There was supposed to be a party. I was twenty years old and in Katy, Texas, with my friends. It felt like I had a full life ahead of me. By 2:20 a.m. on June 23, 2026, that night had changed into something else: a fatal crash with a dead man and a young driver who now faces a felony charge that could change his life forever.
Several news outlets looked at court documents that showed Dejon Fortune had spent the night at a birthday party close to Tompkins High School. He drove to a Taco Bell on Westheimer Parkway after the party was over and stayed there until it closed. Two people were in his father’s BMW X5 when he got behind the wheel. At some point between the fast food parking lot and where he was going next, terrible things happened.
Deputies were told that Fortune was going between 70 and 80 miles per hour when his BMW hit Sung Bae’s 53-year-old black Cadillac XT4. Bae’s car went off the road and into a light pole, two trees, and the ground because of how hard it hit. Bae was taken to the hospital right away, but she did not make it. That person had been out that night and never came back. He was a family member.
This case is especially hard to deal with because it looks like it could have been avoided. Fortune told the police at first that he wasn’t driving. Later, he took that back and said he had been drinking. He also told police that he couldn’t remember when he last drank, which makes us wonder what kind of mood he was in when he drove. It is said that one of his passengers took alcohol out of the car after the accident, which makes people even more curious about what everyone in that car knew before the accident.
In a statement, Fort Bend County Sheriff Eric Fagan told the Bae family that he was sorry for their loss. “Impaired driving continues to claim innocent lives in our community,” he stated. Too often, police have to say things like this, and it sounds different when you think about how the victim was just driving home in the middle of the night. Bae didn’t seem to have seen the BMW coming. Most of the time, there isn’t.
Fortune was taken to the Fort Bend County Jail on one count of felony manslaughter while drunk. At the time of the report, his bond was still being looked at by a magistrate, and it wasn’t clear if he had entered a plea. Most people say he was just a young man at a birthday party before everything happened.
Cases like this make it easy to see them as moral lessons or cautionary tales that have been cleaned up for the news. But this is where a real person died. At 2 a.m., Sung Bae, 53, was driving a Cadillac on Westheimer Parkway and never got home. His family is now dealing with grief that they didn’t want or could have planned for. That fact is often forgotten when the news is too focused on the driver who is being charged.
In the US, drunk driving deaths have been stubbornly high for decades, even though there have been decades of campaigns to raise awareness, stricter laws, and rideshare apps that make other options easier to find than ever. There are tools that can help you stay sober while driving. You can get them at 2 a.m. for a low price, and they were probably easy to get that night. That’s not a verdict; it’s just a fact that comes up in cases like this one.
The case of Dejon Fortune is still being looked into. No matter what happens in court, one man is dead and another is facing serious criminal charges. Meanwhile, a family in Katy, Texas, is trying to make sense of a loss that happened out of the blue on a normal Tuesday morning.
