A late-night drive turned deadly in the early hours of Saturday morning when a 2025 Honda CR-V packed with four people went off the road on Interstate 26 near St. Matthews, South Carolina — killing one man and sending the rest scrambling for their lives.
Benjamin Winston, 35, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was riding in the front passenger seat when everything went wrong. According to the South Carolina Highway Patrol, the crash happened around 12:20 a.m. near the 133-mile marker, west of St. Matthews. The vehicle was headed eastbound when it suddenly veered off the right side of the road and crashed hard into a concrete barrier. Winston didn’t make it. The Calhoun County Coroner’s Office pronounced him dead right there at the scene.
Nobody walks away from something like that unshaken. Three other people were inside that SUV when it hit. All three survived, though they weren’t unscathed — each of them was rushed to nearby hospitals to get treated for their injuries. As of now, officials haven’t released anything about their conditions, so the full picture of how serious things are for the survivors is still unclear.
What makes this whole thing even more unsettling is that nobody yet knows why that car left the road. Troopers haven’t pinpointed a cause. No reckless driver, no blown tire, no weather event has been officially named as the culprit — at least not yet. The South Carolina Highway Patrol says the crash is still very much under investigation, and that more details will come as the case moves forward.
What’s known right now is that Benjamin Winston was a 35-year-old man far from home, riding through the night in South Carolina, and he never made it to wherever he was headed. That’s the kind of loss that settles heavy on a family — the kind that doesn’t make sense no matter how many times you turn it over in your head.
Emergency crews showed up in force overnight, working through the dark to clear the scene and make sure everyone who could be helped got that help as fast as possible. It was a serious operation that stretched well into the early hours of Saturday, turning a quiet stretch of I-26 into a flashing wall of emergency lights.
Benjamin Winston leaves behind a community in Winston-Salem that now has to process losing one of their own in a crash hundreds of miles from home. Authorities are asking anyone with information about the crash to come forward as the investigation presses on. For now, his family — and the families of those still recovering — are left waiting on answers that haven’t come yet.
