A 19-year-old man is dead after a road rage encounter on San Antonio's South Side erupted into gunfire early Sunday morning, with police saying his driver raced him to the hospital only for him to be pronounced dead soon after arrival. The shooting unfolded around 3:30 a.m. off Teresa Street near Pleasanton Road, leaving investigators searching for three unidentified men and a vehicle with no description yet released to the public.
According to KABB, investigators said the shooting involved two vehicles, with three men inside a suspect vehicle when someone opened fire at the rear of another car carrying a driver and the teenage victim. The 19-year-old was sitting in the front passenger seat and suffered an apparent gunshot wound to the chest, the station reported.
Driver Rushes Wounded Teen to Hospital
Rather than wait for first responders at the scene, the driver sped the wounded teen to Baptist Hospital on Cupples Road. Officers later found the vehicle parked near the hospital's emergency-room entrance, per the same report. The 19-year-old was pronounced dead there shortly after.
Police had initially been responding to a shooting call near Pleasanton Road and Division Avenue when dispatchers alerted officers that the victim was already being driven to the hospital, prompting several officers to divert to Baptist Hospital instead. That scramble to redirect resources underscores how quickly the situation shifted from a street-level 911 call to an emergency-room response.
No Identifications, No Arrests as Investigation Continues
As of the latest update, police had not released the victim's identity or provided a description of the suspect vehicle. The three men inside that vehicle remain unidentified, and no arrests have been made, the station's report notes. San Antonio police have described the investigation as ongoing.
The shooting adds to a troubling pattern of road rage violence across San Antonio. The Gun Violence Archive has recorded nearly 140 road-rage shootings in the metro area since 2016, with more than 100 resulting in injuries and 29 leading to deaths, according to an analysis from expressnews.com. The same analysis found San Antonio tied with Memphis for the second-highest number of gun-involved road-rage incidents among U.S. cities, and noted that Texas Department of Transportation data links road rage to more than 3,100 crashes in the metro area since 2016.
A City Grappling With Aggressive Driving
Just days earlier, on October 27, a 25-year-old man was critically injured in a separate road-rage shooting on the Southwest Side, struck by several gunshot wounds to the torso in the 1300 block of Kyle Street near Southwest Military Drive and South Zarzamora Street, according to ksat.com. Police arrested 20-year-old Luke Perez in that case and charged him with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Earlier in October, a jury convicted Eric Vasquez in the fatal Northwest Side road-rage shooting of Jay Whitemountain Morales, sentencing him to 25 years in prison after a mistrial earlier in the year, ksat.com reported. Evidence presented by prosecutors showed Vasquez shot Morales five times after Morales exited his vehicle to open a trunk containing a firearm, a case that stemmed from a January 2025 shooting in the 6700 block of Spring Hurst Drive. Traffic-safety researchers cited by the outlet placed Bexar County second in Texas for aggressive-driving incidents, a ranking that tracks with a national AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety study finding 96% of surveyed drivers admitted to an aggressive driving act in the past year, up from 78% in 2016.
No further details have been released about Sunday's shooting near Teresa Street, and San Antonio police have not said whether any suspects have been questioned. The investigation remains active as detectives continue working to identify the three men in the suspect vehicle and determine what sparked the confrontation.
