Andrews, Andrews County, Texas — What Happened on FM 1788 and What Texas Law Says When Nine People Die on a West Texas Road
If you found this page, you already know what happened on March 15, 2022, half a mile north of State Highway 115 on Farm-to-Market Road 1788, east of Andrews. You know nine people are dead — six college golfers, their coach, and a father and his thirteen-year-old son in the pickup that hit them. You know two students survived the van with serious injuries. And you know, or you are beginning to suspect, that the official story has changed more than once.
We are writing this page for one person: the family member who is sitting at a kitchen table in Andrews, or Hobbs, or Midland, or Fort Stockton, or Nocona, or Westminster, Colorado, or Portugal, or Mexico — anywhere these seven students and their coach called home — trying to understand what happens next. Not the news version of what happened. The legal version. What your rights actually are. What the insurance company is already doing. What evidence is already gone. And why the government’s investigation, important as it is, will not win your family’s case.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm. We handle wrongful death and catastrophic motor vehicle crash cases in Texas. Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in courtrooms, including federal court. Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he switched to this side of the table — he knows how adjusters price a claim, how they delay, and how they devalue a family’s loss, because he used to do it. We are writing this page as the resource we wish every family in this situation could read before the insurance company calls. Everything here is legal information, not legal advice. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win. And we speak Spanish — Hablamos Español — because some of these families pray in Spanish, and they deserve to understand every word of this fight in the language they think in.
The Crash on FM 1788 — What the Public Record Shows
At 8:17 p.m. on March 15, 2022, an 11-person passenger van carrying members of the University of the Southwest golf teams was traveling back to Hobbs, New Mexico, from a tournament in Midland, Texas. The van was towing an 8-foot cargo trailer. It was dark — sunset in Andrews in mid-March falls around 7:30 p.m., so by 8:17 the sky was fully black. FM 1788 is a two-lane farm-to-market road in the heart of the Permian Basin, built for agricultural traffic, now carrying the heavy truck traffic of the most productive oil field in the United States. There is no median barrier. There is no street lighting. At highway speed, on a dark two-lane road in the oil patch, the margin for error is measured in inches of painted line.
A pickup truck collided with the van. The crash was fiery. Nine people died at the scene — seven in the van, two in the pickup. Two students in the van survived with serious injuries.
The National Transportation Safety Board came to Andrews County to investigate, as they do for catastrophic highway crashes. And then the public record shifted — twice. The NTSB originally reported that the thirteen-year-old boy was behind the wheel of the pickup and that a spare tire had failed before the collision. Then the NTSB changed its findings: the father was driving, not the child. And investigators found no evidence of loss in tire pressure or any other indicator that the tire failed. Toxicological testing showed the presence of methamphetamine in the father’s blood.
If your family was in that van, or in that pickup, here is what those shifting findings mean for you: they mean you cannot rely on the first version of any story. They mean the government’s investigation will produce a report — but that report, by federal law, cannot be handed to a jury in your case. And they mean the proof of what happened, and who is responsible, has to be built independently, by people working for you, not by the government working for the public.
Texas Wrongful Death Law — Who Can Sue, What They Can Recover, and How Long They Have
Texas has its own wrongful death statute — a law written to give surviving family members a civil claim when someone’s wrongful act, carelessness, unskillfulness, or negligence causes a death. The law spells out who can bring the claim: the surviving spouse, the surviving children, and the surviving parents of the person who died. If none of those beneficiaries file a claim within three months of the death, the executor or administrator of the deceased person’s estate can file it on their behalf — unless the beneficiaries direct the executor not to.
The deadline is two years from the date of death. Texas’s wrongful death statute of limitations is two years — not from the accident, not from the funeral, but from the date the person died. In this crash, that clock started running on March 15, 2022, for every person who died at the scene. For the two students who survived with serious injuries, a separate two-year personal-injury clock also started running on that date. Those deadlines are real. They are not suggestions. A case that sits in a drawer for two years and one day is gone — no matter how strong the evidence, no matter how clear the fault.
Texas also has a survival action — a separate claim that belongs to the estate of the person who died, not to the family beneficiaries. The survival claim carries forward what the deceased person could have sued for had they lived: the pain and suffering they experienced between the injury and death, the medical expenses incurred before death, and funeral costs. In a crash this violent, the survival action may be brief — the question of whether consciousness persisted for seconds or minutes after impact is a medical one, answered by the autopsy, the injury patterns, and the testimony of a forensic pathologist. But it is a separate claim, with separate damages, and a family that walks through only the wrongful-death door leaves money on the table.
Texas follows a modified comparative-fault rule. Your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, and if you are 51 percent or more at fault, you recover nothing. In this crash, the families of the van occupants were not at fault — they were passengers in a vehicle that was struck. The comparative-fault question is more likely to arise between the at-fault pickup driver and the van driver, and in any product-liability or institutional-negligence theory that names additional defendants. Every percentage point of fault assigned to the plaintiff reduces the recovery dollar for dollar — which is exactly why the insurance company works so hard to pin fault on the injured.
There is no general statutory cap on wrongful-death damages in Texas. A jury in Andrews County can award the full measure of what these lives were worth — the lost earning capacity of a 19-year-old golfer who had decades of working life ahead, the lost companionship and guidance of a coach who was 26, the mental anguish of parents who buried children. The exceptions to this rule are narrow (medical-malpractice cases have a cap under a different statute). For a highway crash, the ceiling is what the jury says it is. The floor is what the insurance company offers — and the distance between the two is why you are reading this page.
“No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report.”
— 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b)
That federal statute is the reason the NTSB’s report — however thorough, however well-funded, however authoritative it appears in the news — will never be shown to the jury that decides your family’s case. We will come back to this. It is one of the most misunderstood facts in crash litigation, and the insurance company is counting on you not knowing it.
The At-Fault Driver’s Impairment — and Why the Headline Will Not Win Your Case
The public record reports that toxicological testing showed methamphetamine in the pickup driver’s blood. That fact, if proven in civil court, is devastating to the defense. A driver operating a vehicle with a central-nervous-system stimulant in their bloodstream — at night, on a dark two-lane road, with his thirteen-year-old son in the passenger seat — is not merely negligent. That is the textbook definition of gross negligence, and in Texas, gross negligence opens the door to punitive damages: money designed not to compensate but to punish.
But here is what the methamphetamine finding will not do: it will not win your case by itself. The toxicology result is a fact. To use it in court, you have to prove it — not by handing the jury the NTSB’s report (which the law bars), but by obtaining the lab results through discovery, by establishing the chain of custody of the blood sample, by presenting a toxicologist who can explain what the presence of methamphetamine means for reaction time, judgment, and impulse control, and by connecting the impairment to the specific act that caused the collision — the crossing of the center line, the failure to yield, whatever the physical evidence shows the pickup did in the seconds before impact.
The defense will attack every link. They will argue the blood test was mishandled. They will argue the methamphetamine was a residual from days earlier, not active impairment at the moment of the crash. They will argue the pickup driver’s conduct was caused by something else — a medical event, a road hazard, the van’s headlights. And they will point to the NTSB’s own shifting findings — first a tire failure, then no tire failure — as evidence that even the government cannot say for certain what happened.
This is the fight. It is not a press release. It is a courtroom, and in the courtroom, the family that came prepared wins.
The NTSB Investigation and the Courtroom — Two Different Fights
The NTSB is the premier transportation-safety investigative body in the world. When nine people die on a highway, the NTSB sends a team. They measure skid marks, download vehicle data, take blood samples, interview witnesses, and produce a report that identifies the probable cause of the crash. Their work is essential. It makes the roads safer for the next family. But it is not built for your courtroom.
Here is the gap the insurance company hopes you never understand: the NTSB’s probable-cause finding is, by federal law, inadmissible in a civil damages trial. The statute at 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b) bars the Board’s report from being used as evidence in a lawsuit for damages. The NTSB’s own regulations clarify that Board employees may testify only to factual information they gathered — the measurements, the observations, the raw data — not to the Board’s conclusions about what caused the crash. The NTSB’s job is to prevent the next crash, not to decide who pays for this one. That is the court’s job, and it is a separate investigation.
This means the toxicology finding, the tire analysis, the vehicle-speed calculation, and the crash reconstruction all have to be independently developed. The blood test result can be obtained from the lab that performed it. The vehicle data can be downloaded from the black box by your own expert. The scene can be reconstructed from the Texas Department of Public Safety crash report (which, unlike the NTSB report, is generally admissible), from photographs, from the physical evidence on the road, and from the vehicles themselves — if they have not been destroyed.
And that brings us to the evidence clock — the countdown that is already running, whether or not anyone has hired a lawyer yet.
The Evidence Clock — What Exists, Who Holds It, and How Fast It Dies
Every piece of proof in a crash case is on a timer. Some of those timers are set by federal law. Some are set by the company that owns the data. Some are set by the salvage yard that holds the wreckage. Every one of them is running right now, and the day a lawyer sends a preservation letter is the day the clock starts working for the family instead of against it.
The vehicles themselves. The van and the pickup are the single most important physical evidence in this case. They contain the crash recorders — the event data recorders, or EDRs — that federal law requires to capture the seconds before impact: vehicle speed, brake application, throttle position, seatbelt status, and the change in velocity at the moment of collision. For the van, the EDR data tells us what the van was doing. For the pickup, it tells us what the pickup was doing — how fast it was traveling, whether the brakes were applied, whether the steering input suggests the driver was trying to avoid the collision or was unconscious or impaired. The vehicles also contain the physical evidence of crashworthiness — did the van’s structure hold, or did it collapse? Did the seats stay anchored? Did the fuel system rupture and cause the fire? Did the doors stay closed, or were occupants ejected? These questions can only be answered by examining the vehicles. If the vehicles are sold for salvage, crushed, or ” repaired” before an expert examines them, that evidence is gone. A preservation letter to the tow yard, the insurance company, and the salvage facility is the first move — and it has to go out before someone decides the wreckage is worth more as scrap than as proof.
The black-box data. Federal law requires the EDR to lock its recording when the airbags deploy, so the crash data should survive — but only if the module itself is not destroyed. If the airbags did not deploy, the data may be overwritten the next time the vehicle’s electrical system is powered. The EDR data has to be downloaded by a trained expert using the right forensic tool — the Bosch CDR system for passenger vehicles, or manufacturer-specific tools for larger vehicles. Doing it wrong, or powering up a damaged module, can corrupt or erase the one honest witness to the crash.
The toxicology evidence. The blood sample taken from the pickup driver is a time-sensitive record. The lab report exists. The chain of custody exists. But the blood sample itself may be destroyed on a retention schedule, and the defense will want it re-tested by their own expert. A demand to preserve the sample — not just the report — has to go out early.
The DPS crash report. The Texas Department of Public Safety investigates fatal crashes on state highways and farm-to-market roads. The DPS crash report is separate from the NTSB report and is generally admissible in civil litigation. It contains the investigating officer’s observations, a diagram of the crash scene, vehicle descriptions, witness information, and the officer’s assessment of contributing factors. This report is a foundation — but it is not the ceiling. The officer’s conclusions can be challenged, supplemented, and corrected by independent reconstruction.
Scene evidence. Skid marks, gouge marks in the pavement, debris fields, fluid stains, and the final resting positions of the vehicles all tell the story of what happened in the seconds before and during the collision. But FM 1788 is a live road. Traffic wears away the marks. Weather washes away the fluids. Road crews repair the gouges. The scene evidence that existed on March 15, 2022, has been degrading every day since. A reconstruction expert should have been on that road within days — measuring, photographing, documenting. The longer the delay, the more of the scene is gone.
Surveillance and dashcam footage. FM 1788 is rural, but the Permian Basin is industrialized. Oilfield lease roads, pump stations, pipeline compressor stations, and company yards in the area may have cameras that captured the vehicles before the crash — their speed, their lane position, their headlights. That footage overwrites itself on a rolling cycle, often in weeks. A canvass of every camera within a mile of the crash site is something a lawyer does in the first week, not the first month.
The 911 calls and CAD records. The first calls to 911 after the crash contain witness statements, timestamps, and location data that can establish the timeline. The CAD (computer-aided dispatch) records from the Andrews County Sheriff’s Office, DPS, and EMS show the emergency response timeline. These records are retained on schedules that vary by agency, and some can be purged within a few years. Request them early.
The NTSB factual docket. While the NTSB’s report is inadmissible, the factual information the investigators gathered — witness statements, photographs, vehicle measurements, recorder data readouts — is a public record. The NTSB publishes this factual material in its docket. These facts can be mined, verified independently, and presented through your own experts. But the docket may not be complete for months, and the final report can take a year or more. Your case cannot wait for the NTSB.
Here is what all of this comes down to: the proof of what happened on FM 1788 is perishable. Every day that passes without a preservation letter, without a vehicle inspection, without a scene reconstruction, is a day the evidence fades. The insurance company knows this. They are counting on delay. The day you call a lawyer is the day the clock starts working for you.
The Money — Insurance Reality in a Nine-Fatality Crash
Let us talk about the hardest question in this case honestly: where does the money come from? Nine people are dead. Two are seriously injured. The at-fault pickup driver is also dead. His estate may have limited assets. And the insurance coverage that applies is the single most important factor in what your family can actually recover — not what the case is worth, but what can be collected.
The at-fault driver’s auto insurance. Texas law requires a minimum of $30,000 in bodily-injury liability coverage per person and $60,000 per accident. That means if the pickup driver carried only the legal minimum, the total available to all nine families and two surviving students from his policy is $60,000 — split among eleven claims. That is less than $5,500 per family. Even if the driver carried higher limits — $100,000 per person, $300,000 per accident, or more — the coverage is a pool, and when eleven claims draw from one pool, each family’s share shrinks. The driver’s estate could be exposed above the policy limits if the case goes to verdict, but collecting from a deceased driver’s estate depends on what assets he had — and many estates are insolvent or nearly so.
Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. This is where the recovery often lives in a case like this. Every Texas auto policy is required to offer UM/UIM coverage unless the policyholder signs a written rejection. If the victims’ families carried UM/UIM on their own vehicles, or if the university’s vehicle policy included UM/UIM, that coverage stacks on top of the at-fault driver’s limits. UM pays when the at-fault driver has no insurance. UIM pays when the at-fault driver’s insurance is insufficient to cover the full value of the claim. In a nine-fatality crash, the at-fault driver’s insurance will almost certainly be insufficient — which makes UIM the primary recovery engine for many of these families. Finding every available UM/UIM policy — the students’ own policies, their parents’ policies, the university’s fleet policy — is work that begins the day a lawyer is hired.
The university’s insurance. The University of the Southwest owned or operated the van. Its institutional insurance — general liability, athletic-department coverage, auto liability for the fleet — may provide additional coverage. The university’s travel policy is also relevant: the athletic director told the press that the team made the 95-mile one-way trip four times on consecutive days, and that “more teams than you think do this.” That practice — repeated long drives on rural Permian Basin roads, at night, in an 11-person van towing a trailer — raises institutional-liability questions about fatigue, vehicle selection, driver training, and whether overnight stays should have been required. The university’s insurance tower could be a significant source of recovery, separate from and in addition to the at-fault driver’s coverage.
Product-liability coverage. If the van’s crashworthiness failed — if the roof crushed, if the seats collapsed, if the fuel system ruptured and caused or worsened the fire, if the doors failed and occupants were ejected — the van manufacturer could face a products-liability claim with its own, often much larger, insurance tower. The same is true for the pickup manufacturer if a vehicle defect contributed to the crash. The initial tire-failure theory, even though the NTSB found no evidence of tire failure, is a reminder that vehicle components must be independently examined. The crashworthiness doctrine — established in American law for decades — holds that a vehicle manufacturer has a duty to design a vehicle that protects its occupants in a foreseeable crash. The crash on FM 1788 was a foreseeable collision. The question is whether the vehicles performed as they should have, and whether the injuries and deaths were caused or worsened by a design that failed to protect.
What the case is worth. The honest answer is that a case with nine deaths and two catastrophic injuries has a value that reaches into the tens of millions of dollars — potentially higher when punitive damages are available for the at-fault driver’s methamphetamine impairment. Each wrongful-death claim carries its own value based on the deceased person’s age, earning capacity, relationships, and the family’s loss. A 19-year-old college golfer had fifty-plus years of expected earning capacity ahead. A 26-year-old coach had decades. The survival claims add the pain and suffering each person experienced before death. The two surviving students’ injury claims include medical costs, future care, lost earning capacity, pain and suffering, and potentially a life-care plan that stretches across decades.
But value and recovery are different numbers. The recovery is limited by what coverage exists and what assets can be reached. Finding every source — the at-fault driver’s policy, the at-fault driver’s estate, every UM/UIM policy, the university’s coverage, any applicable product-liability tower — is half the work of this case. The other half is proving the liability that makes each source pay. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But we can tell you this: the insurance company’s first offer in a case like this is always a fraction of what the case is worth, and the family that accepts it without understanding the full coverage picture has been cheated twice — once by the crash, and once by the settlement.
The Medicine — What a Highway-Speed Collision Does to the Human Body
The crash on FM 1788 was described as fiery. The forces involved in a collision between a pickup truck and a loaded 11-person van towing a trailer, on a rural two-lane road where highway speeds are common, are enormous. The kinetic energy in a crash scales with the square of the closing speed — if both vehicles were traveling toward each other at 60 miles per hour, the closing speed is 120 miles per hour, and the energy is not twice what it would be at 60 — it is four times. That energy has to go somewhere, and it goes into the vehicles and the people inside them.
For the nine people who died, the injury mechanisms would have included some combination of blunt-force trauma from the collision itself, crush injuries from the vehicle’s structural deformation, thermal injuries from the post-crash fire, and deceleration injuries to the brain and internal organs. In a crash of this severity, death may have been rapid — but the survival-action question of whether consciousness persisted for seconds or minutes is a medical one, answered by the autopsy findings, the injury patterns, and the forensic pathology.
For the two students who survived with serious injuries, the medical picture is different — and it is the picture that will define the rest of their lives. A serious-injury survivor of a crash like this may face:
Traumatic brain injury. The brain is a soft organ inside a hard skull. In a violent deceleration, the skull stops and the brain keeps moving — striking the interior of the skull, twisting, tearing nerve fibers. This is called diffuse axonal injury, and it is invisible on a standard CT scan about 90 percent of the time in cases classified as “mild” — which is the most dangerous word in brain-injury law, because “mild” is a triage classification, not a prognosis. More than a third of people with a “mild” TBI score on the Glasgow Coma Scale still have life-threatening bleeding in the brain. Advanced imaging — diffusion tensor imaging, susceptibility-weighted MRI — can detect the microscopic tearing that a CT cannot. For a college athlete whose sport demands precision and focus, a brain injury that affects memory, concentration, balance, or emotional regulation is not just a medical problem — it is an identity problem. And the symptoms can persist for years: the headaches, the lost words, the short fuse, the fatigue, the inability to do what used to be effortless.
Burn injuries. If the survivors were exposed to the fire, the burn treatment path is brutal. The depth of a burn determines everything — a full-thickness (third-degree) burn has destroyed the nerve endings, which means it is paradoxically painless at the site while being the most serious kind. Burn treatment follows a grim arithmetic: roughly one day in the hospital for every one percent of total body surface area burned. Skin grafting leaves two wounds — the burn and the donor site. Scars tighten over joints and, in young people, must be surgically released again and again as the body grows. The American Burn Association has published referral criteria that send every burn to the hands, face, or genitals, every chemical burn, and every inhalation injury to a specialized burn center — because burn care is a subspecialty that general hospitals are not equipped to provide.
Spinal and orthopedic injuries. The deceleration forces in a head-on or near-head-on collision can fracture vertebrae, rupture spinal discs, and in the worst cases, damage the spinal cord itself. A spinal-cord injury is among the most expensive injuries in medicine — the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center puts the first-year cost of a high-cervical (neck-level) injury at roughly $1.4 million and the lifetime cost for a young adult at more than $6 million, in 2024 dollars. Those figures cover medical care and living expenses only — they do not count the wages the person will never earn. Even without cord involvement, fractures of the pelvis, femur, and long bones require surgical fixation, months of rehabilitation, and in some cases permanent hardware and permanent disability.
Internal organ injury. The blunt force of a steering wheel, a seatbelt, or a collapsed door panel can rupture the spleen, lacerate the liver, tear the bowel, or cause a traumatic aortic injury — the last of which is frequently fatal before the patient reaches the hospital. For survivors, the internal-injury repair may involve multiple surgeries, intensive-care stays, and a long recovery complicated by infection risk.
The long arc. A college student who survives a crash like this does not “recover” in the way the news implies. They enter a new life — one that may include years of surgery, rehabilitation, pain management, psychological treatment for post-traumatic stress, and accommodation for permanent disabilities. The life-care plan that prices this future — every surgery, every therapy session, every piece of durable medical equipment, every medication, every home modification, every lost year of earning capacity — is the document that turns the word “serious” into a number a jury can understand. Building that plan is the work of a certified life-care planner and a forensic economist. It is not a guess. It is arithmetic, built from the medical record and projected across a lifetime.
Andrews County, FM 1788, and the Permian Basin’s Deadliest Roads
Andrews sits in the heart of the Permian Basin — the most productive oil field in the United States, and one of the most dangerous places to drive in the country. The farm-to-market roads that crisscross Andrews County were built for agricultural traffic in the mid-twentieth century: two lanes, no median, no lighting, shoulders that drop into bar ditches. They were not built for the volume, weight, and speed of modern oilfield traffic — the water haulers, the frac-sand trucks, the crude-oil tankers, the equipment transports that run these roads twenty-four hours a day. We handle Permian Basin oilfield commercial truck cases because these roads are our roads, and we know what kills on them.
FM 1788 runs north-south through Andrews County. State Highway 115 runs east-west. The crash happened half a mile north of that intersection — a rural stretch with no intersection controls, no lighting, and no barrier between opposing lanes. At 8:17 p.m. in mid-March, the road would have been fully dark. Oncoming headlights are the only illumination. The closest hospital is in Andrews — a small regional facility, not a Level I trauma center. A seriously injured crash victim would need to be flown to a trauma center in Midland, Odessa, or Lubbock — and in a nine-fatality crash, the aeromedical resources of the entire region would have been overwhelmed. The drive time from the crash site to a trauma center is measured in hours, not minutes — and in trauma medicine, the golden hour is the window between injury and definitive care. Every minute beyond that window worsens the outcome.
This is not the first time Andrews County has been the site of a deadly crash involving school or college travel. In November 2021 — less than four months before the FM 1788 crash — three people died when an Andrews High School bus traveling to a playoff football game in Sweetwater was struck by a wrong-way driver on Interstate 20. The NTSB had not released its report on that crash as of the date the golf-team crash was reported. Two tragedies on the same county’s roads, both involving students traveling for school activities, both on high-speed rural highways, both resulting in multiple deaths.
A jury in Andrews County is a jury of neighbors. The people who serve on that jury drive these roads. They know FM 1788. They know the oilfield traffic. They know the distances — the 95 miles between Hobbs and Midland that the golf team drove four times in four days. They know what it means when a dark two-lane road and an impaired driver and a van full of young people converge at 8:17 on a Tuesday night in March. That local knowledge is the home-field advantage — the jury that decides what these lives were worth is a jury drawn from the community where those lives were lived.
The 11-Person Van and the Institutional Travel Question
The vehicle at the center of this crash was an 11-person passenger van towing an 8-foot cargo trailer. Large passenger vans — 11-, 12-, and 15-passenger models — have been the subject of safety concerns for decades. The National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have both warned about the rollover risk of these vehicles, particularly when fully loaded and operating at highway speeds. The high center of gravity, the extended wheelbase, the weight of passengers and cargo, and the addition of a towing trailer all increase the risk of a loss-of-control event. When a large van rolls over, the roof structure is tested against forces it was not always designed to withstand — and roof crush is a leading cause of catastrophic head and neck injury in van rollovers.
Federal motor vehicle safety standards set specific requirements for roof crush resistance, fuel system integrity, occupant crash protection, seatbelt anchorage, and door retention. If the van on FM 1788 failed any of these standards — if the roof crushed into the occupant compartment, if the fuel system ruptured and fed the fire, if the seats broke loose from their anchors, if the doors opened and occupants were ejected — the van manufacturer could face a products-liability claim under the crashworthiness doctrine. That doctrine, established in American law, holds that a vehicle manufacturer has a duty to design a vehicle that is reasonably safe in a foreseeable crash. The crash on FM 1788 was foreseeable. The question is whether the van performed as it should have.
Beyond the vehicle itself, the institutional travel policy raises its own questions. The University of the Southwest’s athletic director told the press that the golf teams made the 95-mile trip between Hobbs and Midland four times on consecutive days — there and back each day — and that overnight stays were not the norm for trips of that distance. That means the van driver — the 26-year-old coach who was among the dead — was making his fourth round trip in four days, on a dark rural road, at the end of a long day, towing a trailer. Fatigue is a documented factor in highway crashes, and the decision to drive rather than stay overnight is an institutional decision, not a personal one. The university’s travel policy, its vehicle-selection policy, its driver-training policy, and its decision to use a large passenger van for repeated long-distance trips are all potential bases for institutional liability — separate from and in addition to the at-fault driver’s negligence.
The Insurance Adjuster’s Playbook — Named Before It Runs
If your family was in that van, someone from an insurance company has already called you, or will soon. The call will sound friendly. The voice will be warm. The person will say they are “just checking on you” or “just trying to get some information to process the claim.” Here is what is actually happening — and here is the counter to each play.
Play 1: The recorded statement. The adjuster asks you to “just tell us what happened” on a recording. The questions are engineered to get you to say things that will be quoted against you later — “I’m doing okay,” “I think he was going pretty fast,” “I’m not sure exactly what happened.” Every one of those phrases becomes a defense exhibit. The counter: Do not give a recorded statement without a lawyer. You have no legal obligation to be interviewed by the at-fault driver’s insurance company. Your own insurance company may require cooperation under your policy — but even then, the statement should be given with counsel present. The adjuster is not your friend. The adjuster is a professional whose job is to minimize what the company pays.
Play 2: The quick check with a release. Within weeks, a check may arrive — sometimes for the policy limits, sometimes for a fraction of them — with a release document that, if signed, extinguishes your right to sue anyone for anything related to the crash. The check arrives before the medical records are complete, before the full extent of the brain injury is known, before the life-care plan is built, before the coverage investigation is done. The counter: Never sign a release without a lawyer reviewing it. A release is permanent. Once you sign it, you cannot go back — even if the injury turns out to be far worse than anyone knew on the day you signed. The first offer is always a fraction of the case’s value, and the coverage that has not been found yet — the UM/UIM policy, the university’s tower, the product-liability claim — is coverage you lose the right to pursue if the release is broad.
Play 3: The “shared fault” argument. The adjuster, or the defense lawyer, will suggest that the van driver was partly at fault — driving at night, towing a trailer, on the fourth trip in four days. If they can assign 51 percent of the fault to the van driver, the families recover nothing from the at-fault driver’s insurance. Every percentage point they can pin on the van is money in their pocket. The counter: Texas’s comparative-fault rule cuts both ways. The at-fault driver had methamphetamine in his blood. That is not shared fault — that is impairment. And the institutional decisions that put the van on that road — the travel policy, the vehicle, the schedule — are not the van driver’s personal negligence; they are the university’s institutional choices. The fault in this crash belongs to the impaired pickup driver and, potentially, to the institutions that built the conditions for the collision. A lawyer’s job is to keep the fault where it belongs.
Play 4: The delay aimed at the statute of limitations. The adjuster is “still investigating.” The file is “still being reviewed.” The offer is “being prepared.” These phrases stretch into months, then a year, then eighteen months — and the two-year statute of limitations is a cliff that the insurance company can see and you might not. The counter: Know the deadline. Two years from the date of death. For this crash, that deadline was March 15, 2024. A lawsuit filed one day late is dead on arrival — no matter how strong the evidence. The delay is not a mistake. It is a tactic.
Play 5: The lowball valuation. The adjuster runs the claim through valuation software — programs like Colossus that assign a number to a human being’s suffering based on medical billing codes and diagnostic categories. The software cannot see the golfer who will never swing a club again. It cannot see the parent who buried a nineteen-year-old. It cannot see the years of depression, the destroyed marriage, the child who grew up without a father. The counter: A claim valued by software is a claim undervalued by humanity. The real number is built from the medical record, the life-care plan, the economic projection, and the story of who this person was and what was taken. That number is built by a trial team, not by an algorithm.
How a Case Like This Is Actually Built
Here is the chronological walk — week one through resolution — of how a crash case like the one on FM 1788 is built by a trial team working for the families.
Week one: preservation. The first letters go out — to the tow yards holding the van and the pickup, ordering them not to release, repair, or crush the vehicles. To the insurance companies, ordering them to preserve all policies, all claim files, all recorded statements, all vehicle data. To the police agencies, requesting the crash report, the 911 recordings, and the CAD records. To the NTSB, requesting the factual docket when it becomes available. To any facility in the area that may have surveillance cameras, requesting that footage be preserved. These letters are not courtesy. They are legal demands that create a duty to preserve — and if the evidence disappears after the letter is received, the consequences can include an adverse-inference instruction (the jury may assume the lost evidence was as bad as the plaintiff says) and sanctions.
Weeks two through four: vehicle inspection and data download. An accident reconstruction expert inspects both vehicles — the van and the pickup — in their post-crash condition. Every measurement is taken, every photograph is shot, every component is documented. The EDR — the black box — is downloaded by a trained technician using the correct forensic tool. The data tells us the vehicle speed, the brake status, the throttle position, and the change in velocity at impact. If the airbags deployed, the data is locked by federal regulation and should survive. If they did not, the data may be fragile. This download is the single most important evidence-gathering step in the first month.
Weeks four through eight: scene reconstruction and records. The reconstruction expert visits FM 1788 — measuring the roadway, documenting the sight lines, analyzing the skid marks (if they survive), the gouge marks, the debris field, and the final resting positions. The DPS crash report is obtained and analyzed. The toxicology report is obtained from the lab. The victims’ medical records are collected — from the scene, from the hospital, from every treating provider. For the surviving students, the full acute-care record, the operative reports, the imaging, and the rehabilitation notes are assembled. For the deceased, the autopsy reports and the death certificates are obtained.
Months two through six: expert development. The life-care planner evaluates the surviving students — what will they need for the rest of their lives? Every surgery, every therapy, every medication, every piece of equipment, every home modification. The forensic economist reduces that plan to present value — what would it cost today to fund a lifetime of care, accounting for inflation and medical-cost trends? The accident reconstructionist finalizes the crash analysis — speed, angle, forces, causation. A toxicologist is retained to explain the methamphetamine finding. A forensic pathologist reviews the autopsies to address the survival-action question — did the deceased experience conscious pain and suffering before death? A human-factors expert may address visibility, reaction time, and driver perception in the dark.
Months six through twelve: discovery and depositions. If the case is in litigation, written discovery goes to every defendant — the at-fault driver’s estate, the university, any vehicle manufacturer named. The responses reveal the insurance policies, the corporate structure, the travel policies, the vehicle maintenance records, the driver’s history. Depositions follow — the insurance adjuster under oath, the university’s athletic director under oath, the vehicle engineers under oath. The defense’s experts are deposed — their methods challenged, their assumptions exposed, their conclusions tested.
Resolution: settlement or trial. Most cases settle — but they settle on the defendant’s terms when the plaintiff is unprepared, and on the plaintiff’s terms when the case is built to win at trial. The leverage that produces a fair settlement is the same leverage that wins a verdict: the evidence is preserved, the experts are retained, the coverage is mapped, and the defense knows that if they do not pay what the case is worth, a jury in Andrews County will hear every piece of it.
The First 72 Hours — What to Do and What Never to Do
If you are reading this in the days after a crash — this crash or one like it — here is the practical roadmap.
Medical first. If you were in the vehicle, see a doctor — even if you feel fine. Adrenaline masks pain. A brain injury can present with a perfectly normal CT scan in the emergency room and still be a life-altering injury. The symptoms — headache, dizziness, confusion, memory gaps, irritability — may appear days later. Document everything. Keep every medical record. Follow every referral. The gap between the crash and the first medical visit is a gap the insurance company will exploit — “if she were really hurt, she would have gone to the doctor the same day.”
Do not speak to the at-fault driver’s insurance company. You have no obligation to give them a recorded statement. You have no obligation to answer their questions. You have no obligation to sign their forms. Be polite. Take their name and number. Say you will have your attorney call them back. Then call an attorney.
Do not sign anything. No release. No authorization. No settlement. No “proof of loss” form. Nothing. Every document the insurance company sends you is designed to limit what they pay. A lawyer reads those documents before you sign them — and most of the time, the answer is “do not sign this.”
Do not post on social media. No photos of the crash. No photos of your injuries. No “I’m okay, just shaken up” posts. The insurance company monitors social media, and a single post — a photo of you smiling at a family event, a comment that says “feeling much better” — can be used to minimize your claim even when you are suffering. Assume everything you post will be shown to a jury.
Preserve everything. Save the clothing you were wearing. Save the shoes. Save the personal effects from the vehicle. Photograph your injuries — bruises, cuts, burns, bandages — every day, on a schedule, because appearance changes and the progression of healing is evidence. Do not let anyone repair, sell, or scrap the vehicle. If it is in a tow yard, it is accruing charges — and those charges are worth paying to preserve the evidence. What to do after a car accident is a subject we have covered in depth, and the principles are the same whether the crash was a fender-bender or a nine-fatality tragedy — the scale changes, not the fundamentals.
Call a lawyer. The call is free. The consultation is confidential. If we are not the right fit for your case, we will tell you. If we are, the first thing we do is send the preservation letters that freeze the evidence before it disappears. The day you call is the day the clock starts working for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a wrongful death claim in Texas?
Texas’s wrongful death statute of limitations gives you two years from the date of death to file a claim. For the crash on FM 1788 on March 15, 2022, that deadline was March 15, 2024. If you are reading this after that date and no claim was filed, you should speak to a lawyer immediately — there are narrow exceptions that can extend the deadline in specific circumstances, but they are exceptions, not the rule, and relying on them without legal advice is dangerous. For any crash that happened more recently, the two-year clock is running right now.
Can the NTSB report be used in my lawsuit?
No. Federal law — 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b) — bars the NTSB’s report, including its probable-cause conclusion, from being admitted as evidence in a civil damages trial. The NTSB’s employees can testify to factual information they gathered (measurements, observations, data), but not to the Board’s conclusions. This means the toxicology finding, the vehicle-speed analysis, and the crash reconstruction all have to be independently developed and proven through your own experts and evidence. The NTSB investigation is valuable for public safety, but it does not build your case — your legal team does.
Who can file a wrongful death claim in Texas?
Texas law allows the surviving spouse, surviving children, and surviving parents of the deceased person to file a wrongful death claim. If none of those beneficiaries file within three months of the death, the executor or administrator of the deceased person’s estate may file the claim — unless the beneficiaries direct the executor not to. Unmarried partners, stepchildren, and grandparents generally do not have standing under Texas law, even if their relationship with the deceased was close. Getting the standing question right early is essential.
What if the at-fault driver does not have enough insurance?
This is the most common problem in a multi-fatality crash, and the answer is that the recovery comes from multiple sources — not just the at-fault driver’s policy. Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage on the victims’ own policies, or on the university’s vehicle policy, can pay above the at-fault driver’s limits. The university’s institutional liability coverage may apply. If a vehicle defect contributed to the crash or worsened the injuries, the vehicle manufacturer’s product-liability insurance could be a separate, larger source. Finding every available source of coverage is a core part of building the case.
Can I still recover if the at-fault driver is also dead?
Yes. A wrongful death claim survives the death of the at-fault party. The claim is brought against the at-fault driver’s estate, and the estate’s insurance coverage is the primary target. If the estate has assets beyond the insurance, those assets may also be reachable — though many estates are insolvent. The insurance coverage, not the estate’s assets, is usually the practical recovery source. Punitive damages may also be available against the estate if the conduct was gross negligence — which a methamphetamine-impaired driver with a child passenger may well be.
What is the difference between a wrongful death claim and a survival action?
A wrongful death claim belongs to the surviving family members (spouse, children, parents) and compensates them for what they lost — the financial support, the companionship, the guidance, the mental anguish. A survival action belongs to the estate of the deceased person and carries forward the claim the person would have had if they had lived — the pain and suffering they experienced before death, the medical expenses, the funeral costs. In Texas, these are two separate claims with separate damages, and a family that files only one leaves the other on the table.
Is there a cap on damages in a Texas wrongful death case from a car crash?
No. Texas does not impose a general statutory cap on damages in wrongful death cases arising from motor vehicle crashes. A jury can award the full measure of the family’s loss — lost earning capacity, lost companionship, mental anguish, loss of inheritance, and in cases of gross negligence, punitive damages. The caps that exist in Texas law apply to medical-malpractice cases under a different statute, not to highway-crash cases. The practical ceiling on your recovery is not a statute — it is the available insurance coverage and the defendant’s assets.
How much is my case worth?
No honest lawyer can answer that question without reviewing the medical records, the autopsy reports, the crash evidence, the insurance policies, and the individual circumstances of each deceased person and each surviving family. What we can tell you is that the insurance company’s first offer is always a fraction of the case’s value — and that the true value is built from the life-care plan, the economic projection, the story of who was lost, and the coverage that exists to compensate that loss. We build the number from the ground up, not from a software output. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The consultation where we begin that process is free.
Should I accept the insurance company’s first settlement offer?
Almost never. The first offer is a floor, not a ceiling. It is designed to close the file cheaply before the full extent of the injuries is known, before the coverage investigation is complete, and before the family understands the full value of what was lost. A settlement is final — once you sign the release, you cannot go back, even if the injury turns out to be far worse than anyone knew. A lawyer reviews the offer against the full coverage picture, the full medical picture, and the full value of the loss before advising whether to accept. In a nine-fatality crash, the first offer from the at-fault driver’s insurance is almost certainly a token designed to make the case go away.
Do I need a lawyer if the at-fault driver was clearly impaired?
Yes — especially if the driver was impaired. Impairment makes the liability clearer, but it does not make the case easier. It makes the case more valuable, which means the insurance company will fight harder to limit the payout. The toxicology has to be proven independently of the NTSB report. The punitive-damages claim has to be built. The coverage has to be found — because the at-fault driver’s insurance is almost certainly insufficient to cover nine deaths, and the additional sources (UM/UIM, university coverage, product liability) require investigation and legal work. An impaired driver does not make a lawyer unnecessary — an impaired driver makes the case bigger, which makes the lawyer more necessary.
Why This Firm — Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in courtrooms — Texas state court and federal court, including the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he writes the way a jury reads — clearly, directly, without hiding behind jargon. He is the managing partner of this firm. He has been lead counsel in cases that went the distance — through discovery, through depositions, through trial — and he approaches every case as though it will be tried, because the cases that settle best are the cases built to win.
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he came to this side of the table. He sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims — he knows Colossus, he knows reserve-setting, he knows IME-doctor selection, he knows surveillance, and he knows every delay tactic in the playbook because he used to run them. Now he uses that knowledge for injured people. He is fluent in Spanish — he conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter — and for families in Andrews, Hobbs, Fort Stockton, or anywhere in the Permian Basin whose first language is Spanish, that is not a courtesy. It is a right.
We work on contingency. The fee is 33.33 percent 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. We have live staff available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — not an answering service, but people who can take your call and start the process. The preservation letter that freezes the evidence goes out the day you hire us. The vehicle inspection is scheduled within weeks. The coverage investigation begins immediately.
If your family was affected by the crash on FM 1788 — or by any crash in Andrews County, the Permian Basin, or anywhere in Texas that took a life or left someone with catastrophic injuries — call us. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. That is 1-888-288-9911. The call is free. The conversation is confidential. We will tell you, honestly, whether we are the right firm for your case — and if we are not, we will help you find one that is.
Hablamos Español. We serve your family fully in Spanish.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page is legal information, not legal advice. Contacting the firm is free and confidential. Every case is different. Nothing here is a promise or a guarantee of any result. The only guarantee we make is this: if we take your case, we will build it to win — and we will not stop until every source of coverage has been found, every piece of evidence has been preserved, and every defendant has been made to answer for what they did.