Monongalia County, WV — January 20, 2026, one person was killed in a car accident at about 8 a.m. on Interstate 79 south of Morgantown.

Authorities said a northbound 2015 GMC Terrain crashed into an excavator parked in a staging area south of Goshen Road.

One person, whose name has not been made public yet, died in the crash, according to authorities.

Authorities have not released any additional information about the Monongalia County crash at this time.

Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman

When someone loses their life on the road, the instinct is to look for immediate answers, but real understanding rarely comes that quickly. Serious crashes demand more than surface-level conclusions. They call for a closer look at what was missed, what went wrong and what might have been preventable.

Did the authorities thoroughly investigate the crash? When a vehicle leaves its lane and strikes a stationary object, the immediate concern is whether the crash was truly random or the result of a missed signal along the way. It’s not clear yet what kind of analysis took place here, but this is exactly the type of crash that deserves detailed work: scene measurements, reconstruction of the vehicle’s movements and a close review of the driver’s behavior leading up to the impact. Depending on the resources and training of the local investigators, that level of scrutiny isn’t always guaranteed.

Has anyone looked into the possibility that a vehicle defect caused the crash? This GMC Terrain is over a decade old; long enough for unseen mechanical issues to emerge. If steering locked up, brakes gave out or any onboard system failed, that could shift the narrative entirely. With a crash like this, where the vehicle hit an object in a location it shouldn’t have, a mechanical inspection is essential. Unfortunately, unless someone pushes for it, that kind of deep dive doesn’t always happen.

Has all the electronic data relating to the crash been collected? Today’s vehicles carry critical data: how fast the car was going, whether the driver hit the brakes, even whether a distraction might have played a role. It's unclear whether investigators pulled that information here, but it can be the key to understanding whether this was a lapse in attention, a sudden emergency or something else entirely. Add in potential GPS traces and nearby camera footage, and there’s a lot of context that could help clarify what led to such a deadly outcome.

Digging deeper into these moments isn’t about blame; it’s about learning what truly happened. Only by asking the right questions can anyone begin to understand why a seemingly ordinary morning turned fatal.

Key Takeaways:

• Not all crash investigations include full reconstructions or data reviews.
• Vehicle defects aren’t always visible. Mechanical checks are crucial.
• Electronic data can reveal what happened in the seconds before a crash.