A Texas appeals court has revived a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a man who was struck by a tractor-trailer while crossing eight lanes of Houston's Interstate 610 on foot in December 2021, ruling that the trucking company and its driver never properly raised suicide as a legal defense before the trial court threw out the case. Mohammed Ghanbarikaleh died two days after being hit near 2400 North Loop, and his family had argued the defendants waited too long to claim he died by suicide.
Appeals Panel Finds a Fatal Pleading Gap
In a memorandum opinion issued September 15, a panel of the Texas 14th Court of Appeals found that defendants Rigoberto Leon Rodriguez and Alain Leon Rodriguez never included suicide as a defense in their written response to the lawsuit, according to Chron.com. The panel overturned the trial judge's decision to dismiss the case without a trial and sent it back for further proceedings. As 1910 & Beyond reports, the court held that simply alleging Ghanbarikaleh walked into oncoming traffic was not enough to plead suicide, because the defendants never explicitly alleged he acted intentionally or sought his own death.
The defect traces back to a basic rule of Texas civil procedure. Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 94 requires defendants to spell out affirmative defenses like suicide in their responsive pleadings, and courts have held that raising such a defense for the first time in a motion for summary judgment is waived if the opposing side objects, according to a legal analysis from Haynes Boone. Ghanbarikaleh's parents did object, arguing the suicide defense came too late and that they had evidence to counter the claim, per the facts laid out in the Chron report.
A Death Certificate That Complicates the Record
Court filings cited by Legal Newsline reveal a conflict sitting at the center of the case: the initial police crash report recorded that Ghanbarikaleh stepped in front of the moving tractor-trailer on the eight-lane freeway, while his official death certificate categorized the manner of death as suicide. Under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 93.001(a)(2), suicide can only serve as an affirmative defense to a wrongful death claim if the suicide was not caused in whole or in part by a defendant's failure to meet an applicable legal standard, according to FindLaw. That statute places the burden on the defense to plead, and ultimately prove, that the death was not tied to any negligence on their part.
The lawsuit was originally filed in the 165th District Court of Harris County under Cause No. 2023-15568 by plaintiffs Khalil Homafar, Ramezan Ghanbarikaleh, and Maryam Daneshmand Kaleh, court records reviewed by Justia Law show, before the family's appeal reached the 14th Court of Appeals in July 2025. The family's negligence claims against Alain Leon Rodriguez, who owned the tractor-trailer and did business as Alain Rodriguez Trucking, and Rigoberto Leon Rodriguez, the truck's driver, were filed in 2023, seeking between $200,000 and $1 million in damages, per Chron's reporting. Attorneys for both the plaintiffs and defendants had not immediately responded to Chron's requests for comment.
Pedestrian Right-of-Way Rules on Freeways
Texas Transportation Code § 552.005 requires pedestrians crossing a roadway outside a marked or unmarked crosswalk at an intersection to yield the right-of-way to vehicles, according to FindLaw. That legal backdrop doesn't resolve the suicide dispute now headed back to the trial court, but it underscores the scale of the risk Ghanbarikaleh faced crossing eight lanes of traffic.
The case lands against a grim statistical backdrop for Houston pedestrians. The city recorded 121 pedestrian traffic fatalities in 2024, the highest annual total in the five-year span from 2020 through 2024, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data reported by TXAN 24. Texas Department of Transportation crash data separately recorded 301 total traffic fatalities in Houston in 2024, a 29-death increase from the prior year, with multi-lane freeway loops like I-610 remaining among the city's highest-risk corridors, per analysis from Simmons and Fletcher, P.C. Statewide, 772 pedestrians were killed and 1,455 seriously injured in 6,095 crashes in 2024, with pedestrians making up 19 percent of all Texas traffic deaths despite being involved in just 1 percent of crashes, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.
Research from Houston's Vision Zero program, highlighted in earlier Hoodline coverage of a fatal South Loop crash, found that roughly 6 percent of Houston's street miles account for about 60 percent of all traffic fatalities and serious injuries, with multi-lane freeways like I-610 generating a heavy share of the carnage. That pattern has shown up repeatedly in recent months, from a predawn fatal pedestrian crash at the I-45 and Loop 610 interchange in March to a midnight strike-and-kill on the South Loop in April. With the Ghanbarikaleh case now remanded, open questions remain over whether the defendants can amend their pleadings to properly raise suicide or shared-fault arguments, and what evidence about the death certificate versus the family's negligence claims will ultimately be admitted at trial.
