Traffic deaths have spiked in Tarrant County. What’s behind the increase? 

By Jaime Moore-Carrillo July 10, 2025 5:50 AM 

Star-Telegram.com

Traffic flows south on Interstate 35W after passing under the Heritage Trace Parkway overpass on July 5. In 2015 an SUV slammed into the back of the Estelles family’s vehicle near this location, resulting in the death of two of their children. Amanda McCoy amccoy@star-telegram.com 

On a clear December evening in 2015, four days before Christmas, Alexander Trejo and Gabriella Estelle died within arm’s reach of their parents. 

The family spent its final moments together packed into a 2011 Ford Fusion, traveling south along Interstate 35W on their way home from a Christmas light display at Texas Motor Speedway. 

The kids filled the back row — Alexander, then 23, on the passenger side, his 18-year-old half brother Zachary Estelle on the opposite end, and Gabriella, 19, wedged between them. Kevin Estelle, 40 at the time, drove; his wife Dee Estelle, 48, sat beside him. 

As the Estelles passed under the Heritage Trace Parkway overpass, traffic slowed. The 1998 Ford Explorer directly behind them didn’t. 

The SUV pummeled the back side of the stationary Fusion at full speed, launching the sedan from the right lane 386 feet into the grassy median. (The bullpens at Globe Life Field are, by comparison, roughly 410 feet from home plate.) 

The man driving a Mercury that trailed the Explorer later described hearing a “pop” when the vehicles collided. Another witness told police he saw “car parts flying everywhere.” 

The Explorer collapsed the Fusion’s trunk into its back seats, all but fusing them together. Much of the Fusion’s back half looked as if it’d been sheared off, the muffler, the spare tire, and the fuel door the clearest surviving indications of its past form. 

Some occupants in nearby vehicles scrambled to check on the Estelles. 

A passenger in the Mercury observed that two of the three back seat passengers — Gabriella and Alexander — were “unresponsive.” Their mother, he said, was “begging us to help her kids.”

(Top) Kevin and Dee Estelle, the parents of Alexander Trejo and Gabriella Estelle, together at Capp Smith Park in Watauga in June.. Two of the Estelle’s children were killed in 2015 when an SUV crashed into the rear of their vehicle. (Bottom) Dee Estelle shows a photo her son Alexander Trejo, left, and daughter Gabriella Estelle, right. Chris Torres ctorres@star-telegram.com 

Another man, whose Dodge had been clipped by the Explorer after it hammered the Fusion, tried to open the front passenger door but couldn’t; Dee, he reported, said she couldn’t breathe.

Zachary, somehow spared his life, managed to get out of the car, the witness recalled. Gabriella, meanwhile, appeared unconscious; Alexander seemed “deceased.” 

At some point, Kevin, dazed but not incapacitated, got on the line with a dispatcher. 

“Does everybody appear to be completely awake?” the dispatcher asked. 

“No, that’s my problem,” Kevin replied. “Two are not.” 

The dispatcher tried to clarify what Kevin had said. He went on, his voice beginning to falter, “My daughter’s not conscious, and I think my son is … not conscious.” 

First responders converged on the crash site over the next hour. They pried Alexander and Gabriella from the back seat. Medics pronounced them dead at the scene. MedStar personnel shuttled Kevin, Dee, Zach and the driver who hit them to John Peter Smith Hospital. 

“The impact was so catastrophic,” a Fort Worth police investigator later wrote, that the Explorer “intruded into the rear passenger compartment of the Ford Fusion and crushed Gabriella Estelle and Alexander Trejo, causing their deaths.” 

Authorities traced the evisceration of the Estelle family to a single, mundane decision: the Explorer driver, moments before the crash, had decided to glance down at his phone. 

Rising road fatalities in Tarrant County 

Gabriella and Alexander were two of the 159 people to lose their lives on Tarrant County roads in 2015, according to data compiled by the Texas Department of Transportation. 

Dee and Kevin, of Haltom City, managed to channel some of their grief into activism in the decade since. They joined groups of bereaved families lobbying at the state and national level for road safety reform, focusing their efforts on stricter penalties for distracted driving.

 “We had to give our loved ones a voice,” Dee told the Star-Telegram in early May. 

Whatever change they’d hoped to catalyze has, to their rage and confusion, been elusive. 

“I don’t think it’s getting any safer,” Dee said. 

“It’s not that people don’t care,” Kevin added later in the conversation. “Nobody’s taking it seriously.” 

Kevin Estelle, the father of Alexander Trejo and Gabriella Estelle, is photographed at Capp Smith Park in Watauga in June. Estelle’s children were killed IN 2015 when an SUV crashed into the the rear of their vehicle on Interstate 35W. Chris Torres ctorres@star-telegram.com 

Road fatalities in Tarrant County have soared since the Estelle’s lost two of their children. At least 227 people died in collisions in 2021 — the highest death toll over the past decade, and a 43% leap from 2015. 

The upswing in road deaths, confoundingly, hasn’t coincided with a surge in reported crashes. Municipal law enforcement agencies recorded about 30,800 crashes in 2015; they documented roughly 30,700 collisions in 2021. 

Crash fatalities in Tarrant County oscillated between 166 and 189 annually from 2016 to 2020. They spiked unexpectedly in 2021 and have hovered above 200 every year since. The state registered a similar trend — a rough plateau in fatalities until a startling jump during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Is driving getting deadlier in one of Texas’ largest counties? 

More People Are Dying on Roads Across the Metroplex

Road fatalities across DFW have trended upwards over the past decade, spiking around the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

 

Collision Course

Tarrant County has recorded far fewer vehicle crashes over the past decade. Some experts note that drivers and law enforcement agencies may simply be reporting fewer collisions.

Why are more people dying on Tarrant roads?

To some, statistical shifts can explain this apparently disturbing trend. 

“While it’s difficult to determine a true cause for having a lower amount of crashes but more fatalities, our perspective is to believe that due to the increase in population, there had to have been more people travelling in a single vehicle where fatality crashes occurred,” Buddy Calzada, a spokesperson for the Fort Worth Police Department, wrote to the Star-Telegram. 

Calzada added that, around the start of the pandemic, the department began encouraging drivers that “had a minor accident, with no injuries and where the vehicles were still drivable, to just exchange information.” 

“That practice is still used today with Fort Worth to keep officers answering higher priority calls for service and not have them out of service while working those specific type of minor accidents,” he explained. “At the end of the day, we are just the reporting agency for the insurance companies, and some drivers are aware of just exchanging information and may not need the police out to report it for them.” 

Traffic flows on Interstate 35W in 2023 in Fort Worth. The state’s traffic fatality rate jumped 28% between 2019 and 2021. Amanda McCoy amccoy@star-telegram.com 

Changing reporting habits could have, in other words, artificially deflated crash totals since 2020. More people are driving through and around Tarrant County. More cars invites more collisions — a growing number of which may never be reported. More collisions correlates, intuitively, with more deaths. 

But road fatalities rose and fell in subtle swings between 2016 and 2019, even as the county’s population steadily increased. Kara Kockelman, a transportation scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, says vehicle occupancy levels have stayed “pretty constant” since 2017. 

Experts also tend to assess road lethality by evaluating fatality rates. Number crunchers often tally the ratio of deaths in a given area to the estimated number of miles driven by vehicles in that jurisdiction. The calculation, in theory, frees analysts from the ambiguity of some potentially misleading factors (like population) and allows for easy comparisons across counties, states, and countries. 

According to TxDOT data gathered and analyzed by the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the Metroplex’s planning body, Tarrant County’s road fatality rate leapt almost 28% between 2019 and 2021. It has gradually declined since. 

The statewide fatality rate — generally higher than Tarrant’s over the past decade — had been on a shallow downward glide since 2014 before jumping in 2020, according to TxDOT’s crash data dashboard, last updated in June 2024. Annual fatality rates in TxDOT’s Fort Worth district — encompassing Tarrant, Erath, Hood, Jack, Johnson, Palo Pinto, Parker, Somervell and Wise counties — displayed a gradual rise before spiking in 2021. (TxDOT headquarters did not respond to questions about fatality trends or make experts available for interviews for this story.) 

Much of the country witnessed a similar pandemic bump. 

“COVID was fascinating, if you’re a safety researcher, because the number of crashes went down, but the fatalities went up,” said Josh Peterman, a career transportation engineer now sitting on the board of the Greater Dallas Planning Council. “So while we were crashing less, we were driving very poorly, and so they were resulting in a lot of fatalities and serious injuries.” 

Traffic flows on Interstate 35W on July 2. Road fatalities in Tarrant County have been on the rise in the past decade. Amanda McCoy amccoy@star-telegram.com

Peterman and many of his peers eventually settled on a plausible theory for the upswing: stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns drained roadways of traffic — a naturally occurring obstacle to speeding. Faster crashes tend to be deadlier ones. With fewer vehicles on the road, the fast and the reckless ran amok, resulting in fewer but more severe collisions. 

Other experts reckoned the intense emotional and psychological distress unleashed by the pandemic had spilled onto the roads. 

Police departments also scaled back traffic enforcement as the virus spread, removing an important deterrent to dangerous driving. 

“So many police departments were forced to limit traffic enforcement and other police-initiated contacts throughout the Covid pandemic that I do believe we saw an increase in unsafe driving,” Jeff Garner, chief of the North Richland Hills police department, wrote to the Star-Telegram. 

Why Tarrant’s fatality rates didn’t slump to pre-COVID levels as the pandemic faded is another mystery with less obvious explanations. 

North Texas’ congestion, perhaps to the frustration of many, had more or less returned to normal by 2022, according to data compiled by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. 

Perhaps, Peterman posited, the free and frenzied driving of the pandemic years had molded driving habits in ways that hadn’t fully recalibrated.

 “I think people just got used to driving fast and continued to do it while they could,” he said. 

And staffing struggles continue to strain the agencies tasked with policing perilous road behavior. 

At least 70% of the 1,158 American law enforcement agencies surveyed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a professional group for police leaders, reported that officer recruitment was “more difficult” in 2024 than it was five years ago; around 65% of respondents said they “had reduced services or specialized units because of staffing challenges, prioritizing essential patrol functions over specialized assignments.” Fort Worth PD’s attrition rate roughly doubled between 2019 and 2022. 

“Traffic control is kind of an elective; answering 911 calls and responding to calls for service is what you have to do,” said Jeremiah Allen, a crash investigator at the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office. “So I think we’re in a situation where a lot of law enforcement agencies are just maintaining their call load, and they don’t necessarily have the overhead to go out and do a lot of traffic enforcement.”

Jeremiah Allen, a crash investigator at the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office, speaks about the fatal crashes that have occurred at the intersection of Highway 1187 and Gipson Manor Court in Crowley in June. Allen believes one of the most effective ways to improve road safety is among the most straightforward: putting more cops on the street. Chris Torres ctorres@star-telegram.com 

Efforts to reduce road deaths 

To Allen and some of his peers, one of the most effective ways to improve road safety is among the most straightforward: putting more cops on the street. 

“When the cat is away, the mice will play,” said Tyler Killman, an officer at the Euless police department. “When the cops aren’t in the area, some folks are going to see that as a license to speed.” 

Whether this solution is viable in the near term, given agencies’ staffing woes, is another matter. 

Departments in other states and municipalities have tried filling enforcement gaps with computerized aides: speeding and red light cameras. Some scholars and experts argue they’re powerful checks on risky driving. New York City’s Department of Transportation claims to have reduced speeding by 94% at locations where it installed cameras in 2022. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, more convinced of their threats to civil liberties than their safety benefits, signed a law in 2019 banning “photographic traffic signal enforcement systems” across the state. 

“Texas has a very strong passion for individual liberty, so there’s always a lot of political pushback on putting in systems like this,” Peterman said. 

Other advocates, Dee Estelle among them, think police officers need stricter laws to enforce. 

Two years before outlawing traffic cameras, Texas lawmakers approved a statewide prohibition on texting while driving. But to some road safety advocates and police officers, the law is so constrained by its caveats that it’s effectively toothless. 

The law explicitly forbids drivers from using “a portable wireless communication device to read, write, or send an electronic message while operating a motor vehicle.” Drivers can also be penalized for using any handheld devices while passing through school zones. 

But drivers can, if they so choose, stare at their phones while they’re stationary. Commuters can also drive and use their phones if they’re following their GPS or activating “a function that plays music,” among other exceptions. And in fast-moving torrents of vehicles, many with tinted windows, identifying who is using their phones and why is a tall task. 

“It’s practically unenforceable,” Killman, the Euless officer, said. 

Other experts stress that better enforcement is only a part of the battle. 

“There is room for improvement there,” said Jay Crossley, the executive director of Farm & City, a Texas-focused urban planning nonprofit. “But anyone who claims that the way to solve this is enforcement is not being realistic.” 

Texas’ transportation system, in Crossley’s view, is dangerous by design. 

“Speed is kind of the central problem here in Texas,” he said. 

Traffic flows along Interstate 35W in 2021, a year after traffic fatalities began to increase in Tarrant County. Amanda McCoy amccoy@star-telegram.com 

Almost 35% of Texas crash fatalities in 2022 involved speeding, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, compared to about 29% nationwide. “Speed related” fatal crashes — in which drivers went too fast or too slow — rose noticeably in TxDOT’s Fort Worth district (and across the state) around the pandemic, according to agency data; so too did fatal collisions involving pedestrians. 

If police don’t have the capacity to control careless driving, Crossley argues, then the streets should. Designing roads for safety, not swiftness — tighter lanes, roundabouts, safer sidewalks, lower speed limits — can rein in the speed-hungry before they go fast enough to take a life. 

“We have invested massive amounts of money trying to speed up how fast people drive and designing roadways for fast speeds, and promising people that that’s what’s right and good,” he said. “All of us are trained to live dangerous lives, and it doesn’t work out well.” 

Weaning Texans off of their driving dependence — replacing cars with bikes, buses and trains, and developing the infrastructure to accommodate them — could also help drag down collisions. 

“I think there’s too much of a focus on roadways as opposed to, you know, better transit and better sidewalks and better biking facilities,” Peterman said. 

Peterman and Crossley acknowledge that Texas transportation agencies and municipal planning departments are filled with earnest planners and engineers committed to protecting the state’s commuters. But neither is especially optimistic about the prospect of quick, meaningful change. 

“There is quite a lot of inertia. People don’t want things to change,” Crossley said. 

He went on, “I think things are better now than they were 10 years ago, at least in terms of there being hope to kind of fix it.” 

Kathy Sokolic, a colleague of Crossley’s, had a more pessimistic outlook. 

“I just feel like the empathy and all of that is gone for traffic violence,” she said of the public’s attitude. 

Sokolic, a real estate agent by day, leaned into road safety activism in 2016, after a pickup struck and incapacitated her 9-year-old nephew outside his home in Austin. 

“Nobody cares until it happens to them,” she said. 

Sokolic and others fear road deaths have become so common as to become mundane, tragic yet tolerable consequences of getting around. TxDOT estimates crashes killed one person in Texas every two hours and seven minutes in 2024; in the Metroplex, one person died in a crash every ten hours in 2023, according to calculations by NCTCOG. 

Part of the problem, according to Allen, the traffic investigator, is how crashes are often framed. 

Traffic flows south on Interstate 35W at Heritage Trace Parkway on July 5. Two siblings were killed near the underpass in 2015 when an SUV rear-ended a car driven by their father. Amanda McCoy amccoy@star-telegram.com 

“The word ‘accident’ alone automatically biases our opinion of what a traffic crash is,” he said. “Because you say ‘accident,’ what does ‘accident’ imply? No fault. It’s unavoidable. Stuff happens.” 

Nurturing the public empathy and urgency needed to tackle the problem is a Herculean undertaking of its own. 

Political leaders must find it “politically painful” to let the problem fester if things are to change, Peterman said. 

The Star-Telegram asked every sitting Tarrant County representative in the state Legislature for their take on the matter — whether they were aware of the fatality trend, and what they planned to do about it. Only two of 16 legislators replied.

 “The rise in traffic deaths is alarming and deserves the attention of policymakers across Tarrant County,” Rep. Salman Bhojani, D-Euless, wrote in a statement. “One death on the roads is too many, and Texans deserve to feel safe when traveling across the state.” 

Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, agreed. 

“I am aware that traffic fatalities continue to be a grave problem in the Dallas-Fort Worth region,” he wrote. “Every level of our government must continue our work to prevent traffic fatalities.” 

Turner credited officers in Arlington, Mansfield and Grand Prairie with “doing an excellent job enforcing traffic laws in my district and using every resource available to them to keep our communities safe.” 

He also stressed the need to “focus on developing safer roads that address contributing factors to crashes” — better sidewalks, better signals, and, if localities so choose, red light cameras. (Turner was one of 34 House representatives to vote against the 2019 traffic camera ban.) 

Processing grief from road deaths 

Dee and Kevin spent Christmas in 2015 planning funerals for Alexander and Gabriella. 

They’ve spent much of the 10 years since stumbling through a jungle of trauma and rage and confusion and nostalgia and anguish and doubt and countless other indecipherable emotions heaved upon them by the sudden, violent deaths of their children. 

“You feel like you’re amputated, like you’re missing an arm or a leg, or like feeling like there’s an anaconda squeezing you to death and you can’t breathe every day,” Dee said. 

They spent a few months apart the year after the crash. 

“We needed a little bit of space to breathe, because we couldn’t breathe,” Dee said. 

Kevin, for a time, was racked by a sense of parental failure. 

“I was the one driving. It was on my watch; I lost them on my watch,” he said. 

That shame sometimes spiraled into agonizing hypotheticals. 

“What if we got off the freeway? What if we, you know, [took] the back roads home, instead of going on the freeway?” Dee said. “When you start thinking about that, that drives you nuts.” 

But much to the couple’s pride and relief, the crash didn’t pull the family apart. They learned, over time, to live with the loss — to work and play and live without Alexander and Gabriella around. 

“I remember the first time I laughed after the crash,” Dee said. “I remember the first time I laughed, I just felt guilty for laughing. ‘Oh my gosh, my kids aren’t here, and I’m laughing.’” 

Their efforts to move forward have been hamstrung by a lingering feeling of injustice. The driver who killed Gabriella and Alexander entered a plea agreement with prosecutors in January 2018, pleading guilty to criminally negligent homicide in exchange for five years probation. 

Kevin and Dee Estelle, at Capp Smith Park in Watauga in June, lost two of their children in 2015 when an SUV crashed into their car on Interstate 35W. Chris Torres ctorres@star-telegram.com 

Dee recalled having the chance to push for a harsher punishment in court, but she couldn’t muster the will. 

“OK, I’m done. I’m done. I want my children at peace,” she remembered. “And I could hear my children saying, ‘Mom, get over it. Just leave him alone. Just let him go.’” 

The couple also spends time filling in the blanks of two young lives cut short. “Would they be parents? Would they get married? What would they be doing right now?” Dee said. “Every day we think about it, and sometimes we talk about it.” 

But they try, as best they can, to keep the longing and frustration at bay. Dee and Kevin, when recalling the crash and what followed, gushed about their kids. 

Alexander was a talented guitarist, a Ranger fanatic and a prankster. 

“He was the type of person that would just poke at you until you roar at him, and he’d laugh,” Dee said. 

Gabriella, chill yet gregarious, was an aspiring artist. 

“She was just so alive. You just wanted to just sit down and talk to her, squeeze her,” Dee said. 

What blossomed, in time, was a sense of gratitude. 

“It hurts sometimes,” Dee said, “but knowing that we had those memories. ... You know, I was blessed with Gabby for 19 years, and I was blessed with Alex for 23.”