A deadly collision in Dallas is leaving police, and even veteran officers, stunned after the pedestrian victim was found in the driver’s passenger seat 40 miles away.
“When you’re impaired to this level, where you hit a pedestrian on the roadway and you think it’s an animal, that’s a significant impairment and, in all my 28 years, I have never really worked a case like this,” White Settlement Chief of Police Christopher Cook said at the press conference Sunday morning.
Authorities are still trying to figure out exactly what happened Saturday night, but they’re putting the pieces together.
Around 11:00 p.m., a concerned citizen called in a report of a driver who appeared to be slumped over their steering wheel in the parking lot of a local Jack in the Box restaurant. That caller also reported the grey Kia Forte had extensive damage to its front hood and windshield.
When police got to the scene, they found the driver, but also another person in the front passenger seat who was later pronounced dead by EMS.
Police immediately detained the driver, 31-year-old Nestor Lujuan Flores of Arlington, who they say was intoxicated.
Flores told the responding officer he believed he hit a deer somewhere in Dallas. But, Flores, who ended up in Fort Worth around 8:00 p.m., never called 911 to report any incident.
Detectives say based on the evidence, they believe Flores hit the person with his car somewhere between Arlington and White Settlement and that the impact was so severe, that the person was thrown inside of the Kia Forte. Cook said Sunday that there was “significant trauma to the body … to include missing some body parts.”
“This scene was really hard for our fire teams, our police teams, our MedStar teams to even work a case like this,” he shared.
“What the frustration is for our teams is that [this] is avoidable,” Cook continued. “People do not need to get behind the wheel. We talk about it all the time—make good decisions. There’s rideshare services, there’s friends, there’s just other things you can do besides getting behind the wheel.”
Flores is facing charges of intoxication, manslaughter and possibly failure to stop and render aid. Cook shared Sunday that Flores was previously arrested with a DWI in 2020 by Plano police and convicted in 2021.
WSPD has turned its investigation over to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office. Together, they will work to find out where Flores was drinking between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. and whether he was over-served.
The White Settlement Police Department had reached out to surrounding departments to try to track down the timeline. Cook said as of Sunday morning, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office is working on an incident at I-30 and Cockrell Hill after locating some possible body parts in the roadway. Cook said based on that information, WSPD believes the two incidents could be connected but will wait for the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office and the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office to make that determination.
“It just goes to show you that certainly [with] impaired driving, there is still a huge problem throughout North Texas. All of our agencies deal with this,” Cook said. “It’s the holiday season. We know some people won’t take our advice. Some people will get behind the wheel when they shouldn’t … You’ll see additional police presence not only here in White Settlement, but across the entire North Texas region, because the time of year—we want people to have a good time, we want people to celebrate, we just don’t want you to get behind the wheel.”
