Overview
- A Tesla Model 3 drove through the front wall of a Katy, Texas, home and struck 76-year-old Martha Avila in a crash that occurred on June 19, investigators say.
- Prosecutors and crash investigators who downloaded the car’s event logs, camera video and the driver’s phone records wrote that the accelerator was pressed to 100% over about six seconds, the vehicle hit about 73 mph, and the brake pedal was not used before impact.
- The driver, Michael Butler, told first responders he had the car in Autopilot or Full Self-Driving and said he passed out, while Tesla executives publicly disputed that account and said telemetry shows the driver manually overrode the system.
- Butler was arrested and charged with manslaughter, booked into the Harris County Jail on a $150,000 bond with court-ordered monitoring and driving restrictions, and faces pending arraignment and pretrial proceedings.
- Avila’s family has filed a wrongful-death suit against Butler and Tesla and both NHTSA and the NTSB have opened investigations, which could influence civil liability and regulatory actions given past probes and recalls of Tesla’s driver-assistance systems.