A woman was struck and killed by a minivan late Monday night while trying to cross eastbound Interstate 20 near Wheatland Road in the Red Bird area of Dallas, police say. Officers responding to a crash call just before midnight found the adult woman down in the roadway, and Dallas Fire-Rescue personnel pronounced her dead at the scene. Her identity has not been released.
According to FOX 4 News Dallas-Fort Worth, the Dallas Police Department received the crash call at 11:53 p.m. Monday. The driver of the minivan, who was heading east on I-20, remained at the scene and told police he was unable to avoid the woman, who was in the middle of the roadway when he encountered her. No criminal charges are expected against him.
Investigators are treating the crash as an accident, and their preliminary investigation attributes it to pedestrian error, per the same report. That framing lines up with Texas law: under Texas Transportation Code § 552.005, a pedestrian crossing outside a marked or unmarked crosswalk at an intersection must yield the right-of-way to vehicles. Separately, state and local authorities are permitted under Texas Transportation Code § 545.065 to bar pedestrians from controlled-access highways like interstates altogether.
A Corridor Familiar to First Responders
The I-20 and Wheatland Road interchange sits near a major commercial and freight hub in southern Dallas’s Red Bird neighborhood, an arterial junction where law enforcement has long fielded high-speed traffic calls, as previously reported by WFAA. It is not the first fatal pedestrian crash Hoodline has covered on this same stretch of freeway; in mid-August, a pedestrian was killed on I-20 near I-35E during a dawn crash in Dallas County…