A 65-year-old Brookeland man died Tuesday afternoon after his Ford Focus turned into the path of a northbound box truck on U.S. Highway 69 just south of Huntington, according to officers on the scene. James Hennington was critically injured in the crash and later pronounced dead at a hospital in Lufkin.
The wreck happened shortly before 2 p.m. near Farm to Market Road 1669, according to KJAS.com. Hennington was driving his 2007 Ford Focus southbound on Highway 69 when he attempted to turn off the highway into a driveway, putting him in the path of a Freightliner box truck heading north. The Texas Department of Public Safety reported that the Brookeland man died in the two-vehicle accident.
The Freightliner was driven by 32-year-old Robert Johnson of Beaumont, who was not injured in the crash. His passenger, 34-year-old Freddie Zenn, also of Beaumont, sustained non-life-threatening injuries and was transported to Lufkin Memorial Hospital, per the report. The Huntington Police Department provided the photo from the accident scene.
A Legal Duty To Yield Before Turning
Under Texas Transportation Code § 545.152, a driver turning left across oncoming traffic — including into a driveway or private road — must yield the right-of-way to any approaching vehicle close enough to pose an immediate hazard, according to FindLaw. The law places the legal burden squarely on the turning vehicle, not the oncoming one. Texas law generally treats a simple failure to yield during a left turn as a Class C misdemeanor traffic violation, unless investigators uncover evidence of intoxication or gross criminal negligence, according to the Hill Law Firm.
Left-turn failures are far from rare on Texas roads. TxDOT data cited by Miller Weisbrod Olesky shows that failing to yield when turning left was among the state's top crash-contributing factors, tied to 36,744 accidents statewide in 2023. Traffic studies referenced in that data point to drivers routinely misjudging the speed or distance of oncoming vehicles when crossing travel lanes to turn.
State Investigation And Reporting Timeline
Texas law requires investigating officers to file an official Peace Officer's Crash Report, known as a CR-3, with the Texas Department of Transportation within 10 days of any collision resulting in injury or death. That report, once filed, will contain the officer's narrative and any preliminary determinations about speed, visibility, and contributing factors in Tuesday's crash.
A Corridor With A History Of Close Calls
This is not the first serious crash in the immediate Huntington area this summer. Less than three weeks earlier, in July, a multi-vehicle accident occurred in Huntington when a southbound driver crossed into northbound lanes and struck a parked vehicle, a wreck Hoodline covered in its report on a parked Bronco that may have saved a child. And just days before Hennington's crash, a 59-year-old Lufkin man was killed on August 17 in a single-vehicle wreck on Highway 69 near Rusk after his vehicle left the roadway and struck a tree.
TxDOT is separately developing a safety project along US 69 in Angelina County south of Lufkin that would add a 16-foot continuous two-way left-turn lane and 10-foot shoulders specifically to reduce turning conflict points like the one in Tuesday's crash. That plan follows an earlier $68 million expansion project the agency broke ground on in July 2018 to widen the highway and improve intersections between Huntington and Zavalla.
Statewide, traffic fatalities in Texas fell to 3,809 in 2025, an 8 percent drop from the prior year and a continuation of a downward trend since a peak in 2021, according to Angel Reyes & Associates. Even so, TxDOT crash statistics from 2024 show passenger cars were involved in 775 fatal rural crashes statewide, with commercial freight trucks and tractor-trailers involved in hundreds more — a mismatch that often proves fatal for occupants of smaller vehicles in collisions with larger trucks.
