Almost every crash this strand writes about turns on a second or two when the driver was not there. The car kept going straight at highway speed and no one was steering it, because the person behind the wheel was looking at a screen in their hand. Texas just counted a year of those seconds. And the law does something with the phone that most people never think about: the same device that caused the crash is the only honest witness to it, and it begins erasing itself the moment the cars stop.
The count. TxDOT’s figures for 2025: distracted driving was a factor in 86,384 crashes on Texas roads, 299 of them fatal, with more than 2,437 people seriously injured. Nationally, the federal safety agency counted 3,208 people killed in crashes involving a distracted driver in 2024, and an estimated 315,000 more injured; only about one fatal distraction crash in seven was recorded as involving a phone. Those are the crashes where someone admitted to the distraction or a record later proved it, because looking away leaves no skid mark. The true number is almost certainly higher.
What the pattern says. The danger was never really the phone. It is the eyes, and behind the eyes the attention. A driver reading a message at freeway speed travels the length of a football field in the time the glance takes, and the mind does the rest, because eyes pointed at the road can still fail to see what is on it, which is what Looking Not Seeing is about. A distracted-driving crash is not caused by a reckless driver so much as an absent one. For two seconds the car had no one in it, and two seconds is the whole crash.
What the law does with it. Since September 1, 2017, it has been illegal in Texas to read, write, or send an electronic message while driving, unless the vehicle is stopped (Transportation Code Section 545.4251). A driver who broke that law and caused the wreck can hand the case a breach the jury does not have to build from scratch, which is the whole of Negligence Per Se. But the harder fight is proof, and it is a race. The phone that caused the crash is also the record of it: the timestamps, the app that was open, the seconds a thumb was moving instead of a foot. That record does not keep itself. Phones sync and overwrite, and the companies that carry the messages keep their records only as long as their own retention schedules say. Under Texas law a party who knows, or reasonably should know, that there is a substantial chance a claim will be filed has a duty to preserve the evidence that matters to it; the judge, not the jury, decides whether that duty was broken; and where the evidence was destroyed on purpose, the jury can be told to hold the loss against the side that let it disappear (Brookshire Brothers v. Aldridge). So the first real move in a distracted-driving case is often not about the crash at all. It is a letter that says, in as many words, do not erase the phone, which is what Spoliation is about, and why the car accidents page and its Before You Call companion start there.
No one is named here, and nothing on this page decides a particular crash. A dispatch keeps the record of what the numbers say about Texas roads this week, next to the pages that explain why the device that looked away is the same one the law has to reach out and make remember.
Dispatch is the Night Docket’s news strand: what happened on Texas roads and in Texas courts, reported from credible outlets and agency releases, with no names and no conclusions about open investigations, then connected to the entries that explain the science and the law. General information, not legal advice.
