years ago? They will argue your crash-related spinal injury was really just an aggravation of that old complaint. The counter: do not sign a blanket authorization. Provide the records from the crash forward — the treatment related to this injury. Your lawyer controls what the insurer sees and what it does not.
Play 4: The surveillance. If your claim is significant — and a critical-injury claim always is — the insurance company may hire a private investigator to follow you. They will film you going to the store, carrying groceries, walking your dog. They will film the good day and use it to argue you are not as hurt as you claim. They will not film the day you could not get out of bed. The counter: assume you are being watched. Conduct yourself accordingly. Do not post on social media — no photos, no updates, no check-ins. A single photo of you smiling at a family event can be twisted into “see, they are fine.”
Play 5: The delay. If the adjuster cannot get you to settle cheap, they will try to run the clock. They will ask for “more documentation.” They will say they need “additional review.” They will request another independent medical examination — with a doctor they pick. Every month of delay is a month closer to the statute of limitations, a month the medical bills pile up, a month the family feels the financial pressure and gets desperate enough to take a low offer. The counter: a lawyer who knows the Texas unfair-claims-practices rules and who will file suit when the delay crosses from diligence into bad faith.
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he came to our side of the table. He sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims from people exactly like the ones reading this page. He knows how the reserve is set in the first 48 hours — before the real injuries are diagnosed. He knows how the claim is fed into valuation software that discounts pain it cannot see. He knows the recorded-statement trap and the fast-check-with-a-release trick because he helped build them. Now he uses that knowledge for injured clients. If you want to understand what the insurance company is doing on the other side of the phone, talk to someone who has been on that side.
How a Case Like This Is Actually Built
Here is the proof story — the chronological walk from the day you call to the day a number is on the table.
Week one. The preservation letter goes out — to the at-fault driver’s insurer, to the university’s insurer, to any commercial carrier involved, to the salvage yard holding the vehicles, to the 911 dispatch center, to every business near the crash scene whose cameras may have caught it. The letter orders every one of them to freeze the evidence. From that moment forward, if any of them destroy what the letter told them to save, a judge can tell the jury to assume the destroyed evidence would have helped your case. That is called an adverse-inference instruction, and it is one of the most powerful weapons in a trial lawyer’s arsenal.
Weeks two through four. The vehicles are inspected. If the at-fault vehicle was a commercial truck, we download the engine control module — the truck’s black box — before the carrier can “service” it and overwrite the crash data. If your loved one’s vehicle had an event data recorder, we image it with the right forensic tool, the right way, so the data is admissible and not corrupted by a sloppy download. The crash scene is measured, photographed, and mapped. Skid marks, gouge marks, debris fields, and sight lines are documented before the road is repaired and the evidence is paved over.
Months two through six. The records come out in discovery. The at-fault driver’s hours-of-service logs (if it was a commercial vehicle). The driver-qualification file. The vehicle inspection reports. The maintenance records. The dispatch records. The cell-phone records — because if the driver was on the phone or texting at the moment of impact, that is not just negligence, it is gross negligence, and gross negligence opens the door to punitive damages. The medical records build in parallel — every surgery, every imaging study, every therapy session, every specialist consult.
Months six through twelve. The depositions. The at-fault driver sits across the table and answers questions under oath. The safety director of the trucking company explains, under oath, why a driver with three prior crashes was still behind the wheel. The university’s risk manager explains, under oath, what maintenance was done on the van and when. The witnesses — the ones we found and interviewed in the first 72 hours, while their memories were still sharp — tell the jury what they saw.
The number. The settlement value of a case like this is not a guess — it is an arithmetic problem. A life-care planner — a certified expert who builds a formal, year-by-year projection of every medical need, every piece of equipment, every caregiver hour, every medication, every surgery, every modification to a home and a vehicle — prices out the future care. A forensic economist reduces that stream of costs to present value. The lost earning capacity is calculated from the person’s age, education, work history, and the government’s own labor-data tables. The past medical bills are added up. The pain and suffering, the mental anguish, the loss of the life the person was going to live — those are the human losses the jury weighs. In Texas, there is no cap on those damages for a motor-vehicle crash. The number that comes out of all of this is what the case is worth. The insurance company’s first offer will be a fraction of it. The gap between the two is where the fight lives.
For a case involving a critical brain injury or spinal cord injury, the lifetime cost of care alone can run into the millions. For a wrongful death — a young person whose life was taken — the damages include the financial support they would have provided to their family over their expected career, the household services they would have performed, and the loss of the relationship itself. These are not abstract numbers. They are the arithmetic of a life that was taken or a life that was changed forever.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do Now
If you are in the first hours or days after the crash, here is the roadmap — practical, chronological, and built for someone who is exhausted and in pain.
Medical care comes first. Always. If you were in the crash and have not been examined by a doctor, go now. Not tomorrow. Not when you feel better. Some of the most serious injuries — brain bleeds, internal organ damage, spinal fractures — may not produce obvious symptoms in the first hours. The adrenaline masks pain. The “I feel okay” moment is exactly when the injury is doing its worst work. Go to the emergency department. Tell them every symptom, no matter how small. Let the CT scan and the exam find what your body cannot yet feel. And keep every record — every discharge instruction, every imaging report, every follow-up appointment. The medical record is the spine of your case.
Do not give a recorded statement. The insurance adjuster will call. They will be friendly. They will say they just need to understand what happened. They are recording you. Politely decline. Say: “I am not able to give a statement right now. I will contact you when I am ready.” That sentence protects you. It is not rude. It is not suspicious. It is what every person who has ever been through this wishes they had said.
Do not sign anything. If a document arrives — a release, a medical authorization, a settlement offer — do not sign it. Not until a lawyer has read it. The insurance company knows you are overwhelmed. That is when they send the paperwork. A document that looks like a routine form may be a full release of your claim.
Preserve everything. Do not repair, clean, or dispose of anything from the crash — not the vehicle, not the clothing, not the personal items in the vehicle. If the vehicle is at a tow yard, it needs to stay there until a preservation letter is on file. Photograph everything — the vehicles, the scene, the injuries, the hospital room. Save every text message, every email, every social-media post related to the crash. If there were witnesses, write down their names and contact information immediately.
Do not post on social media. Nothing. Not “I am okay.” Not a photo. Not a thank-you to the hospital staff. The insurance company is monitoring your social media. A photo of you smiling can be used to argue you are not as injured as you claim, even if the smile was through gritted teeth on the one good day in a bad week.
If your loved one died, protect the estate. Under Texas law, a personal representative must be appointed to bring the wrongful-death claim. That is the person the law authorizes to file suit on behalf of the family. We handle that appointment. Meanwhile, the official death certificate is completed, the medical examiner’s report is filed, and the evidence at the scene — if it has not already been preserved — is one day closer to being gone.
Call a lawyer. Not next month. Not when the medical bills become unpayable. Not when the insurance company’s offer arrives and you realize it is a fraction of what you need. Call now, while the evidence is still alive. The call is free. The consultation is free. If we take your case, the fee is contingency — 33.33 percent if the case settles before trial, 40 percent if it goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. That is not a slogan. It is the fee structure, in writing, and it means we carry the financial risk so you do not have to.
For families reading this from Canada — your child was injured in Texas, and Texas law governs the claim. You do not need to be in Texas to begin the process. We can coordinate with you by phone, by video, and by email. We can work with your Canadian medical providers and your Canadian insurance. We can handle the Texas legal process while you focus on your child. But the Texas evidence clock is running whether you are in Midland or in Toronto, and the preservation demand has to go out on Texas time.
Why This Firm
Ralph Manginello has spent 27 years in courtrooms, including federal court. He is a journalist who became a trial lawyer — he learned to find the story, then he learned to prove it in front of a jury. He is admitted to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Houston Bar Association. He is the lead counsel in the active $10 million hazing lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston. He does not like losing, and he does not take cases he cannot fight to win. Read his full background.
Lupe Peña is a former insurance-defense attorney. He spent years at a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue people exactly like the reader of this page. He knows how the reserve is set, how the IME doctor is chosen, how the surveillance works, and how the delay is engineered. He now uses that knowledge for injured clients. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. He is a third-generation Texan with family roots to the King Ranch, born and raised in Sugar Land.
Together, they have recovered more than $50 million for clients — including more than $5 million in a brain-injury settlement, more than $3.8 million in an amputation settlement, more than $2.5 million in a truck-crash recovery, and millions in wrongful-death cases. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But those numbers tell you what the firm is built to do: take the hardest cases, against the biggest defendants, and build them to the number the harm is actually worth.
We serve clients in English and in Spanish. Hablamos Español. If your family was affected by this crash — whether you are in Midland, in Lubbox where your loved one was flown, or in Canada trying to understand what happened on a Texas highway — the call is free, the consultation is confidential, and the phone is answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by live staff. Not an answering service. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). Or contact us online. We do not get paid unless we win your case.
For more on what to do in the hours after a serious wreck, watch our guide to what to do after a car accident. For the full picture of how car-accident compensation works, our guide to car-accident settlements walks through the valuation, the negotiation, and the timeline. And if you lost someone, our wrongful-death practice page explains who can file, what damages are recoverable, and how the Texas wrongful-death statute works.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a lawsuit after a fatal or critical-injury crash in Midland?
Texas law gives you two years from the date of the crash (or the date of death, if it was a wrongful death) to file a lawsuit. This is the statute of limitations under the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. After two years, the court will dismiss your case no matter how strong it is. However, the evidence that proves your case — the vehicles, the black-box data, the camera footage, the witness memories — can disappear in weeks, not years. The two-year deadline is the legal wall; the evidence clock is the practical one, and it runs much faster.
The crash involved a university van from New Mexico. Does Texas law still apply?
Yes. The crash occurred in Texas, and Texas tort law governs the substantive claims — the duty, the breach, the causation, and the damages. The fact that the university is based in New Mexico does not change the governing law for a crash that happened on a Texas highway. It may affect where the lawsuit can be filed (jurisdiction and venue) and which insurance policies apply, but the law that determines what you can recover and how fault is assessed is Texas law. A lawyer licensed in Texas who handles cross-state MVA cases can coordinate the jurisdictional questions.
My loved one was a Canadian student. Can they pursue a claim in Texas?
Yes. A person injured in Texas has the right to pursue a claim in Texas courts regardless of their nationality or residency. Canadian students injured in a Texas crash are entitled to the same legal rights as any other person injured in this state. The practical considerations — coordinating with Canadian health coverage, managing travel and communication, understanding the U.S. legal process — are things we handle regularly. The evidence clock runs on Texas time, so the preservation demand should go out quickly even if the family is still in Canada.
What if the at-fault driver did not have enough insurance?
Texas requires drivers to carry minimum liability coverage of $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident. For a critical-injury or fatal crash, that amount can be exhausted in a single night of hospital care. If the at-fault driver was uninsured or underinsured, your own uninsured/underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) coverage may step in to cover the gap — unless you specifically rejected UM/UIM coverage in writing when you bought your policy. If the at-fault vehicle was a commercial truck or a university van, the coverage is likely far higher — potentially $1 million to $5 million or more. Identifying every available policy and every responsible party is a core part of the investigation.
Can I still recover if my loved one was partly at fault for the crash?
Texas follows a modified comparative negligence rule with a 51 percent bar. If your loved one was 50 percent or less at fault, they can still recover — but the recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault. If they were 51 percent or more at fault, they cannot recover. This is why the insurance company works so hard to pin fault on the injured party. Every percentage point they can assign to your loved one is money off the recovery. For a passenger in a vehicle — like a student athlete in a van — the passenger has no fault of their own. Their claim is the cleanest one.
How much is a critical-injury or wrongful-death case worth?
There is no fixed number. The value of a case is built from the specific harms: the past and future medical bills, the lost earning capacity, the life-care plan for future treatment and equipment, the pain and suffering, the mental anguish, the loss of the relationship, and — in cases of gross negligence — punitive damages. For a catastrophic brain injury or spinal cord injury, the lifetime cost of care alone can run into the millions. For a wrongful death of a young person, the damages include the financial support they would have provided over their expected career and the loss of the relationship itself. Texas does not cap non-economic damages in motor-vehicle cases, so a jury can award what the harm is actually worth. The insurance company’s first offer will be a fraction of the true value. The gap is where the fight lives.
Should I accept the insurance company’s first settlement offer?
No. The first offer is designed to close your file for the lowest possible amount before the full extent of your injuries is known. It typically arrives while you are still in the hospital, while the medical bills are still climbing, and before any life-care plan or economic analysis has been done. Once you sign the release that comes with the offer, your claim is over — permanently. Even if the injury turns out to be far worse than anyone knew at the time of the settlement, you cannot reopen the case. A lawyer working on contingency can evaluate the offer against the true value of the claim at no cost to you. If the offer is fair, you will know. If it is not, you will also know — and you will have someone to fight for the difference.
How much does it cost to hire a lawyer for a crash like this?
Nothing up front. We work on contingency. The fee is 33.33 percent of the recovery if the case settles before trial, and 40 percent if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. The phone call is free. The preservation letter — the one that freezes the evidence before it disappears — goes out the day you hire us, at no additional cost. We carry the financial risk so you can focus on your family and your recovery. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911), 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We answer with live staff, not a machine.
The Bottom Line
If your family was affected by this crash — whether you lost someone or someone you love is fighting to survive — the law gives you rights, and the insurance machine is already working to limit them. The evidence is disappearing. The clock is running. The call is free.
1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win. Hablamos Español.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Every case depends on its own facts. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Contacting the firm is free and confidential.