Truck driver facing murder charges after a road rage incident escalated into deadly violence in Texas on Tuesday.
31-year-old Caitlin Elizabeth was allegedly shot to death by 46-year-old truck driver Jason Rashad Williams on Interstate 20 in Van Zandt County, Texas on September 19th. Now, police are trying to figure out exactly what happened.
Elizabeth’s mother says that Elizabeth was a passenger in a car with her sister and sister-in-law when the truck driver started following their car.
“They said he was trailing them and they would go into one lane, he would go into the next. And they ended up beside each other and my daughter said ‘was there a problem?’ because they couldn’t get in front of him, they couldn’t pass him. And he just, when she said that, my other daughter said that she was getting the baby. My daughter-in-law was driving, and they had no clue that he was going to shoot her,” said Senta Holmes, Elizabeth’s mother. No one else in the car was hurt.
According to information from the Van Zandt County Sheriff’s office, the truck driver was not at the scene when police responded to the call. Constable Pat Jordan happened to be driving east on I-20 when heard about the incident, and was told to be on the lookout for a maroon tractor hauling a white trailer. 17 minutes after the initial 911 call, Jordan pulled over the first tractor trailer matching the description he saw, and got the driver to come out of the cab to talk to him.
“I asked him, I said, ‘Were you involved in an altercation down the road?’ And he said ‘Yes,’” Jordan said. “And immediately I thought, ‘Well, this might be the guy.’”
“He said he was coming down the road, vehicle pulled up beside him, they got into some sort of verbal argument, and she threw something at his truck,” Jordan said. “I asked him, I said, ‘Well, did you have a gun pointed at them?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ ‘Did you fire a gun?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I just, at that point, I just felt like it was him.”
The truck driver identified himself as Williams and fully compiled when Jordan took his .45 handgun.
A search warrant was obtained for the rig and another gun was found. Williams was detained at the scene for questioning and was eventually booked into Van Zandt County Jail on a charge of murder and three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He is being held on $1,750,000 bond.
“In this business, we work hard to solve cases, but sometimes it takes a little bit of luck. If I would have sat there and missed that vehicle in that 15 second range, we probably would still have a whodunit,” Jordan said.