A church community and a family are mourning the loss of a 15-year-old boy killed in a crash with a wrong-way driver Saturday night in Frisco.
“It’s so sad to see something like this happen to somebody who had so much potential,” family friend Anthony Asaad said.
A lifetime of dreams was dashed in an instant as the Boulos family drove home from a birthday party.
It was just before midnight on the Dallas North Tollway Saturday when a wrong-way driver hit the family’s car head-on just south of John Hickman Parkway.
Passenger David Boulos was killed, his sister was hurt and their parents were critically injured.
David was a few weeks away from his 16th birthday.
“He’s got the personality of his dad. He’s a carbon copy of him and he’s always smiling,” Asaad said. “The kid’s a comedian, I mean the kid could’ve done anything he wanted to. He had a heart of gold.”
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Asaad said the Rockwall Heath High School student was devoted to his family and his church, St. Philopateer Coptic Orthodox Church in Richardson.
“He was the church head of scouts program,” Asaad said. “He loved God and everything about his demeanor and his personality reflected that.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety said wrong-way driver, 37-year-old Michael Ramirez of Frisco, was also killed in the crash.
According to online court records, Frisco police arrested Ramirez for DWI in 2016.
DPS said they were still awaiting toxicology reports to see if Ramirez was impaired at the time of the deadly collision.
The North Texas Tollway Authority said while it too does not yet have details as to the condition of the driver, "to date, every wrong-way crash NTTA has recorded has involved a driver who was impaired."
NTTA spokesman Michael Rey added the driver ignored several safety warnings prior to the crash -- one "One-Way," four "Do Not Enter" and four "Wrong Way" signs -- before getting onto an exit ramp equipped with raised pavement markers and reflective arrows showing the correct direction of travel.
In a statement, the NTTA added: ‘We continuously work to examine and improve our wrong-way countermeasures on all of our roads throughout the NTTA system for the safety of our drivers. Soon we will share information about an additional measure we are working to put in place.’
The agency previously explored whether to install spike strips on-ramps in an effort to stop wrong-way drivers.
Studies show spike strips simply will not work in a real-world, high-speed application, said NTTA citing a detailed review by TxDOT.
First responders sometimes enter roadways in the wrong direction to get to major accidents, the agency added.
But if more can be done to prevent another family’s pain, Asaad said: Do it.
“At the end of the day there’s a child’s life,” he said. “We lost a 15-year-old kid.”
