A 57-year-old Toms River man died Thursday afternoon after his SUV ran off the southbound Garden State Parkway in Tinton Falls, struck a guardrail and slammed into a tree. Mark Edgell was driving south around 4:45 p.m. when the vehicle veered left off the roadway near milepost 103.1, according to New Jersey State Police. No other motorists were injured in the crash.
The SUV was identified as a Nissan, according to a New Jersey State Police statement reported by Patch. New Jersey State Police public information officer Sgt. Jeffrey Lebron confirmed that troopers responded to the scene at 4:45 p.m., per the same outlet. The crash was also reported by NJ.com, whose account of the veer-off, guardrail strike and tree impact matches the state police details relayed to Patch.
What caused Edgell's SUV to leave the roadway remains under investigation by New Jersey State Police, according to Patch's reporting. Full investigative files for the crash, including any reconstruction analysis, are not immediately public; basic crash reports can be pulled online for $5 through the crash-report portal.
A Familiar Stretch of Highway
Thursday's crash happened along a segment of the Parkway in Tinton Falls where the posted speed limit is 65 miles per hour, according to New Jersey Department of Transportation straight line diagram records. It's not the first time this stretch has turned deadly this year: in May, a 27-year-old passenger died in a similar single-vehicle, off-road crash on the southbound Parkway near milepost 108, when a pickup truck hit trees and caught fire, as Hoodline previously reported.
Monmouth County, where Tinton Falls sits, ranks among the top five counties in New Jersey for traffic collisions, registering 16,559 accidents in recent state crash data compiled by Davis, Saperstein & Salomon, P.C. The Garden State Parkway itself records more total vehicular crashes annually than any other highway in the state, topping 9,600 collisions in a single year compared to 7,768 on the New Jersey Turnpike, according to statistics cited by Brandon J. Broderick, Attorney at Law.
A Statewide Safety Picture in Flux
The fatal crash comes even as statewide traffic deaths have been trending downward. Statewide traffic fatalities in New Jersey fell by nearly 15 percent in 2025, dropping from 684 deaths in 2024 to 582, according to preliminary New Jersey State Police data reported by Patch in January. Federal traffic safety research cited by the D'Amato Law Firm indicates driver error accounts for 94 percent of major highway crashes, with 77 percent of all collisions occurring within 10 miles of a driver's home.
Separately, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority scheduled a public hearing this month regarding proposed highway capital improvements along the Garden State Parkway in the nearby Toms River area, according to an official authority press release. As of now, investigators have not released further details on what caused Edgell's SUV to leave the roadway.
