Foremost Group CEO Angela Chao was intoxicated last month when she accidentally drove her Tesla X SUV in reverse over a wall into a pond on the Texas ranch she owned with her husband, billionaire venture capitalist Jim Breyer, according to a police report released Wednesday.
Chao drowned after friends and rescue workers tried without success to get the 50-year-old shipping executive out of the submerged vehicle.
That desperate effort is detailed in the new report, which concluded she died from an “unfortunate accident.”
A toxicology report later showed that Chao had a blood-alcohol concentration of .233, the Blanco County Sheriff’s Office said in its report.
That level is nearly three times the legal limit to drive on public roads in Texas, and one that can lead to impaired behavior and other side effects.
Surveillance video from the exterior of a guest house on the ranch shows her walking “unsteadily to her vehicle” that night, according to the report.
Chao was the sister-in-law of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is married to her sister, Elaine Chao, a former head of the U.S. Labor and Transportation departments in separate GOP administrations.
Angela Chao was hosting seven close female friends at the guest house at her 4,500-acre JW Ranch in Johnson City on Feb. 10, a day after the group attended a concert by the rapper Pitbull in nearby Austin, the police report said.
Most if not all of the women were from New York and had attended Harvard Business School with Chao. Breyer reportedly was in Dubai, while the couple’s young child was staying at the main house on the ranch.
The women had shared dinner and drinks at the guest house before Chao left at around 11:30 p.m. to make the approximately one-mile drive to the main house.
Investigators later determined that Chao’s Tesla had struck a retaining wall near the pond, separating two large limestone blocks at least three feet high and weighing up to 500 pounds, with the SUV becoming “airborne after…
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