Temple, TX — Abigail Boatwright and a teenager died and one person was injured in a crash on Highway 36, near Temple, when the vehicle they were riding in was struck by cargo that came off of a commercial vehicle.

According to news reports, shortly after 11 a.m., an accident occurred on Highway 36, near the intersection of Highway 317. Details are unclear, but at the time of the crash, a commercial vehicle was transporting a 350,000 lb. load which came loose from its trailers. The load impacted another vehicle, pinning the vehicle's driver inside.

Over the course of several hours, authorities extracted the driver from their vehicle. First-responders then life-flighted the injured person to a nearby hospital where they arrived in critical condition. Two other occupants in the vehicle died as a result of the accident. They were identified as 22-year-old Abigail Boatwright and a 17-year-old boy from Gatesville.

At this time, authorities have not released the names of the victims, but they've requested that any witnesses reach out to them with any information relating to the crash.

Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman

Obviously, when an accident occurs where cargo either load-shifts or falls off of a trailer, that raises several important legal questions, such as:

• How did it happen?
• Who loaded the cargo?
• Did any tie straps or restraints fail?
• Did a collision cause the cargo to fall, or did the cargo falling cause the collision?
• Could anything have been done to prevent this?

Most people would be surprised at how these incidents play out in the courtroom. The general public tends to think of truck accident cases as victims vs. the truck driver, but there are usually a lot more moving parts.

For example, I had an improperly loaded cargo case that I tried a few years back, and a lot of people were held responsible, not just one.

That case involved a flatbed trailer that was loaded with a piece of steel that was approximately 40' long, 8' wide, and about an inch thick. 8' of that steel hung off the back of the flatbed. In other words, some combination of careless people loaded what turned out to be a gigantic guillotine to the back of a truck and then sent it down the highway. It will never cease to amaze me that so many people participated in that foolishness, yet no one spoke up and said, "Hey, this is a terrible idea."

When the truck driver in that case ran a stop sign at night, the innocent motorist he cut off swerved to avoid hitting the reckless trucker. Though he had cleared the trailer, he drove straight into the piece of steel hanging off the back. The trailer had lights, the piece of steel did not. The poor motorist was doomed. They didn't just fail him by violating his right of way, they didn't bother to adequately light the cargo so that the motorist could avoid hitting it.

Naturally, we sued the trucker and a jury agreed that he was to blame—but he wasn't the only one the jury found at fault. There was also a company that planned the route, a company who loaded the trailer (even though it was the wrong trailer for the job), and the company who the driver worked for.

In short, a lot of people/companies put their heads together to make that catastrophe become a reality. And their collective negligence cost a woman her husband and three children their father.

I suspect that a similar combination of bad acts led to the fatal accident in Temple that killed two victims and injured a third. When the curtain is pulled back, it will likely reveal that there was no one person who made a single, critical mistake; rather, it's likely, a series of bad decisions were made, resulting in this wreck.

Now, I'm not claiming to have special knowledge about this accident, nor do I know who is to blame. Indeed, the only way anyone can know who is to blame is if they've launched an independent investigation and analyzed the results. But I've seen and litigated enough similar truck accidents to know that this will be a hard-fought case. I hope the people affected by this find the justice they deserve.