news
Six members of a family were killed in a Texas crash when a minivan crashed head-on into a pickup truck driven by a 17-year-old boy on the wrong side of a highway.
Rushil Barry, 28, was driving her family to Irving in a Honda Odyssey when they visited the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center.
As they joined the freeway on their way home, a Chevrolet pickup truck hit their minivan head-on.
Barry and five of his six passengers were killed in the collision. NBC News reports.
Among the victims of the crash were his cousin, his cousin's wife, two young children and a mother-in-law from Alpharetta, Ga.
Besides Bari, the five passengers who died were Naveen Potapatula, 36, Nageswara Rao Ponnata, 64, Seethamahalakshmi Ponnata, 60, and children, Krithik Potapatula, 10, and Nishita Potapatula, 9.
A seventh person in the minivan, a 43-year-old man, was critically injured.
The 17-year-old driver of the pickup truck was also taken to the hospital with serious injuries, as was his 17-year-old passenger.
The injured victims were airlifted to nearby John Peter Smith Hospital and Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital, where they received emergency treatment.
Pari's roommate Ayyappala Bandaru expressed his shock over the tragedy, saying he was informed that Pari's iPhone had crashed at 4:01 pm on Tuesday.
“We were just in shock about what happened,” he said told NBC News. “We tried to reach everyone in the car and no one picked up.”
Barry, who moved to the US from India in August 2020, was described as ambitious by Bandaru.
“We were like brothers,” Bandaru said. “He's really like my brother here. He had really big dreams. He was always thinking about tomorrow. He was like, 'Man, we gotta rule this world.'
“We came here with a lot of struggles,” he said.
Following the brutal ordeal, Sgt. William Lockridge of the Texas Department of Public Safety said it's still unclear why the teenager drove the wrong way on the highway.
“For an unknown reason at this time, the Chevrolet pickup truck was traveling northbound and struck the Honda Odyssey head-on,” he said.
