We Recovered $15,000,000 in a Wrongful Death Settlement for the Family of a Tradesman Killed When a Truck Driver Fell Asleep on I-45 Near Palmer

On His Way to Work, Before Dawn

We put that morning back together from three records: the officer’s narrative, the field diagram on the same page, and TxDOT’s camera images of the scene. It was 4:19 on a Saturday, raining, and dark on a stretch of I-45 with no street lights. A loaded tractor trailer was heading north in lane 3, the outside lane, near reference marker 258 in Palmer. He was on the same stretch of highway behind it, headed to work.

The narrative on page 2 opens with these five sentences, copied exactly:

Unit 1 is the truck tractor and Unit 2 the trailer it pulled. The rig lay on its side with its underside facing northbound traffic, leaving little for an approaching driver to see in the dark. In lane 2, his SUV struck the overturned truck and trailer, and the collision killed him. Out of respect for his family, the rest of the narrative stays off this page.

Police were notified through dispatch at 4:19, and an officer arrived at 4:23. The report lists the roadway as cleared at 2:00 p.m., nearly ten hours after the crash. For everyone else on I-45, that Saturday meant a closed interstate and a long detour. For his family, it was the morning they lost him.

What the Police Report Told Us

We ordered the certified copy, and TxDOT’s records custodian signed it on December 20, 2024, thirteen days after the crash. Across four pages it covers three units. These are the report fields that mattered most in this case; our crash report decoder explains the others.

The meanings come from TxDOT’s CR-100 instruction manual, the guide officers fill the form from. The report itself is below, with names and identifying details blacked out, along with the part of the narrative that describes what happened to him after the second impact. That part belongs to his family, not to a website.

Who Was Responsible, and Why

The officer’s findings, the safety rules that applied to the truck and the evidence we developed gave the family claims that reached past the driver to the trucking company itself.

Transportation Code § 545.060 requires a driver on a road with marked lanes to keep to a single lane as nearly as practical, and to leave it only when the move can be made safely. The officer’s narrative puts the truck across every lane and into the median, the kind of departure this rule is written to prevent.

Because the report codes the truck as running in interstate commerce, federal motor carrier rules governed it too; 49 C.F.R. § 390.3 makes them apply to every employer, employee and commercial vehicle moving property in interstate commerce. One of them, 49 C.F.R. § 392.3, forbids driving a commercial vehicle while the driver’s alertness is “so impaired, or so likely to become impaired, through fatigue” that driving is unsafe. The same rule says a motor carrier shall not require or permit it.

The claims did not stop with the driver. Under Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 71.002, a person is liable for a death caused by “the person’s or his agent’s or servant’s wrongful act, neglect, carelessness, unskillfulness, or default,” and the driver was on the job for the trucking company at the time. How a fatigue case gets proved, from the report’s factor code to the electronic logs, is laid out in our guide to drowsy driving crashes.

How Often One Crash Leads to Another

For this page, we went to the state’s own crash records. The officer marked this crash as secondary, meaning it grew out of the rollover before it; under TxDOT’s instructions, that box covers a crash caused by an earlier crash or traffic incident, inside the scene or in the traffic backed up on either side of it (CR-100 manual, section 3.2.10.13). The box first appeared on the April 1, 2023 version of the CR-3 form, the version used for this report. Because CRIS, TxDOT’s crash records database, records the field only from that version forward, secondary crash counts are not available for earlier years.

We pulled these counts from CRIS on October 4, 2026. In 2024, the first full year with the box, Texas officers marked 8,311 reportable crashes as secondary, 112 of them fatal; in 2025 the counts were 7,670 and 94. A crash with several vehicles is still one crash in these counts, the county and highway are the ones CRIS assigns, and contributing factors are the investigating officer’s opinion.

On I-45 in Ellis County, CRIS lists two fatal secondary crashes in 2024, and this was one of them. It was also the only crash on that stretch that year where officers coded a commercial vehicle crash with factor 40, the fatigue code; statewide in 2024, that code appeared in 563 crashes where a commercial motor vehicle was involved, 13 of them fatal. Our Texas crash severity index compares serious crash rates across 42 crash categories.

What His Family Could Claim

He left behind his wife, his mother and three children, all of them minors. No statute can measure what they lost. What Texas law does is give a death two separate claims. The wrongful death claim was theirs; Texas reserves it for a person’s spouse, children and parents (§ 71.004). The survival claim is the estate’s, carrying forward the claim he would have had himself, his funeral and burial costs among it (§ 71.021). This case had both.

Whether an estate has to be opened is one of the first questions we answer for a family, and we explain the options before anyone starts a probate case they may not need. Our wrongful death lawyers page covers who may bring each claim.

How Matthew Graham Built and Litigated the Case

His family’s part was to tell us what only they knew. Everything else was ours: the investigation, the records, the filings, the negotiations and every conversation with the other side.

Lead attorneyMatthew Graham, Managing Litigation Attorney

Before he represented injured people, Matthew spent more than ten years trying cases for insurance companies across the Southwest, then oversaw the subrogation lawsuits of the nation’s number two auto insurer across ten states. Today he runs our litigation department and takes on the trucking cases where an insurer is most inclined to fight. Read Matthew’s profile

That background shaped how he built this file. An insurer weighing a death case looks at how clear the fault is, how far responsibility reaches beyond the driver, and what the losses are worth against the coverage behind the truck. Matthew built the case to answer each of those from the records.

The first call

On a call about a death, our intake team lets the family set the pace, at any hour and in English or Spanish. The questions wait until they are ready: the date and the highway, the police agency that responded, and who survived him. That is how a file like his gets opened.

Locking down the evidence

A trucking company starts guarding its own records the day of a crash, so the first thing we send on a truck case is a preservation letter covering the truck, the trailer, its electronic data, its dash camera video and the driver’s logs. On a fatigue case like this one, it goes out the same day we are hired.

One case manager

Every family we represent gets one case manager, an update at least every two weeks and a direct line for everything in between. On this file, the case manager built the record both claims would stand on: the certified report, those camera images, and the records of his work and pay that showed what he earned in his trade.

Fault, and how far it reached

Matthew started with the proof of fault. The officer coded the truck driver’s contributing factor as fatigued or asleep, and video from the truck’s own dash camera showed the driver asleep at the wheel. Because he was on a run for his employer when it happened, the claims reached the company as well as the driver, under the state and federal rules that governed the truck.

The gross negligence claim

Matthew also pressed a claim for gross negligence. After the rig hit the cable barrier, the driver steered back toward the highway instead of stopping in the median. Texas defines gross negligence as conduct carrying an extreme degree of risk by someone who knows the risk and goes ahead with “conscious indifference to the rights, safety, or welfare of others” (§ 41.001), and Matthew argued that choice met it. He expected discovery to show the driver had started his shift already fatigued. When gross negligence causes a death, § 71.009 allows exemplary damages on top of actual damages, and that possibility changes how an insurer has to value a case.

Measuring what his family lost

To measure the loss, Matthew retained an economist, who calculated the earnings the tradesman would have brought home over the rest of his working life. He also traced every policy behind the truck, including the excess coverage stacked over the primary one, because the claims could only be paid from the insurance that was actually there. What layers like these mean for a claim is covered on our page about truck accident case values in Texas. Through all of it, Matthew answered the family’s questions himself.

A Stowers demand, and the lawsuit

Our founder, Josh Alexander, writes that he will not let a first explanation, a first report or a first offer decide a case. In the spring of 2025, Matthew laid both claims, and the proof behind them, in front of the trucking company’s lawyers as a Stowers demand: an offer to settle everything for an amount inside the company’s combined primary and excess insurance, open for a set time. Texas law makes that kind of offer hard to ignore, because an insurer that unreasonably turns down a reasonable demand within its limits risks paying a judgment above them; our guide to Stowers demands explains the rule. The demand did not resolve the case. Matthew kept pressing both claims in the lawsuit, and the case settled before trial.

As on every case here, we advanced the costs as the work happened, from expert fees to court filings, so his family paid nothing along the way. Our job was to carry the legal work, so they would not have to carry that too.

$15,000,000 for His Family and Estate

The $15,000,000 is a gross amount; the firm’s fee and case expenses are deducted before the family’s share is paid. No recovery can make up for a death. Each result depends on the facts, the proof and the insurance behind it, and this one does not guarantee or predict the outcome of any other case.

Attorney Review

Case handled by: Matthew Graham, Managing Litigation Attorney

Licensed in Texas since 2000

Reviewed by: Josh Alexander, Founder and Managing Attorney

Published and reviewed on October 4, 2026

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