A dump truck collided with three passenger vehicles Tuesday night at the intersection of Chandler Road and County Road 119 in Round Rock, killing one person at the scene and leaving three others with non-life-threatening injuries. The crash prompted a full closure of Chandler Road in both directions, along with a stretch of County Road 119 between County Road 118 and Chandler Road, as officers worked the scene.
The Round Rock Police Department announced the crash Tuesday evening, confirming the fatality and injury counts and urging drivers to avoid the area and seek alternate routes. As reported by KVUE, the crash matched the same details police released: a dump truck and three passenger vehicles involved, one person dead at the scene, and three others hospitalized with injuries not considered life-threatening.
A Corridor With a Troubled Recent History
Tuesday's fatal wreck is not an isolated incident for this stretch of eastern Williamson County. Just weeks earlier, on June 29, a crash at the Chandler Road overpass over State Highway 130 killed semi-truck driver Eric Fields after an Audi SUV collided with his tractor-trailer, according to the same KVUE report, knocking the 18-wheeler off the bridge and onto the SH 130 main lanes below. Hoodline covered that overpass crash that killed a trucker at the time.
Texas Department of Public Safety troopers arrested the Audi's driver, 38-year-old Rayford Washington, on a state-jail felony charge of driving while intoxicated with a child under 15, the outlet's report notes, after finding an open liquor bottle in his vehicle. Two child passengers were reportedly inside the Audi during that collision. A year before that, on August 25, 2025, Chandler Road was shut down in both directions after a four-vehicle crash near SH 130 involving a semi-truck, a garbage truck, a van and a passenger car sent two people to the hospital, according to a report cited by Injury Relief.
City Had Already Flagged This Intersection for Safety Upgrades
Notably, the City of Round Rock opened public bidding back in February for a major safety overhaul at the very intersection where Tuesday's fatal crash occurred. According to GovTribe, the planned project at Chandler Road and CR 119, also known as Ed Schmidt Boulevard, calls for installing a new traffic signal system, adding right-turn deceleration lanes in both directions, and placing concrete traffic barriers. It remains unclear whether construction on those improvements had begun before Tuesday's crash.
Chandler Road has seen rapid growth alongside heavy commercial truck traffic tied to regional landfills and waste transfer stations in eastern Williamson County. In June, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization allocated $131 million in federal transportation grants for Williamson County, a package that includes an anticipated $20 million overpass project at Chandler Road and FM 1660 in Hutto, according to Community Impact.
Statewide Numbers Show a Broader Pattern
The dangers seen along Chandler Road echo trends found across Texas. TxDOT crash records for 2024 show commercial motor vehicles were involved in 39,393 crashes statewide, resulting in 608 fatalities and 1,601 suspected serious injuries, per data compiled by Hamilton Wingo. Texas leads the nation in total commercial vehicle fatalities, the same figures show.
Intersections like Chandler Road and CR 119 represent a particular hazard point in that data. TxDOT's 2024 commercial vehicle safety figures found that 32.76 percent of all commercial truck crashes in the state — 1,339 collisions — happened at intersections, according to Pierce Skrabanek, pointing to turns and signalized crossings as primary danger zones. Statewide, motor vehicle crashes produced 4,150 total fatalities in 2024, with excess speed cited as a factor in nearly a third of all fatal collisions.
In May 2025, Williamson County formally adopted its Safety Action Plan as part of a regional CAMPO safety framework, setting goals to reduce traffic fatalities and severe injury crashes across the county's rural and developing corridors. Whether that plan, or the pending Chandler Road and CR 119 intersection project, will directly address the kind of commercial truck traffic implicated in Tuesday's fatal crash remains an open question for local officials to answer.
