23-year-old Texas cop who recently wed is killed in on-duty crash caused by wrong-way driver

A 23-year-old police officer from Texas who just got married ten months ago was killed early Sunday morning in a crash caused by a wrong-way driver.

CBS Local reported that Beaumont Police Chief James Singletary said that Officer Sheena Yarbrough-Powell and her partner were driving northbound on Cardinal Drive near Highway 347 at around 2:30 a.m. on Sunday when their cruiser was hit head-on by a Ford Mustang with no headlights on that was going southbound. The driver of the Mustang has since been identified as 18-year-old Luis Torres, who police believe was under the influence of alcohol. He survived the crash.

While her police partner is in stable condition with “severe” injuries, Yarbrough-Powell tragically died of her injuries. Singletary said that while the surviving officer has been released from the hospital, he faces a “long road to recovery.”

The police chief told reporters that Yarbrough-Powell had been sworn in as a Beaumont officer in December 2018 and had just gotten married 10 months ago.

“The next few days, weeks, months and years will be difficult for Sheena’s family, both blood and blue, but we will get through this together with the help of our community,” Singletary said. “Also, I want to ask our community to not only keep Sheena’s family and the police department in your prayers but Beaumont EMS and Fire Department. Police, Fire and EMS go hand-in-hand. We are all first responders and our paths cross multiple times throughout our respective shifts. So this loss is hard for them too.”

Yarbrough-Powell’s sister Sarah Shelton said that the officer was the youngest of six girls.

“We did a lot together growing up,” Shelton said. “We went to church a lot and did a lot of church activities like going to camp. We even had like a dance group thing we did as children. The dances were so corny. It was really lame. We would have costumes made up. It was me, her and other little girls from the church. I think we were called the Angelic Dancers.”

She went on to describe this as Napoleon Dynamite-styled interpretive dancing.

“We grew playing with Barbies,” she said. “I don’t know why we didn’t have boy ones, but if we wanted them to have boyfriends, we would just cut off the hair of the ones we thought were the ugliest and make them the boyfriends.”

Yarbrough-Powell was the only cop in their family, and Shelton said that she never gave a clear reason as to why she went into law enforcement as a career. However, she added that it didn’t surprise her, as it went along with Yarbrough-Powell’s desire to help others.

“It’s one of those things that our parents told us,” Shelton said. “We should put others before ourselves and not think selfishly. Between that and going to church and hearing that, I think that had a large impact.”

Tyler Powell, Yarbrough-Powell’s husband, has been left devastated by her death.

“I just feel like she was stolen,” he said. “No one should leave at 23.”

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