Seventeen people were packed into the van. Minutes later, nine were dead.
On a stretch of highway already feared as the “road of death,” a single head-on impact ripped families apart and shut down BR-251 for hours. Rescue teams fought the dark, the rain, and twisted metal. What happened in those final seco… Continues…The collision on that rainy May night exposed, once again, how fragile life is on BR-251.A van full of workers returning to Ceará met an empty heavy-haul truck at kilometer 446, and in a single violent impact, nine lives — including a child — were gone before help could arrive. The wreckage was thrown off the road, turning every rescue into a race against time in steep, muddy terrain. Firefighters cut through mangled metal while SAMU teams tried to stabilize the injured in the dark.

Behind the statistics are families waiting for calls that never came, children orphaned, and a community that already knew this highway could kill. BR-251, overloaded, underbuilt, and scarred by hundreds of fatal crashes, has long been called the “rodovia da morte.” This tragedy has renewed urgent demands for lane duplication, safer shoulders, better signage, and strict enforcement.

The question haunting Minas Gerais now is whether these deaths will finally force action — or fade into yet another forgotten report.