A Marlow Man Retired in June and a Pack of Feral Hogs Had Other Plans

Roger Cummings retired in June after forty years at the same lumber company.

Two months later, a rural Oklahoma road put ten feral hogs directly in his path.

A pack of feral hogs turned Roger Cummings's last drive into something Oklahoma is only starting to take seriously.

Forty Years at One Company, Two Months Into Retirement

Roger Gregory Cummings spent four decades working at Marlow Lumber Company in Stephens County, the kind of job where everybody in town knows your name.

He'd just retired in June, and he'd just celebrated his fortieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Soyna.

Late Wednesday night, driving a rural stretch of road about ninety miles south of Oklahoma City, his vehicle slammed into a pack of roughly ten feral hogs.

The impact sent the vehicle into a ditch, through a fence, and rolling.

Cummings, 63, didn't survive, trapped under the wreck when it came to rest.

Troopers with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol confirmed he didn't have a seatbelt on.

Marlow Lumber owner Barbara Johnson called him "part of our family here" and said the whole community was "shocked and saddened."

"People hit wildlife all the time, but we don't get fatalities often," she said.

Oklahoma Has a Million Hog Problem and No Real Plan to Fix It

State wildlife officials put the total feral hog population somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million animals, a range wide enough to show nobody actually has an exact count.

Seventy of Oklahoma's 77 counties have them, worst in the southern half, exactly the stretch Cummings was driving through.

One group of hogs moving together at night can wreck several acres of a farmer's field before sunrise, and they reproduce fast enough that killing a handful barely makes a dent by the following season.

This isn't just an Oklahoma headache.

A nationwide study of insurance claims from 2015 to 2022 tracked nearly 16,700 wild pig vehicle collisions in a single year, adding up to $103.8 million in vehicle damage.

Texas alone absorbed $56.2 million of that, with Florida a distant second at $12.4 million, and the researchers behind the study found crash rates in Texas and Hawaii running "more than seven times higher" than the local hog populations there would explain.

Oklahoma's night shooting exemptions and trap permits are the main tools the state currently hands landowners.

Real money finally started moving just six days before Cummings died, when USDA announced $35 million in new eradication grants across 14 states, including Oklahoma, through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

That funding exists because feral hogs tear up tens of millions of dollars in Oklahoma crops and pasture every single year.

Roger Cummings is the reason that a program built for farmland just ran into a gap it was never designed to cover.

The Cost Nobody Puts on a Balance Sheet

State wildlife agencies are good at measuring crop damage and repair bills.

They are not built to measure what happened outside Marlow.

A man who worked forty years at the same company, who'd been retired two months, who'd just marked forty years of marriage, is gone because ten animals nobody is required to control were standing in a road at night.

The insurance data proves this is getting more common, not less, and Oklahoma's hog population sits in the high six figures with no ceiling in sight.

Barbara Johnson said her town doesn't lose people to wildlife very often.

At the rate these animals are multiplying across the southern half of the state, that sentence has an expiration date, and nobody in Oklahoma City is treating it like a deadline.

Rural drivers already know to watch for deer at dusk, and every farm kid learns that lesson early.

Nobody's teaching drivers that a sounder of ten hogs can be standing in the middle of a dark two lane road with zero warning and enough combined weight to flip a pickup truck.

That's the gap between a wildlife nuisance and a genuine road hazard, and Oklahoma crossed it the night Roger Cummings didn't make it home.

The new USDA money running through the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry and Wildlife Services will help a wheat farmer protect his fence line.

It won't put up a single hog crossing sign on the road outside Marlow, and until somebody in that agency decides highway deaths count as a feral hog problem too, the next family finding out the hard way is only a matter of time.

Sources:

• Staff, "Retired Oklahoma Man Killed After Vehicle Slams Into Pack of 10 Feral Hogs," Slay News, September 8, 2026.
• Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, "Feral Hogs," wildlifedepartment.com, 2026.
• Staff, "Frequency and vehicle damage costs of wild pig-vehicle collisions in the United States, 2015 to 2022," European Journal of Wildlife Research, 2024.
• Staff, "Oklahoma highway accident highlights growing danger of feral hogs," NBC News, 2026.
• Staff, "USDA Expands Feral Swine Eradication and Control Efforts Across Impacted States," Oklahoma Farm Report, September 2, 2026.