The night before Thanksgiving 2024, four young friends climbed into a Tesla Cybertruck in Piedmont, California. Three of them would never climb out. What followed was not just a crash — it was a slow-motion catastrophe that their families say could have been prevented, and that is now forcing one of the world’s most valuable companies to confront a question it has long resisted answering: What happens to people inside a Tesla when the power goes out and the doors won’t open?

A Crash, a Fire, and Doors That Wouldn’t Move
In the early hours of November 27, 2024, a Tesla Cybertruck struck a retaining wall and a tree on Hampton Road in Piedmont, California, at approximately 3 a.m. The vehicle then caught fire. Three of the four occupants — Krysta Tsukahara, 19; driver Soren Dixon, 19; and passenger Jack Nelson, 20 — died in the blaze. KTVU All three were recent Piedmont High School graduates who had come home for the holiday break. The fourth passenger, Jordan Miller, survived only because a motorist following behind them acted fast.
That good Samaritan could not get the doors open — the truck had no exterior handles — and was ultimately forced to smash through one of the vehicle’s reinforced windows with a tree branch to drag Miller, barely conscious, from the passenger seat. NBC Bay Area By the time the flames were fully raging, there was no reaching the others.
According to the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau, Dixon, Tsukahara, and Nelson died from smoke inhalation and severe burns. KRON4 The California Highway Patrol determined that Dixon had a blood alcohol level of .195 — more than twice the legal limit Local News Matters at the time of the crash, and toxicology reports confirmed the presence of cocaine in his system as well.
But for the families of the dead, impairment alone does not explain everything. The question consuming them is simpler, and far more disturbing: Why couldn’t their children get out?

“The Door Didn’t Work. She Couldn’t Get Out.”
Krysta Tsukahara was seated in the back right passenger seat. She was not critically injured in the impact. She was, by all accounts, alive and aware — trapped inside a burning vehicle as the fire spread toward her. Dbbwc
Attorneys say Tsukahara was fully conscious and aware of her situation. According to the lawsuit filed on her family’s behalf, she was unable to open her door due to an electrical failure — and neither could the bystander attempting to rescue her from outside. KRON4
The mechanics of the failure are at the heart of the lawsuits now working their way through Alameda County Superior Court. The Cybertruck’s doors are controlled by electronic buttons, both inside the cabin and on the exterior pillar. After the crash, those buttons failed. Because the Cybertruck has no physical exterior door handles, no one approaching from the outside had any grip to pull on, no mechanical fallback to yank open. The San Francisco Standard Inside, Tesla provides a manual release — but it was concealed beneath a map pocket liner at the bottom of the door, effectively impossible to find in the heat, smoke, and chaos of a post-crash fire. KRON4
The Cybertruck’s stainless-steel exoskeleton and impact-resistant windows, marketed as toughness, created an additional barrier — making the vehicle harder to breach from the outside during an emergency rescue attempt. The San Francisco Standard
“The design of this vehicle failed Krysta,” said attorney Roger Dreyer, who represents the Tsukahara family. “There was no functioning, accessible manual override or emergency release for her to escape. Her death was preventable.” Local News Matters

Lawsuits, Grief, and a Father’s Impossible Question
The Tsukahara family filed their initial wrongful death lawsuit in April, seeking answers about the collision. In October, they filed an amended complaint directly targeting Tesla’s door design — alleging that the company’s reliance on power-dependent door latches violates basic safety standards and ignores a decade of warnings and documented incidents in prior Tesla models. KTVU
The Nelson family filed a parallel lawsuit with a pointed argument: “Jack Nelson did not die from the crash; he died because Tesla’s design left him with no practical means of escape.” KRON4
Sole survivor Jordan Miller has also filed a separate lawsuit against Tesla KRON4, with his attorney arguing that a vehicle should never become a trap following an accident.
Both wrongful death suits name Tesla, the estate of driver Soren Dixon, and Charles Patterson — the reported owner of the Cybertruck — as defendants. The families say they turned to litigation as a last resort after attempts to obtain information informally went unanswered, and note that the mangled Cybertruck has remained inaccessible to their legal team since the night of the crash. KRON4
Krysta’s father, Carl Tsukahara, gave his first public interview months after losing his daughter. His words were stripped of legal abstraction: “We’ve had to endure not only the loss of our daughter, but the silence surrounding how this happened and why she couldn’t get out. This company is worth a trillion dollars — how can you release a machine that’s not safe in so many ways?” KTVU

A Pattern Tesla Has Long Been Warned About
The Piedmont crash did not emerge from nowhere. Investigators and safety analysts say Tesla’s electronic door systems have been raising red flags for years. After reviewing thousands of crash reports, photos, audio recordings, and body-camera footage, investigators identified at least 15 fatal cases in which Tesla doors failed to open, trapping people inside — some of whom died after their vehicles caught fire. Grossman Law Offices
Unlike other Tesla models, the Cybertruck has no physical exterior door handles at all. The only way to open the doors is via an electronic button — meaning if the power source is damaged in a crash, the button does nothing. The truck’s manual releases exist, but are hidden, requiring occupants to know where to look under conditions that make searching nearly impossible. Grossman Law Offices
Despite this documented pattern, Tesla has issued no recall specifically addressing the electronic door failure hazard, and has only suggested that future models may incorporate a hybrid of electronic and mechanical handles. Grossman Law Offices
The broader Cybertruck safety record has drawn scrutiny from regulators and consumers alike. By early 2025, the Cybertruck had been recalled at least eight times in its first year on sale — an unusually high frequency even by Tesla’s own standards Recharged — with issues spanning faulty inverters, stuck accelerator pedals, failing windshield wipers, rearview camera delays, and exterior panels detaching at highway speeds.
Safety analysts note that even the Cybertruck’s emergency pull cords may require passengers to remove interior paneling to access them — a task that is, for most people, unimaginable in the seconds after a crash and fire. Brclegal

The Larger Question Hanging Over the EV Industry
Tesla has not commented publicly on the Piedmont lawsuits or the specific allegations about door design. The company did not respond to multiple media requests for comment.
Meanwhile, the victims’ families make clear they are not letting impaired driving serve as a shield for the automaker. As attorney Dreyer put it, speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle: “Tesla knows that it’s happened and that it’s going to happen, and they are doing nothing but selling the car with a system that entraps people and doesn’t provide a way of extraction.”
The case arrives at a fraught moment for Tesla. The company has faced declining sales, significant stock depreciation, and growing scrutiny of its safety record — all while its CEO, Elon Musk, has become one of the most polarizing figures in American public life. The Cybertruck, once hailed as a symbol of audacious futurism, now carries a different kind of weight: the grief of three families from a small California town who believe the vehicle that killed their children was never truly safe to sell.
For Krysta Tsukahara, a sophomore studying art and design who had come home simply to celebrate the holiday with old friends, the future ended not in the crash — but in the silence that followed it, when the doors would not open and the fire moved in.