A wrong-way driver was killed and another motorist was seriously hurt in a head-on crash before dawn Sunday on the South Side, after a woman drove her vehicle into the southbound lanes of Interstate 37 near Southton Road and collided with an oncoming car. San Antonio police say the crash happened around 2:47 a.m. in the 13000 block of southbound I-37, shutting down the freeway while emergency crews responded.
According to WOAI, San Antonio police said the woman was driving the wrong way in the southbound lanes when she crashed head-on into another vehicle. Emergency crews found her dead inside her car at the scene, and as of Sunday morning she had not been positively identified. The man driving the other vehicle was alert following the crash but suffered serious injuries and was taken to a local hospital. Police reported no other injuries connected to the collision, and the southbound lanes of I-37 were eventually cleared.
A separate report from KENS 5 identified the injured driver as a 23-year-old man and said police estimated the deceased wrong-way driver to be in her 20s or 30s. The station also reported that police received multiple 911 calls warning of a wrong-way vehicle in the southbound lanes before the head-on impact.
A Corridor With a Grim History
This is not the first deadly wrong-way crash on this stretch of I-37. In July 2024, a wrong-way pickup truck slammed head-on into a car on the 15600 block of I-37 near Southton Road, killing three people, including an off-duty 20-year-old Bexar County Sheriff's deputy who was heading home from downtown San Antonio, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Hoodline previously covered that crash in a report on the deputy's death.
Just over two months before Sunday's crash, another wrong-way collision on I-37 killed two drivers and critically injured a passenger near the downtown interchange, KENS 5's video report on the June 25 crash noted. And on June 14, a pre-dawn wrong-way collision on San Antonio's Southwest Loop 410 near Palo Alto Road set both vehicles ablaze and killed everyone at the scene, per Texas Injury Report — a crash Hoodline covered as a pre-dawn Loop 410 inferno.
Texas Leads the Nation in Wrong-Way Deaths
The pattern extends well beyond San Antonio. A five-year study of federal crash data published in 2025 found that Texas led the nation with 1,199 fatal wrong-way driving crashes between 2019 and 2023, accounting for 6.4 percent of all fatal crashes statewide — double the national average, according to Wawi Tijerina Law. Nationally, the toll has been climbing too: a 2026 analysis of crash data cited by Southern Injury Attorneys found that fatal wrong-way collisions on U.S. divided highways nearly doubled over a decade, rising from 373 deaths in 2014 to 699 in 2023.
Alcohol impairment remains the dominant factor behind these crashes. A 2026 national study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, also cited by Southern Injury Attorneys, found that roughly 70 percent of wrong-way drivers in fatal crashes were alcohol-impaired, and that drivers with a blood alcohol concentration above 0.12 had more than 80 times the odds of driving the wrong direction. It remains unclear whether toxicology findings will confirm impairment in Sunday's crash, or where along the corridor the woman first entered the wrong-way lanes.
San Antonio's Countermeasures Against Wrong-Way Drivers
San Antonio has spent more than a decade trying to get ahead of the problem. The city became the first in the country to establish a dedicated multi-agency Wrong Way Driver Task Force in 2011, created by TxDOT, SAPD, and local partners after San Antonio Police Officer Stephanie Brown was killed by an intoxicated wrong-way driver on I-35, according to the Southwest Research Institute.
TxDOT has since layered in newer technology, including AI-enhanced thermal cameras, cloud-based monitoring, and real-time geofenced smartphone warnings meant to alert approaching motorists before a head-on crash occurs, per the Texas Department of Transportation. The San Antonio District also relies on automated dynamic message signs that broadcast warnings reading “WRONG WAY DRIVER REPORTED / USE EXTREME CAUTION” whenever police dispatch an alert, according to research from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. It is not yet known whether those detection systems flagged Sunday's wrong-way driver before the fatal impact.
