Fatigue may have caused crash that killed Fort Worth-area woman, her family says
A 28-year-old Burleson woman killed over the weekend in a car wreck may have suffered from fatigue when she crashed in south Fort Worth, her family said Wednesday.
Courtney Pilkington died Friday night, but her car was not discovered until Saturday morning on Chisholm Trail Parkway at Sycamore School Road.
“We think she may have been drowsy,” her mother, Maggie Norton, said in a telephone interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “She had been at her boyfriend’s in Godley, and we believe she was headed to visit her baby nephew in Benbrook.”
Pilkington died from blunt-force injuries, and her death has been ruled an accident, according to officials with the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Each year, an estimated 1,550 residents are killed by a fatigued driver and another 71,000 are injured, according to a 2016 study by the AAA Foundation.
Tyler Raising Education for Drowsy Driver (TYREDD) reports that one in five fatal crashes involve a fatigued driver. The nonprofit organization brings awareness about the dangers of sleep deprivation and “driving while tired” to teens, parents, and organizations across the country.
It’s an organization that Courtney Pilkington’s family has turned to for support.
“We are grieving,” her father, Michael Norton, said earlier this week. “We are simply grasping for any good that I feel God can add to even this.”
Born in Houston, Pilkington graduated in 2010 from Connally High School in Waco.
Pilkington and her family moved a few years later to North Texas, where she worked as a quality control inspector. She was the oldest of five children.
“She was a beautiful girl,” said Maggie Norton, who wrote her daughter’s obituary. “She had never taken a bad photo.”
Pilkington just recently had become an aunt.
“Courtney was a daughter, a sister,” Michael Norton said. “She was 5-foot-2 with the personality and attitude as though she were 7-foot tall. She was so much more.”
The Norton family asked that donations be made to TYREDD.
A memorial service for Pilkington will be at 1 p.m. on Saturday at Clayton Kay Vaughan Funeral Home in Alvarado.
This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 12:20 PM.