Still waiting: Families, victims await justice for I-35 pileup in 2021

Hinkle further noted that NTE posted “state-of-the-art signage on I-35W not far from the accident site, warning drivers of icy conditions and encouraging them to drive cautiously” and also placed signs warning drivers that cold weather could cause bridges to ice, “giving drivers every reason to slow down and drive responsibly.”

Previously, when the NTSB report was released, Hinkle said in an emailed statement to The News the company had been disappointed and strongly disagreed with certain parts of the report’s conclusion. “Given the extraordinary circumstances,” Hinkle wrote, “we are confident in the actions taken by the company.”

TxDOT Chairman Bruce Bugg did not respond to requests by text and email over a month by The News for comment. TxDOT spokesman Adam Hammons asked The News to provide questions in writing but did not answer them, citing pending litigation. TxDOT also has been sued.

TxDOT did not provide answers to questions about safety lapses related to the crash or its oversight of NTE, only saying it regularly communicated and coordinated on operations with NTE.

Hammons told The News to seek additional relevant information about the crash in the investigatory NTSB report, which was released in March 2023. That final report concluded that NTE contributed to unsafe conditions by failing to address the roadway conditions that led to the crash. NTSB investigators asserted that NTE’s monitoring process was “deficient,” saying that as the conditions deteriorated, personnel didn’t identify the elevated portion of the road where the crash occurred as a stretch needing additional deicing treatment.

After the NTSB report, Texas leaders enacted legislation to allow TxDOT to install variable speed limits signs on roadways. In that same 2023 legislative session, a law also was passed to require comprehensive winter safety training for employees of private toll roads. NTE now requires its crews to undergo training, said state Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Fort Worth, who sponsored the bill.

NTE told the NTSB it has taken a series of actions following the crash, such as beefing up its winter maintenance crews, increasing its salt storage capacity by several hundred tons and installing 18 weather sensors to detect freezing temperatures and icing within the area of the crash site. NTE installed weather sensors, which are visible to the public, but it’s hard to verify other changes. NTE does not share staffing and road monitoring reports with the public. The News asked TxDOT if it required such reports but the agency did not respond.

No winter weather plan

In court filings made public this summer, Christopher Norcross, a Dallas attorney for NTE, acknowledged to the court that no winter maintenance plan had been implemented at the time of the crash.

A final version of such a plan was completed about a year after the crash, he said. “Your Honor, I can’t give you the exact date, but I can tell you that it was subsequent to the incident here.”

Norcross, however, said that even if the winter plan had not been finalized, NTE still took action consistent with what was in a draft version of the plan.

Though the plan is now complete, NTE has refused to disclose it publicly, citing trade secrets. It’s unclear if the plan has been shared with TxDOT, which did not require such a plan.

TxDOT could be seen as “careless,” said Benson Varghese, a Texas attorney with offices in Dallas and Fort Worth whose firm handles similar contracts between state and local governments and private entities throughout the state.

“Finding out there was no winter road plan is really bad,” Varghese said.

In its contract with TxDOT, the private toll road operator, or NTE, should have spelled out explicitly how it was to have managed the roadway during severe weather conditions, said Abdelghany, the SMU environmental and civil engineering professor.

“It’s unfortunate,” Abdelghany said, “that we still see these types of crashes on our highways with all the technologies that we have — very unfortunate.”

The rescue

When she awoke from the impact, Kilbreath had one arm shoved against her face and everything was upside down. Shards of glass were stuck in her scalp, her hair, her skin.

She was stuck in a tin can, helpless.

She wanted to grab an emergency tool she kept in her SUV to cut the seatbelt straps, but she didn’t know where it was. She also didn’t know the bones that held up her spine were shattered.

Beyond the fiery pain in her lower body, she felt sick from the strong smoky smell of airbag contents mixing with air condensation.

But worst of all, she said, was hearing the echo of crashing cars. Another, then another, then another.

She could control neither the noise nor random thoughts. Who else made it out alive? How did she get so lucky?

She told herself she had to pull it together. She had to survive for her son.

“He’s got such a large part of my heart,” Kilbreath said, in the midst of retelling her crash story to The News two months ago alongside her attorney at a Fort Worth legal office. “And we’re extremely close.”

Amid processing those inner thoughts, she saw a man pull himself out of the wreckage of his nearby tractor-trailer. He asked her if she needed help.

“Do you have a pocket knife?” she asked.

He nodded that he did, but he didn’t know where it was. And then he left to find help.

Eventually, first responders arrived and removed her from the SUV. They placed her on a backboard and carried her to a gurney on the side of the road away from the crash. A nurse anesthetist stayed with her and kept a blanket over her to keep her warm and to keep the snow off her face.

While she was being loaded into an ambulance she asked another crash victim if he would contact her son, Jared, then 21.

It wasn’t so much to explain to him what happened but to warn her son, who is a truck driver, about the dangerous conditions.

“You know, I didn’t want him to leave the house.”

First responders struggle to help

The roadway that day not only posed a danger to Kilbreath and other drivers, but those first responders, too.

At least two firefighters fell on their backs while a dozen other first responders slipped while they approached the wreckage, paramedic Trey McDaniel told The News. Ken Mouton, a Fort Worth police officer, injured his shoulder on the toll road and had to be taken to the hospital. Mouton was injured while trying to climb over a concrete barrier of the toll road.

After 36 consecutive hours of below-freezing temperatures, the toll road had become engulfed in ice.

Richard Camacho, a 19-year veteran of the Fort Worth Police Department who arrived to check on Mouton, described it “like being on an ice rink.”

Another difficulty first responders faced was the toll road’s design — specifically, trying to move patients and large and heavy emergency equipment in and out of the tight enclosure between the 42-inch high concrete barrier.

“It’s a very challenging environment for emergency response,” said Stephen P. Mattingly, University of Texas at Arlington professor of civil engineering and associate director of research for the Center for Transportation, Equity, Decisions and Dollars.

The toll road’s features provide little to no escape for vehicles trying to avoid a crash, he said. In perfect weather, he said, a fuel truck could have a blowout and block the lanes, causing another chain-reaction crash behind it. That could lead to a very dangerous explosion that could involve many deaths.

“So” he said, “we’ve got another similar catastrophic type of condition that we’re not proactively managing.”

Mattingly goes as far as to suggest safety restrictions on the types of vehicles that can travel the road to try to prevent what he called “an even more catastrophic event that could happen during perfect weather.”

The weather leading up to the crash was anything but perfect.

Two days before the crash, NTE crews had applied saltwater to the road to prevent ice and snow. While the saltwater application was a first step in preventing the formation of ice, it wasn’t enough to ensure safety over a long period, especially after so many hours of freezing temperatures, said Dan Walsh, senior highway accident investigator for the NTSB who spoke to The News about his team’s findings of the crash.

Crews should have applied a second treatment after consecutive hours of freezing temperatures and continuing weather reports of worsening conditions.

“They did not identify the area of the multi-vehicle crash needing salt, which it did,’’ Walsh told The News.

In separate interviews roughly two months after the crash, several NTE maintenance technicians and supervisors couldn’t tell Walsh and members of his NTSB team how long saltwater was expected to last before it would need another application, according to their testimony to the NTSB.

When asked, one technician told the NTSB, “I couldn’t answer that question. I would say I couldn’t answer that question.”

Federal and state guidelines for effective snow and ice control on roads indicate that pretreatments applied before the onset of a winter weather event must be followed by subsequent chemical treatments when conditions deteriorate, according to the NTSB.

Had they followed best practices, NTSB investigators told The News, NTE supervisors would have known to apply a subsequent application to the road ahead of the day the crash occurred.

Firefighters eventually dropped salt and sandbags on the ground to avoid falling on the ice when trying to extricate those trapped in their cars.

Kilbreath was one of those. But she believes she never should have been. And she is angry that NTE did not take measures to protect her and other drivers that day.

She suspects she knows why: money.

“You realize that you’re just a dollar and you’re contributing to tolls,” she said, “and they don’t care about your well-being or if you get home to your family.”

The victim-turned-rescuer

Kilbreath never knew which responder brought the backboard to help free her from her Hyundai. It might have been Trey McDaniel.

McDaniel is a paramedic with Medstar Mobile Healthcare. But on this day he also was a crash victim — snarled in the chain-reaction collision on his way to work.

It’s not clear but McDaniel and Kilbreath likely crashed simultaneously and could have very well been hit by the same 18-wheeler. After high impact, his Toyota FJ Cruiser was not far from Kilbreath’s Hyundai, While her Hyundai was found between the trailers of two 18-wheelers, his pickup flipped over and landed wheels down.

“I somewhat remember flying through the air, but it was so fast,” he said. “It was so fast. I had no idea I was airborne. I knew I got crushed. I didn’t know I went upside down. I didn’t know I landed on the other side, but everything was a commotion for what I felt, you know, maybe five seconds.”

But, in his retelling of how he survived the crash to The News, he said nothing, not even his years as a paramedic, prepared him for the screams.

“You know, knowing somebody is in excruciating pain or somebody that’s walking the line of death right now and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

McDaniel couldn’t tell but he had suffered a concussion and his nose was bleeding. He was cold and light-headed as if the blood in his body was leaving his arms and legs. The paramedic in him pushed him to do his job. He crawled out of the front window of his truck, shaking his right foot that was wedged underneath the brake pedal.

He called his supervisor to let her know he would not be at work that day. “But I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Then he began to help his co-workers, who had arrived on the scene to carry the injured on stretchers and load them into ambulances.

He recalled bringing a backboard to help a woman who was trapped in her vehicle. It might have been Kilbreath.

Questionable decisions

The decisions that led to the catastrophic crash happened well before the first car slid into a concrete barrier.

On Monday, three days before the crash, the National Weather Service issued its first winter weather alert, warning a severe cold front was poised to strike North Texas the following day. Temperatures were expected to fall below freezing.

NTE responded by placing salt on the toll road Tuesday morning. That evening, temperatures plummeted into the low 20s and remained below freezing up until the time of the crash — more than 30 hours later.

On Wednesday, the day before the crash, TxDOT held an all-hands conference call with toll operators, including NTE, to coordinate response to the storm. On that call, a TxDOT official made clear that the purpose of the meeting was to be “on the same page” with the response approach but not tell toll operators “what to do.”

State toll road operators, such as the Plano-based North Texas Tollway Authority, told The News it prioritizes its treatment of elevated surfaces and overpasses by initially focusing on dispatching its large plow and sanding trucks along pre-planned routes where those exist. Romero’s subsequent state law now requires this for all private toll operators.

At the time, however, NTE did not prioritize elevated surfaces and overpasses, relying instead on spot checks at that time. The NTSB report specifically called out NTE for not treating the road in the area of the crash in the hours before the pile up.

NTE officials, however, did make a staffing decision — one that later proved to only exacerbate the calamity to come.

Hours after the TxDOT conference call, at about 10 p.m. on the night before the crash, NTE officials decided to change the shift times for its maintenance crews. Instead of the typical 3 a.m. shift change, it would be 6 a.m. The reason is not disclosed in any of the records reviewed by The News.

The deadly chain-reaction pileup was not the only crash in the early morning hours of Thursday, Feb. 11 on NTE’s toll road. There were, in fact, plenty of warnings that the road wasn’t safe.

At 3 a.m, a black Hyundai Elantra spun out of control on an icy bridge 5 miles north of the site of the later pileup. That prompted NTE maintenance workers to spot treat that section of the roadway. But only that section, according to the NTSB.

At 4:43 a.m., NTE treated another spot section after a second crash had been reported 1.5 miles south of the larger crash site. But, again, the elevated area of roadway where the fatal crash would soon happen was not treated — even after it was inspected by at least two NTE maintenance supervisors, according to the NTSB.

That inspection took place after an NTE maintenance tech, at around 4 a.m., reported a downpour amid the freezing temperatures, a condition that leads to the formation of black ice.

“They came out and inspected it,” the tech told federal investigators. Their conclusion, he told investigators, was that the area “did not need any salt.”

Aarron Robledo, a reserve police officer at the time who monitored cameras in the NTE traffic control room that morning, told plaintiffs’ attorneys he believed top NTE officials disregarded the situation.

“I believe that they just disregarded, slept through the night,” he said, “and thought it was going to be a normal workday the following day.”

In the hours before the crash, an off-duty NTE manager was tasked with monitoring weather conditions and immediately reporting incidents of snow and ice to NTE headquarters. She did so, records show, as she “occasionally rolled over in bed that night from her sleep to glance at whatever weather might be displayed on the local TV channel.”

The NTSB report and statements made in lawsuits point to other potential issues that could help explain why NTE might have failed to recognize the severity of the situation.

The NTSB criticized NTE for not investing in basic technology used by the industry for over a decade to monitor snow and ice. That would include weather sensors that measure pavement temperature and surface conditions that contribute to black ice. A weather sensor can cost up to $100,000.

Related: A look at Texas private toll roads

Instead, NTE crews used devices, such as a single $20 laser thermometer gun, to try to monitor moisture in the air. To check for ice on the road, they slammed on the brakes of their trucks.

“There wasn’t any training,” an NTE maintenance technician told federal investigators. “They basically just tell us to drive and stop and if we skid, you know, that’s pretty much it.”

To compound matters, in the minutes before the chain reaction catastrophe, NTE maintenance workers were in the middle of that new shift change.

Employees on the night shift had wrapped up operations on the road at 5:30 a.m. and started their close-out process in the NTE shop. Because the day shift did not arrive until 6 a.m., and it took them 30 minutes to check in, be briefed and inspect their equipment.

As such, no maintenance crews were on the roadway at 6 a.m. when a car in the southbound toll lanes slid on that elevated part of the roadway near the Northside Drive exit and struck the concrete barrier on the right side of the toll lanes.

The crash’s toll

Over approximately the next 24 minutes, cars, SUVs, pickups, big rigs and other vehicles slammed into the back of each other in a series of accidents that stretch 1,110 feet and ultimately involved 130 vehicles.

Six people — Christopher Ray Vardy, 49, Tiffany Louann Gerred, 34, Aaron Luke Watson, 45, Michael Henry Wells, 47, William Darrell Williams, 54, Tamara Mendoza, 46 — were killed. An additional 14 people suffered incapacitating injuries, while 66 more were hurt before maintenance crews could make it onto the road.

Mendoza, a reconstructive cosmetic surgeon who moved to the U.S. from Venezuela for a better life, died when she got out of her disabled car and was struck by another car as she tried to help others involved in the pile up. She left behind an adult daughter.

Watson, a local Jason’s Deli owner, left behind a wife, an 18-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. He also was struck and killed after exiting his car.

Gerred, a Tarrant County family court clerk, was killed when an 18-wheeler violently rear-ended her gray Honda Accord with such force that it drove over the top of her vehicle, tearing off its roof. She left behind an 11-year-old daughter.

Wells, who was a master plumber, was killed by the same 18-wheeler when it ran over and crushed his white Ford F-35. He left behind his wife of 26 years, and two adult daughters.

Vardy, an administrator for a Fort Worth aerospace contractor and the father of two adult sons and husband of a local school administrator, died in a cluster of vehicles.

Williams, an employee at a Fort Worth door repair company who loved to travel all over the world, was killed in that same cluster.

Also in that cluster — within feet of Vardy and Williams — was Kilbreath.

Three years after the crash, she still wonders why her life was spared.

“I am perplexed by that on a daily basis,” Kilbreath said. “What made it different that I survived? Especially when people tell you, ‘God, you shouldn’t have survived.’ "

Robledo, the reserve police officer who monitored NTE cameras at the time of the crash, watched the deaths pile up. He was the solitary employee assigned to monitor cameras in the NTE traffic control room that night.

“I’ve seen murders,” said Robledo, who left NTE a few months after the crash and is now a police officer for the Newman Department of Public Safety. “I’ve seen school shootings, I’ve seen major accidents. This is — I’ve seen suicides; this has been the biggest that I’ve ever seen.”

Robledo also is among those who believe it was avoidable. It never should have happened, he said.

A Code Red, the most severe weather alert, was never activated before the crash, Robledo said, but it should have been at the moment when NTE heard about worsening conditions from the weather service.

Curiously, a Code Orange, a step below a Code Red, which would have nonetheless initiated an “all hands on deck” response, was issued at 8:31 p.m. the previous night but rescinded 36 minutes later, records show.

Multiple NTE employees said in oral and videotaped depositions taken over the last year and reviewed by The News that they did the best they could to keep the roads safe.

Each was asked by a plaintiffs’ lawyer to grade his or her performance on the night of the crash as if they were grading papers on an A to F scale.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” said Jonathan Torres, a maintenance tech. “Grade myself on how to find ice? I can’t grade that. I don’t know. I mean, I would look for it, look for moisture. But how am I going to grade myself if I’m a professional? I don’t know how to answer your question. I …”

John Burkhead, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, pressed Torres further.

“Do you think you did an A+ job that night?”

Torres replied: “Like I answered before, to the best of our abilities, I feel like we did our job to the best way we could — were told to do.”

Lawsuit seeks accountability

Kilbreath is among the dozens of plaintiffs who are part of the consolidated lawsuit against NTE and various other defendants. It is a protracted legal battle — one that Kilbreath sees as a strategic effort by the defendants to blame the victims.

Kilbreath’s oral and videotaped deposition was June 21, three years, four months and 10 days after the crash.

A Fort Worth lawyer for the NTE defendants asked questions about her driving record, including a speeding ticket and a minor accident in a parking lot that was not her fault, and whether she noticed the freeze warning indicator on the panel of her 2018 Black Hyundai Santa Fe that indicated the potential for weather hazards, including ice and snow.

“They won’t take responsibility. The way his representation was, it was all on you. We don’t have any culpability. How do you not? You didn’t do anything. You have every bit of culpability here.”

The lawyer also asked questions about one of her medications and suggested it could have caused her to fall asleep at the wheel and lose control of her car. Kilbreath said at no point during her drive did she fall asleep at the wheel.

For three months after the crash, she had to shuffle her left foot and drag her right foot for 30 minutes before she could make it to the bathroom. Even after months of physical therapy to address the broken bones at the base of her spine and terminal nerve damage, she still cannot sit on a flat surface. She can’t ride a bicycle.

She had to find work in Irving after she was let go from her job because she was absent for more than 30 days while recovering from the crash.

She now drives a Nissan Titan XD diesel and — has anxiety every time she gets on any road.

She purposely avoids toll roads.

She also may never get a chance to tell a judge and jury her story because the consolidated lawsuit might very well be settled out of court. If so, the court and plaintiffs will likely be asked to sign non-disclosure agreements that prohibit them from speaking, said Wade Barrow, the Fort Worth attorney who is representing Kilbreath.

When that is done, Barrow said, it will likely be the last word anyone hears about the deadliest crash in Texas’ history.

Justice, if any, Barrow said, will have to come from any settlement payments that are provided to those affected by the crash. Such settlements would be paid primarily by NTE and drivers’ auto insurance.

Because it is a governmental agency that is protected by law, TxDOT is “largely immune from suit,” Barrow said. That means, he said, “if TxDOT is not in compliance with its own contract and that causes death and injuries to citizens, what is the mechanism for holding TxDOT accountable for that? I think the answer to that is nothing.

“It’s going to be surprising to folks (to learn) that in one of the greatest traffic disasters in Texas history, not one person at TxDOT has any accountability for that.”

For Kilbreath, accountability would mean victims are compensated but she also would like an admission and some form of contrition, maybe even an apology — NTE and TxDOT publicly owning up to its actions.

Most importantly, it would mean further action is taken to ensure that nothing like what happened on that bone cold February Fort Worth morning, where six people lost their lives, ever happens again.