No primary source confirms claimed DPS chase and I-35 closure near Sanger, Valley View

The GvilleTX Newsroom could not confirm, through any primary source found in a web search, a claim that a high-speed Texas Department of Public Safety pursuit forced Interstate 35 to close near Sanger and Valley View. No official record describing the chase or the closure turned up in that search, and the outcome of the pursuit is likewise unconfirmed.

Valley View's official police page does not settle the matter. The page directs calls for police service to the Cooke County Sheriff's Office dispatch, which operates around the clock, and nothing on it substantiates a pursuit or a highway closure.

The section of interstate named in the claim sits inside a long-planned rebuild. In a 2019 environmental-clearance notice, the Texas Department of Transportation described widening and reconstructing roughly 15 miles of I-35 from US 380 to a point north of FM 3002, a stretch that runs through Denton, Sanger and Valley View. North of FM 3002, TxDOT's Cooke County project covers 22 miles to the first mile marker inside Oklahoma. Its interim design adds one lane in each direction, and the agency counts relief from expected traffic growth among the project's stated purposes. Denton County reported a population of just over a million in 2025 and cited a North Central Texas Council of Governments projection of nearly 1.9 million residents by 2050.

The Denton Police Department's published general orders offer one nearby example of how an agency limits chases. Those orders bar pursuits for traffic offenses alone. They generally discourage pursuits for offenses involving neither violence nor a weapon, with an exception for driving while intoxicated, and they require an officer who pursues a nonviolent suspect to articulate a justification for doing so. The orders govern Denton officers.

Federal figures give the practice a scale. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that state and local law enforcement conducted about 68,000 vehicle pursuits in 2012, and it found that pursuit-related crashes killed an average of 355 people a year from 1996 through 2015. The Police Executive Research Forum's 2023 pursuit guide recommends that officers chase only when a violent crime has occurred and the suspect poses an imminent threat of committing another. The forum's guide is a recommended standard; it is not evidence of the policy that governed the claimed Texas chase. A research analysis of federal fatal-crash records, archived in PubMed Central, counted 5,425 fatal crashes involving police pursuits and 6,352 deaths from 2009 through 2023. The yearly number of fatal pursuit crashes was lowest in 2011, at 280, and highest in 2022, at 496.