Travis Legal Offices represents Franktown crash victims on Highway 83, Highway 86, and every road in this community. Our Castle Rock office is approximately 10 miles west, and we have litigated in the 23rd Judicial District at the Douglas County Courthouse for over 26 years. When a family loses everything on a two-lane highway because a stolen vehicle crossed the center line, the legal response has to match the magnitude of the loss. That is the kind of case we exist to handle.
On November 24, 2025, the day before Thanksgiving, a stolen Toyota lost control on Highway 83 south of Franktown near Russellville Road, rolled into the oncoming lane, and struck a Ford Fusion head-on. Five people in the Fusion were killed: two adults and three children. Two juveniles in another vehicle were airlifted to a trauma center. An entire family was destroyed at a rural intersection on a two-lane highway where there was nothing between them and the oncoming vehicle except a painted yellow line.
That crash was the worst single-incident loss of life on a road near Franktown in recent memory. But it was not an isolated event on an otherwise safe road. Highway 83 is a high-speed two-lane highway with no median barrier, carrying commuter and recreational traffic between the Denver metro area and communities to the south. Highway 86, which intersects Highway 83 at the center of Franktown, recorded 265 accidents causing 109 injuries and 5 deaths between 1989 and 1999, and traffic has roughly doubled since then. Franktown sits at the convergence of these two dangerous corridors, and the crashes that happen here reflect the collision of high-speed traffic with rural infrastructure that was never designed for the volumes it now carries.
Call (303) 766-8766 for a free consultation.
Franktown is a community which was originally formed around an intersection of two highways rather than a grid of streets. Highway 83 is one of those highways and it extends from the Denver Tech Center and Parker to the North and connects them to the rural ranching areas and public lands to the South. Highway 86 is the second highway and it extends from the western side (Castle Rock) of Franktown and Interstate 25 to the East and to the eastern plains to the East. Both highways intersect at Franktown and the intersection itself represents the community’s geographical identity and also the most dangerous place in the community.
The accident statistics for the intersection of Highway 83 and Highway 86 during the years of 1989 through 1999 show 28 reported crashes resulting in 12 people injured and 1 person killed. During that same time frame the average number of cars per day traveling through the intersection increased by almost 100 percent; from approximately 7,000 vehicles per day to over 13,650 vehicles per day. Traffic volume has continued to increase in the years since the original ten year time frame. Today the intersection handles multiple times more traffic than it did when the roads were first constructed on an unaltered geometric layout. The same T-shaped intersection design, the same stop sign control features, the same sightlines and the same high-speed driving environment that caused 28 reported crashes in the past decade, currently manages traffic volumes that are many times higher than in the past decade.
The stretch of Highway 86 between Castle Rock and Franktown recorded 265 accidents causing 109 injuries and 5 deaths between 1989 and 1999. That was before the population growth that has transformed Castle Rock, Parker, Elizabeth, and the surrounding communities from small towns into some of the fastest-growing places in Colorado. The corridor now carries 13,000 or more vehicles daily, a volume that has roughly doubled since that historical data was collected. The road has not doubled in capacity. It remains a two-lane highway with limited passing zones, no median barrier, and a pavement surface that CDOT has scheduled for reconstruction.
For anyone who commutes between Franktown and Castle Rock on Highway 86, the crash history of this stretch is not abstract. It is the road they drive every day, the road where they have seen the aftermath of collisions, the road where they have been forced to detour because a crash closed both lanes. When a client comes to Travis Legal Offices after a crash on Highway 86 between Castle Rock and Franktown, we do not need to explain the road’s danger to them. They already know. Our job is to explain it to the jury.
Highway 83 south of Franktown near Russellville Road is a high-speed two-lane highway cutting through open ranch land with long sight lines, gentle curves, and the deceptive appearance of safety. The road looks manageable. It feels manageable. And then a vehicle crosses the center line, and the combined closing speed of two vehicles approaching each other at 55 mph each produces an impact that no passenger vehicle is engineered to survive.
On November 24, 2025, a stolen Toyota traveling on Highway 83 south of Franktown lost control and rolled into the oncoming lane, striking a Ford Fusion head-on. Two adults and three children in the Fusion were killed. Two juveniles in another vehicle were airlifted to a trauma center. The crash closed Highway 83 for hours while investigators reconstructed the scene.
This crash illustrates the lethal arithmetic of two-lane highways without median barriers. The stolen vehicle’s loss of control put it into the opposing lane. There was no cable barrier to catch it. There was no concrete median to redirect it. There was no rumble strip to alert the driver. There was a painted yellow line, and a painted yellow line has never stopped a vehicle traveling at highway speed. Every driver on every two-lane highway in Douglas County is one crossed line away from the same outcome. The difference between the November 2025 crash and the near-misses that happen daily on Highway 83 is measured in seconds and inches.
Five people, including three children, were killed on Highway 83 south of Franktown on November 24, 2025, when a stolen vehicle rolled into oncoming traffic and struck a Ford Fusion head-on. Highway 86 between Castle Rock and Franktown recorded 265 accidents, 109 injuries, and 5 deaths between 1989 and 1999. Traffic volumes have roughly doubled since then. Sources: Colorado State Patrol; Douglas County; CDOT.
The November 2025 crash on Highway 83 was a wrongful death case of the most devastating kind: an entire family wiped out by a single collision caused by a stolen vehicle. Colorado’s wrongful death statute (C.R.S. § 13-21-203) allows surviving family members to bring a claim for the death of a loved one caused by another person’s negligence, recklessness, or intentional conduct. When the death involves a stolen vehicle, the legal analysis expands beyond the driver to include anyone whose negligence allowed the vehicle to be stolen or who facilitated the circumstances leading to the crash.
Colorado’s wrongful death damages include economic losses (lost income, lost benefits, funeral and burial expenses) and non-economic losses (grief, loss of companionship, loss of consortium, loss of the deceased’s guidance and counsel). When three children are killed, the non-economic damages reflect the full scope of what was taken: every year of life they would have lived, every milestone they would have reached, every relationship they would have built. No dollar amount replaces a child. The wrongful death statute does not pretend otherwise. What it does is ensure that the negligence that caused the death carries a financial consequence that reflects the magnitude of the loss.
Travis Legal Offices handles wrongful death cases with the gravity they demand. These cases require meticulous investigation, expert testimony on crash reconstruction and survivability, detailed economic analysis of lifetime losses, and the ability to present a family’s devastation to a jury in terms that make the loss tangible. We have over 26 years of experience with wrongful death litigation in the 23rd Judicial District. If your family has lost someone on Highway 83, Highway 86, or any road near Franktown, call (303) 766-8766. There is a two-year statute of limitations on wrongful death claims in Colorado (C.R.S. § 13-80-102), and the investigation must begin immediately to preserve evidence that deteriorates with time.
Franktown is unincorporated. It has no police department. It has no hospital. The community is served by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office for law enforcement and by the local fire protection district for emergency medical response. Colorado State Patrol has jurisdiction on Highways 83 and 86. When a crash occurs at the Highway 83/86 intersection or anywhere in the Franktown area, the response chain begins with a 911 dispatch to agencies that cover vast geographic areas with limited resources.
The nearest hospitals are AdventHealth Parker (Level II Trauma Center, approximately 10 to 15 miles north, (303) 269-4000) and AdventHealth Castle Rock (Level III Trauma Center, approximately 10 miles west, (720) 455-5000). For catastrophic injuries, patients are airlifted to Denver-area Level I trauma centers. The November 2025 Highway 83 crash demonstrated this reality: two juveniles were airlifted because ground transport to a facility capable of treating their injuries would have taken too long. Air ambulance activation requires a severity assessment at the scene, helicopter availability, and flyable weather conditions. When any of those elements fails, the patient waits for ground transport, and the clock keeps running.
The absence of local emergency infrastructure is not a detail that affects only the worst cases. It affects every crash. A rear-end collision at the Highway 83/86 intersection that produces a concussion and whiplash still requires transport to a hospital 10 to 15 miles away. The patient still waits for the ambulance to arrive from a station that serves a wide territory. The delay between crash and treatment is still longer than it would be in Castle Rock, Parker, or any suburban community. Travis Legal Offices documents every minute of that delay and presents it as part of the damages when the delay affected our client’s medical outcome.
Franktown Emergency Resources
Franktown is the gateway to Castlewood Canyon State Park, a 2,136-acre park at 2989 North State Highway 83 featuring the remains of the Castlewood Canyon Dam (which burst in 1933, sending a 15-foot wall of water toward Denver), 13 miles of hiking trails, and popular rock climbing areas. Hidden Mesa Open Space offers hiking and mountain biking trails with mesa-top views. These parks draw visitors from across the Denver metro who travel Highway 83 to reach them.
Visitor traffic on Highway 83 creates the same hazard pattern that Cherokee Ranch creates on US 85 near Sedalia and the Renaissance Festival creates near Larkspur: unfamiliar drivers on roads they do not know, at speeds they may not be calibrated for, making turns into park entrances and trailhead parking areas while through traffic passes at 55 mph. A visitor slowing to find the Castlewood Canyon entrance on Highway 83 while a commuter behind them is traveling at full highway speed and checking a phone is the recipe for a rear-end crash at a speed differential that produces serious injuries.
The park’s historic value is an added layer of risk as well. Visitors to the Castlewood Canyon Dam ruins will likely be tired after having hiked all day, then get into their vehicles and drive down a two lane highway (Highway 83) with no median divider – and this fatigue while driving can present similar risks as drowsy commuting: reduced response times, impaired judgment and the possibility of crossing over the center line and becoming involved in a head-on crash.
Franktown is horse country. The community has a strong equestrian culture, with horse properties, riding trails, and paddocks defining the landscape. Horse trailers are a common sight on Highway 83 and Highway 86, and equestrians riding along road shoulders or crossing highways are a traffic factor that suburban communities do not face.
A horse trailer being towed by a pickup truck significantly changes the towing vehicle’s stopping distance, acceleration capability, and maneuverability. A pickup that can stop in 150 feet without a trailer may need 250 feet or more when towing a loaded horse trailer weighing 5,000 to 10,000 pounds. When a crash involves a vehicle towing a horse trailer, the crash reconstruction must account for the added weight, the altered braking dynamics, and the potential for the trailer to jackknife or separate from the tow vehicle on impact.
Equestrian-vehicle encounters on the highway present their own liability questions. Colorado law requires drivers to exercise due care around animals on or near the roadway. A driver who startles a horse by passing too closely, too fast, or while honking creates a foreseeable risk that the horse will bolt, potentially injuring the rider or causing the horse to enter the travel lane. If you were injured in an equestrian-vehicle encounter on a road near Franktown, the legal analysis involves both standard negligence principles and the specific duties drivers owe around livestock and equestrians in a rural community.
Franktown served as the original county seat for Douglas County until 1874 when Castle Rock became the new county seat. A historic 1908 structure, the Franktown Grange, is a symbol of Franktown’s early roots in the 19th century agricultural movement. Today, the community has a relatively small population, about 409 residents within the Franktown CDP (Census 2020), while the surrounding areas have a population of approximately 5,393 residents; however, the high volume of traffic on the roads through Franktown are due to the rapid growth of Castle Rock, Parker, Elizabeth, and the Denver Tech Center.
Franktown’s residents did not ask for the traffic. They chose to live in a rural community with horse properties and open space, not on a commuter highway. But Highway 83 and Highway 86 carry commuters who live in Elizabeth, Parker, and the Denver suburbs through Franktown every day, at speeds that are appropriate for a highway but dangerous for a community where children ride horses along the road, where farm equipment crosses the highway, and where the nearest hospital is 10 miles away. The disconnect between the community’s rural character and the highway traffic that passes through it is the source of Franktown’s crash problem, and it is getting worse as the surrounding communities continue to grow.
Call 911 and dial *CSP (*277) from your cell phone. Colorado State Patrol has jurisdiction on both Highway 83 and Highway 86. The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office ((303) 660-7500) also responds. Franktown has no local police department.
If the crash involves a fatality, do not move anything. Do not move the vehicles. Do not move debris. Do not disturb the scene in any way. Fatality crash scenes on rural two-lane highways are investigated by the Colorado State Patrol’s Major Crash Team, and the physical evidence at the scene, vehicle positions, tire marks, gouge marks in the pavement, debris patterns, fluid trails, is the foundation of the reconstruction that determines what happened and who was at fault. Disturbing that evidence can compromise the investigation.
If your crash involves survivable injuries, move off the roadway if you can do so safely. Highway 83 carries high-speed traffic, and secondary crashes at crash scenes are a documented hazard. Accept ambulance transport to AdventHealth Parker or AdventHealth Castle Rock. Do not refuse transport and plan to drive yourself later. The 10-to-15-mile distance to the nearest hospital means any delay between the crash and your first medical evaluation creates a gap the insurance company will use against you.
Photograph the road conditions, the visual sight lines and the geometry of the intersection where your accident occurred. Documenting traffic control devices at the intersection of Highway 83 and 86 (i.e., stop sign, yield sign, signal status if applicable), the distance of sight line into each lane of travel and any obstacles (vegetation, terrain, parked vehicles) that may have obstructed your view from entering the intersection and thus made it difficult to assess the gap of time available to make a safe decision to enter the intersection. Crash at rural intersections frequently rely upon determining if the driver who entered the intersection had sufficient time to observe on coming traffic to determine if he/she could safely enter the intersection. By taking these photographs, you are preserving this critical piece of evidence.
Contact Travis Legal Offices at (303) 766-8766. We are approximately 10 miles west of Franktown in Castle Rock.
Franktown is Douglas County’s original county seat. Before Castle Rock, before the Outlets, before the $419 million Gap Project, before the explosive growth that has transformed the I-25 corridor, Franktown was the center of Douglas County governance. The community lost that designation in 1874, but it never lost its identity. The Franktown Grange still stands. The horse properties still define the landscape. The roughly 5,400 people who live in the broader area chose this place because it is quiet, rural, and apart from the suburban sprawl that has consumed much of the Front Range.
That quiet is broken every time a crash shuts down Highway 83 or Highway 86. The roads that bring commuter traffic through Franktown are the same roads that kill people in Franktown. The November 2025 crash on Highway 83 did not just take five lives. It took the sense of safety that residents of a rural community are supposed to be able to take for granted. An entire family was destroyed on a road they probably drove every day, by a stolen vehicle they could not have anticipated, in a collision that a median barrier might have prevented.
Travis Legal Offices cannot bring back the people who are lost. No attorney can. What we can do is hold accountable the negligence, the recklessness, and the systemic failures that produce crashes on these roads. We can fight for the compensation that surviving family members need to rebuild their lives. We can present the danger of Highway 83 and Highway 86 to a Douglas County jury that understands what these roads are and what they do to the communities they pass through. Our Castle Rock office is 10 miles from Franktown. The Douglas County Courthouse is minutes from our door. If you have been injured or lost a loved one on any road near Franktown, call (303) 766-8766. The consultation is free. The fight is personal.
Travis Legal Offices represents injured people throughout the I-25 corridor and surrounding communities in Douglas County, Arapahoe County, Elbert County, and El Paso County. Click any location below to learn about the specific roads, intersections, and crash patterns in your community.
Our office is located at 333 Perry Street, Suite 203, in Castle Rock, at the intersection of Perry Street and 4th Street on the second floor. We also meet clients at their homes, hospitals, or any convenient location throughout the corridor. If you cannot come to us, we will come to you.
Todd A. Travis founded Travis Legal after 26+ years representing injured Coloradans. His career includes complex personal injury work on both plaintiff and defense sides. That experience taught him exactly how insurance companies assess cases and which attorneys they undervalue. He’s tried cases to jury verdict and built this firm on a simple principle: catastrophic injury cases require genuine attention, not assembly-line processing. When Todd’s name appears on a demand letter, insurance adjusters respond differently. He answers client calls directly.
Jordan M. Travis joined the firm after law school, bringing a perspective shaped by growing up around trial preparation and legal strategy discussions. His generational approach complements the firm’s established reputation and adds contemporary research methods to how they build cases. Together, Todd and Jordan offer something larger firms can’t replicate: deep trial experience combined with current techniques and the capacity to give each client genuine attention. When you contact Travis Legal, you’re speaking with both attorneys. The same people who will manage your case from investigation through trial.
When you call, you reach Todd or Jordan. Not a receptionist. Not an intake specialist. Your actual attorney.
We work on contingency, meaning you pay nothing unless we win. The consultation is free. Given Colorado’s three-year statute of limitations, acting quickly matters. Evidence deteriorates. Video footage gets deleted. Witnesses relocate. Company records vanish.
Call (303) 766-877 today to talk to us about your case for free.
Travis Legal Offices, LLC
333 Perry Street, Suite 203
Castle Rock, Colorado 80104
(303) 766-8766 info@travislegaloffices.com