A blown truck tire last week spelled the most recent tragedy for a Kyle family that has seen three of its five members die in accidents in three months.

On April 16, 46-year-old Larry Earp Jr. was driving a heavy work truck with a crane south on Texas 95, near Holland in Bell County, when his left front tire blew out, Holland Fire Chief Coleman Benner said. His wife, Anita Earp, was following in a car behind him and watched the truck flip and roll repeatedly before getting wedged in nearby trees, Benner said.

Larry Earp was killed on impact. His death followed those of the couple's two sons, Larry Earp III, 25, and Tanner Earp, 17, who died in January while kayaking on Canyon Lake.

"My husband was my knight in shining armor," Anita Earp wrote in an email to the American-Statesman on Friday. "Our boys were everything to us. I believe that God saved my husband because he couldn't live without them."

The elder Earp's survivors include his wife, his daughter, Crystal Bradshaw, and her husband and children, according to an obituary.

Anita Earp had to be taken to the hospital after witnessing the wreck, Benner said. When she told a sergeant she'd already buried two sons in January, he wondered if theirs was the family of the kayakers he'd heard about on the news.

"Sure enough, it was their two sons I was thinking of," he said. "And now, he's 46 years old and he's dead."

It took more than five hours to clear the wreckage from the scene, Benner said. The cause of the tire failure is unknown, he said.

Larry Earp Jr.'s obituary described him as the son of a preacher, a hard worker and a heavy equipment operator. He married his wife in 1989. He worked as a diesel mechanic and eventually started his own business, a "dream come true." In his spare time, he'd sell the beef jerky he'd started making for himself.

"R.I.P. The Three Musketeers," a Facebook friend wrote Sunday on a remembrance page for the younger Earps.

On the Facebook page honoring her sons, Anita Earp relayed stories of her joy at finding out she was pregnant and how, especially to Tanner, the youngest, her daughter Crystal was like a second mom. The week before her husband's death, Anita Earp wrote of missing their sons.

"A lifetime is nothing compared to eternity," she wrote. "My promise of spending eternity with my precious babies is the only thing that gets me through each day."