It was supposed to be a quiet meal. On September 2, 2025, Raj and Kala Arivalahan, an elderly couple originally from India but now Maryland residents, were enjoying dinner at an Indian restaurant in Irving, Texas. Their evening took a terrifying turn when an SUV suddenly smashed through the restaurant’s front glass and barreled into their table, sending plates, chairs, and the couple themselves flying across the dining room. The Arivalahans, who were on a phone call with their son, Dr. Thivijan Arivalahan, at the moment of impact, escaped with minor injuries—but the shock lingers.
“That time, the car came in, I fell down, she was pushed out the other side, and I was sliding on the floor towards the end,” Raj told Fox 4, his voice still carrying traces of disbelief. Kala, his wife, recalled her own panic: “I immediately knew I was OK, and I was looking for him. I couldn’t find him for a minute. I thought I lost him.”
According to Fox 4’s reporting, the accident occurred because the SUV’s driver, intending to reverse, failed to actually put the vehicle in reverse gear. Instead, the car lurched forward, crashing through the storefront and right into the couple’s table. The restaurant’s glass shattered, sending fragments everywhere. “Fortunately, the car stopped. So I was inside the cage. It’s a kind of cage. The cage protected me, except all this pain and things, all the windows shattering. All I had were small, small cuts all over my body,” Raj said, describing the surreal moment when the damage was done but the worst had been averted.
The couple’s son, Dr. Thivijan Arivalahan, was still on the phone and heard the chaos unfold. “I just hear a lot of commotion happening,” he recounted. For the Arivalahans, the ordeal ended with minor injuries and a story they’ll never forget. But for many in Texas, car crashes—sometimes with far graver consequences—are an all-too-familiar reality.
Police have not charged the driver, as the incident remains under investigation. The circumstances, while shocking, are not unique. In fact, just recently, a Texas influencer duo had a strikingly similar experience. Influencer Nina Santiago was filming herself eating with her boyfriend Patrick Blackwood when an SUV plowed into their restaurant. In this case, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office explained that the female driver believed she had placed her vehicle in park. When she lifted her foot off the brake, the SUV rolled forward, breaking through the glass and into the business. “The female driver of the vehicle advised that she thought she had placed the vehicle in park and upon releasing her foot off the brake, the vehicle rolled into the business, striking the building, and breaking the glass,” a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office told reporters.
These dramatic incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to road safety issues in Texas. The state, especially its western regions, is grappling with a surge in vehicle crashes, many involving both heavy commercial trucks and everyday drivers. In July 2025, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) launched a new roadside assistance program in Midland and Ector counties, aiming to curb the number of serious injuries and fatalities on the road. Since its inception, the program has responded to nearly 500 calls and helped more than 1,400 drivers, offering services ranging from removing debris and abandoned vehicles to extinguishing car fires, changing flat tires, and jumpstarting dead batteries, according to The Texas Tribune.
“We have such a high crash rate, a growing population, and growing traffic,” said Debra Richmond, director of road safety initiatives for the Permian Strategic Partnership, a nonprofit supported by oil companies and dedicated to improving lives in the region. “We feel like this could really make a difference in the short term while we continue advocating for long-term improvement.”
The Permian Basin, where the program operates, is notorious for its hazardous roads. The highways are narrow, outdated, and often congested with twelve-wheel trucks hauling machinery, oil drums, and other industrial equipment. Add to that the high speed limits—up to 80 miles per hour in some stretches—and it’s not hard to see why the region’s roads are among the deadliest in Texas. A 2023 report found that severe and fatal vehicle accidents in the Permian Basin outpaced the rest of the state. While 2024 saw a 5.8% reduction in road deaths, which Richmond attributes to increased public awareness and infrastructure upgrades, the problem is far from solved.
The two-year roadside assistance initiative, funded with $5 million from the Permian Strategic Partnership, Midland County, and TxDOT, is modeled after similar programs in Austin, El Paso, and San Antonio. Statewide, the effort costs $22.7 million and employs 138 workers who patrol for stranded motorists and hazardous situations. Their job is not just to help drivers with flat tires or dead batteries but also to prevent secondary crashes—those that occur when a stopped or disabled vehicle becomes a new hazard on the road.
“We’re still facing a lot of the challenges that come with having heavy industry crossed with residential and regular civilian traffic, whether that’s heavy equipment and heavy commercial trucks sharing the road with school buses and folks in smaller vehicles, just going about their day-to-day lives,” Richmond explained. “All of those challenges are just compounding.”
Jeffrey Michael, a scholar at Johns Hopkins University who studies road safety, told The Texas Tribune that high speed limits and the prevalence of commercial traffic are a dangerous mix. “If you combine that with a little bit of distraction or fatigue, then you can easily see where that would be a very high-risk situation,” he said. Michael noted that globally, commercial traffic accounts for a third of the 1.2 million traffic deaths each year—about 400,000, according to a 2025 United Nations report.
Michael believes that companies employing commercial drivers should shoulder more responsibility for road safety. He suggests that employers enforce speed limits and require the use of safety equipment such as speed limiters and automatic emergency braking systems, which can detect and prevent collisions. “The expectation and tradition is that we expect less outside the gate,” Michael said. “Outside the gate, we don’t look to the corporation for responsibility; we look to the driver.”
For drivers in Midland and Ector counties, roadside assistance is now just a call away at 877-699-HERO—a small but significant step in making Texas roads safer for everyone, from elderly couples out for dinner to the thousands of workers and families who travel these highways every day.
As Texas continues to grow and its roads become busier and more complex, the need for vigilance, innovation, and shared responsibility in road safety has never been greater. For the Arivalahans and countless others, these efforts couldn’t come soon enough.
