Sheriff's Report: Angela Chao Was Intoxicated at the Wheel

UPDATE Mar 20, 2024 7:20 PM CDT

Angela Chao was intoxicated when she drove into a pond and died last month, a Texas law enforcement report released Wednesday says. Chao, a shipping industry CEO and sister-in-law to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, died in an "unfortunate accident," the Blanco County Sheriff's Office wrote. Investigators found that her blood alcohol level was nearly three times the state's legal limit for drivers, the AP reports.

Mar 11, 2024 12:37 AM CDT

Not much information was released about the February death of Angela Chao, a shipping executive with ties to China (and Mitch McConnell's sister-in-law), beyond the fact that she died in a car accident. Now, the Wall Street Journal takes an extensive look at her final moments, as well as at Chao herself and the life she led up until her death at age 50. She'd invited seven of her friends from her days at Harvard Business School to celebrate the Lunar New Year weekend at her family's Texas ranch, and had just said goodnight to them late on February 9 when she got into her Tesla Model X SUV to drive the four minutes back to the family home on the property so she'd be there when her 3-year-old son woke up in the morning. Within minutes, she made a frantic phone call to one of those friends begging for help. What ensued was chaos that ended with Chao dead.

She told the friend she'd accidentally put the SUV in reverse rather than drive (a mistake she'd made before on that vehicle's gearshift) while making a three-point turn, and it accelerated backward over an embankment and into the stock pond behind her. Her friends called 911, and ran out to help along with the ranch manager and his wife, but no one, including the emergency responders who eventually arrived to the rural location (some of whom parked and walked due to the terrain), could break the glass (which may have been laminated glass—praised for being ultra-safe, but also almost impossible to break underwater). Eventually, the SUV was towed out of the water, but it was too late: Chao did not survive. The full piece delves into Chao's background, her and her husband's reasons for moving to Texas, the conspiracy theories surrounding her death, and much more. Read it at the Journal. (More Longform stories.)