A 59-year-old woman died Tuesday after a driver mistakenly hit the accelerator instead of reverse, pinning her between a Ford Expedition and a fence outside a South Side home. The crash happened around 11:44 a.m. on Dorsey Drive near Moursund Boulevard, and emergency crews pronounced the woman dead at 12:14 p.m.
According to WOAI, police said the woman was sitting in a metal chair positioned between a fence and the SUV when the 58-year-old male driver attempted to leave the home. Investigators believe he shifted the vehicle into drive instead of reverse by mistake, and the Expedition struck the woman against the fence, briefly pinning her underneath it before she was freed.
Police told the station they found no visible signs of criminal activity involving the driver. Her identity had not been released as of the station's report.
Why Investigators Aren't Rushing to File Charges
The absence of an immediate arrest reflects how Texas law treats accidental driver error. Under Texas Penal Code § 19.05, criminally negligent homicide is a state jail felony carrying six months to two years in prison, but it only applies when a death results from a gross deviation from the standard of care a reasonable person would observe, according to a legal analysis from Saputo Toufexis.
A separate review of Texas fatal traffic cases published by the Law Office of Matthew D. Sharp notes that honest mistakes and simple driver errors do not amount to criminal offenses under Texas law unless prosecutors can show the driver consciously disregarded or grossly failed to perceive a substantial risk. That legal threshold helps explain why San Antonio police have not signaled any charges against the driver in this case.
A Common but Deadly Kind of Mistake
Pedal misapplication — pressing the accelerator instead of the brake — is far more common than many drivers realize. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration advisory updated in March, cited by Hardy Wolf & Downing, estimates the error causes roughly 16,000 preventable crashes nationwide every year, or about 44 a day, with drivers under 20 and over 65 experiencing these crashes roughly four times more often than other age groups.
A separate NHTSA technical study found that 77 percent of documented pedal error crashes occurred in parking lots or driveways, with about half happening while drivers were turning or reversing — precisely the kind of low-speed maneuver at play on Dorsey Drive. Research from SAE International in 2022 examining pre-crash event data recorders found evidence of pedal misapplication in 4.3 percent of analyzed crashes, and more than a third of those drivers had pressed the accelerator to 99 percent or more of its stroke, a pattern consistent with a panicked response to a perceived emergency.
Part of a Troubling Pattern on San Antonio Streets
The fatal pinning is the latest in a string of similar incidents Hoodline has tracked across San Antonio this year. Just six days earlier, a shifting truck fatally pinned a 52-year-old man on the city's East Side. In July, a chain-check gone wrong turned deadly when a vehicle pinned someone on a residential street, and in March, a driver faced charges after an SUV pinned and seriously injured a pedestrian near San Antonio College. Just days before this crash, a woman was critically injured and a dog was killed near a driveway entrance on Marbach Road.
The frequency of these off-roadway incidents lands amid broader efforts by the city to curb traffic deaths. San Antonio recorded 769 pedestrian-involved traffic incidents in 2024, resulting in 83 fatalities and 168 serious injuries, ranking it among the top seven deadliest U.S. cities for pedestrians, according to City of San Antonio Transportation Department records. The city has since launched a $4.4 million Keep Crossings SAfe initiative and, in December, rolled out an interactive High-Injury Network Dashboard under its Vision Zero program, using TxDOT crash data to flag the corridors most in need of safety fixes, per KSAT.
Statewide, the scale of the problem is even larger. The Texas Department of Transportation documented 6,095 pedestrian-involved crashes across the state in 2024, leading to 768 pedestrian fatalities and 1,452 suspected serious injuries. Bexar County alone has accounted for 93 percent of the more than 1,000 annual pedestrian-involved crashes recorded across the eight-county San Antonio metro area every year from 2016 through 2025, according to the San Antonio Report.
No further details about the woman's identity or the driver's name had been released as investigators continued to review the circumstances of Tuesday's crash.
