North Richland Hills, TX — November 28, 2024, Clementine Manishimwe was killed and a man was injured in a wrong-way car accident at about 2:15 a.m. along NE Loop 820.
According to authorities, a motor vehicle was traveling westbound in the eastbound lanes of Northeast Loop 820 in the vicinity of the Holiday Lane overpass when the accident took place.
Officials indicate that this resulted in a head-on collision with an eastbound vehicle. Tarrant county officials say the driver of the eastbound vehicle was 21-year-old Clementine Manishimwe. Clementine Manishimwe died due to the accident. The reported wrong-way driver, a 45-year-old man, sustained critical injuries.
Additional details pertaining to this incident—including the identities of those involved—are not available at this point in time. The investigation is currently ongoing.
Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman
To be clear up front, exact circumstances about this accident are still unconfirmed. However, wrong-way collisions almost always happen due to alcohol. Maybe this crash will be that unusual exception, but if evidence instead shows that the wrong-way driver here was indeed drunk, these should obviously be appropriate consequences. What folks generally don’t know, however, is that there’s often an accomplice who should be included in that: a negligent alcohol provider.
The amount of alcohol that it usually takes for someone to get on the wrong side of a divided highway is quite extreme. Simply put, I’ve handled hundreds of cases involving drunk drivers who were unlawfully over-served by an alcohol provider so egregiously that they wouldn’t have known right from left. As such, especially just after 2:00 a.m., it wouldn’t be at all surprising for a wrong-way driver involved in a crash like this to have been coming from a bar that broke the law and contributed to the crash. That could then expose them to potential criminal investigations, fines, suspended licenses, or liability for harm resulting from that intoxication.
The concern, though, is authorities rarely investigate drunk driving accidents beyond the the crash scene. They just charge the drunk drivers and move on. The hundreds of families I’ve worked with weren’t out to find some bad guy to blame. They wanted accountability. If all of the focus is on the driver, and it turns out there was a complicit alcohol provider that authorities overlooked, that establishment could just continue being reckless until some other dangerously intoxicated patron goes up an exit ramp and gets someone else killed. That’s why it’s important to ask in these situations: What steps are investigators taking to retrace the wrong-way drivers steps, and are they making an effort to ensure all wrongdoers involved here will answer for their actions?
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