At Least 4 Dead in East Texas Highway Accidents

EAST TEXAS — DPS troopers have been staying all too busy with fatal accidents this holiday weekend. One was reported at 6:20 Sunday morning on SH-155, half a mile north of Tyler. A vehicle driven by Jose T. Navarro-Ortiz, 22, of Spiro, Oklahoma, went off the roadway and struck a tree, ejecting and killing the unrestrained driver. Sunday at 11:07 a.m., Joseph J. Jaggernauth, 29, of Tyler was walking on the shoulder of SH 31, two miles east of Tyler, when he jumped into the path of a passing vehicle. Jaggernauth later died at a local hospital.

18-year-old Ashley Marie Frias of Bullard died in the hospital shortly after an accident Sunday night at 10:15 on FM 344, four miles east of Bullard. Troopers say her vehicle struck a guardrail and traveled into the opposite lane, where it struck another vehicle. A passenger in Frias’s vehicle and the other vehicle’s driver went to the hospital in stable condition. And Sunday night at 9:35, a one-vehicle accident on FM 2054, fourteen miles north of Palestine, claimed the life of Alexandria Elizabeth Crawford, 22, of Tennessee Colony. Troopers say she was ejected after she made a sharp turn to her left, left the roadway at an unsafe speed, overturned, and collided with a fence.