Husband begs for help to find driver who killed wife in North Texas road rage shooting
A woman was shot and killed in a road rage incident in North Texas on Monday night after a car almost hit the minivan she was riding in and the car’s driver opened fire, according to Hurst police and the victim’s husband.
Hurst police officers were dispatched at 9:18 p.m. to the 1400 block of West Hurst Boulevard, police said in a news release. At the scene, officers found a 37-year-old woman with a gunshot wound to the head.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the victim as Paola Nunez Linares, of Fort Worth.
Nunez’s husband, Zane Jones, was at the scene and told police that the couple were driving in a Kia minivan, northbound on East Loop 820, when they were involved in a road rage incident with another car.
The driver of the other car fired several shots at them, hitting Nunez, her husband told police. She was taken by Hurst Fire Department medics to John Peter Smith Hospital, where she was pronounced dead shortly after 2 a.m. Tuesday.
No arrests have been made in the case. The suspect vehicle investigators are looking for was described as a small, dark-colored older model car, police said.
In a public Facebook post, Jones wrote that the driver of the car put the couple in danger by tailgating their minivan and almost hitting it. Jones, who was driving the minivan, flipped off the other driver, who then began shooting while passing them on the left after Jones moved to the right lane, he said. Jones’ wife was a passenger in the van.
“She was an innocent victim,” Jones wrote. “She was a passenger in the car when I flipped off a driver who put us in danger. She always hated when I did that, and I did it anyways. Then the driver shot into our car and struck my beautiful wife, who had nothing to do with anything.”
“I can’t put into words, everything that my wife meant to me,” Jones wrote. “She was my rock when times were hard. She was my teammate at work and at home. She was my partner in crime through the good and the bad.”
Nunez was “equally as wonderful as a step-mom,” her husband wrote. “She actively took part in the lives of my children. She loved them as (her) own. She wanted them to be the best people on the planet, and she tried to always show that to them.”
His wife “was the most special person I’ve ever known, and I can’t understand why it happened,” Jones said. “She was my other half and I’ll love her until the day I die.”
Jones said he is begging anyone with any information about the shooter to come forward.
“It’s the worst night of my life and it was the last night of hers,” the husband wrote. “This person took my wife from me. They took a friend from her friends. They took a daughter from her mother and they took a step-mom from my children. I need them in custody.”
On a GoFundMe page, Jones wrote that Nunez was “an immigrant from Guatemala who came here for a better life. She was a dedicated wife, step mother, and worker. She always left everyone she interacted with a little better off than they were, and she was truly the best person I’ve ever known.”
Money raised through the page will be used for funeral expenses and travel expenses back and forth to Guatemala, he said.
Police asked anyone with information to contact Detective C. Jackson at 817-788-7179.
There was at least one other shooting within 24 hours in Tarrant County that police say was motivated by road rage. Fort Worth police said a man was wounded in the hand in a shooting early Tuesday along northbound Interstate 35W near Felix Street.
Another shooting Tuesday afternoon on southbound I-35W near the Ripy Street exit also wounded a person but might be gang-related. Fort Worth police said the gang unit was investigating that incident, after which the shooter left the area headed southbound and the victim showed up at a hospital with a gunshot wound to the arm.
This story was originally published July 11, 2023 at 9:47 AM.
