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Brakes fail, or make a mistake, or be negligent, kill four people and get 110 years.
Drive drunk, kill four people and get a tiny sentence, if any.
Except that's totally not what happned.
Don't check your truck's brakes as you are required to do before you blow down a steep grade at full speed, then bypass all the runaway truck ramps while swerving all over the place just about running dozens of motorist off the highway. Then finally when it's obvious you aren't going to be able to stop, instead of crashing into the bridge as he said he considered doing, choose instead nice soft targets to stop your truck and save your own life at the expense of four innocent motorists, and get 110 years.
It sounds more then reasonable to me. The judge gave him the minimum sentence. I would have given him the maximum, to make sure he would never get out. Whether he intended to kill those people or not, he is a very dangerous human being. Probably almost as dangerous as a mass shooter, and just as dangerous as a drunk driver.
I hope his sentence doesn't get commuted, but it probably will. A message needs to be sent to all CDL drivers, that this is not an acceptable way to drive a truck, and if you drive that way and kill someone, you are going to do serious prison time. The fact that so many truck drivers are supporting him, just shows how serious this problem is. He is just the tip of the iceberg. These truck drivers think they should be allowed to drive anyway they like.
My sympathies are with the people who died, not with the person who killed them.
What I have a problem with is the runaway ramp at the bottom of Floyd Hill and he went right past it. When you're scared as hell, which he certainly was, your instincts go right out the window regarding what to do. I've seen a few youtubes on this and it shows him weaving in and out trying to avoid hitting anybody. IIRC the exit on I-70 would be around Colfax ave. or Colorado Mills Parkway. That's several miles down the road from where he had at that point lost his brakes.
Who was the trucking company that hired him? What kind of a record does this company have?
It was a family business. It was one of his relatives who was employing him. The company seems to be out of business now. But I wouldn't be surprised if they just changed the company name and are still up to the same BS.
OK, his brakes failed, and apparently he failed to divert onto a runaway lane (which he says he did not see). But I've found several articles in which both the judge and prosecutor say he made a series of terrible decisions, a series of mistakes, a number of bad decisions, etc. What exactly are all these "terrible mistakes"? Aside from missing the diversion ramp, what exactly did he do wrong? Are they blaming the brake failure on him?
Anyone know the rest of the story? What is it that makes this a crime, rather than an accident?
1. Failing to check his brakes before starting a steep downgrade.
2. Speeding and heating his brakes up.
3. Failing to use a runaway truck ramp.
4. Recklessly swerving between lanes and running cars off the road.
5. Choosing to run into occupied vehicles instead of the bridge, resulting in four deaths and more injuries.
Most of the pictures floating around with the trucks backed up at state lines in Wyoming, NM, and Kansas were due to the high wind the other day. I work directly with truckers, had a CDL for years, and have several family members who drive trucks, if there is a boycott it is a handful of idiots, most of the guys I talk to think the guy should be in jail for a long time.
The truck was stopped with the brakes smoking at the top of Genesee, he called his company and told them his situation, the Dispatcher who had never driven a truck insisted he was almost to Denver after looking at the map and to just go ahead and continue. The DRIVER is in charge of the truck and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out if your brakes are smoking that maybe you should let them cool before continuing.
He could not speak or read english, so he had no idea what the run away ramps were for, he should not have been driving in the mountains if he did not understand how to drive in the mountains and could not read.
He was a new driver that had never driven in any mountains previously, he choose to go the most dangerous route and accept the load not having any clue how to drive in the mountains. Even experienced drivers refuse loads into and through the I-70 corridor because of how steep and dangerous it is.
He could have chosen to jack knife the truck, he could have went into the runaway truck ramps, he could have put it into a ditch, and at the end he choose to drive into a bunch of vehicles as opposed to hitting the bridge. Any one of those options was a choice an experienced driver or a driver with any common sense would have taken instead of purposely aiming for cars, he choose the most deadly option on purpose.
Truck drivers realize that he made the choices that put himself into the position to kill those people. They may think the sentence is excessive but they all think he should be in jail for a long time and are pissed about the negative attention this has brought to their industry.
What I have a problem with is the runaway ramp at the bottom of Floyd Hill and he went right past it. When you're scared as hell, which he certainly was, your instincts go right out the window regarding what to do. I've seen a few youtubes on this and it shows him weaving in and out trying to avoid hitting anybody. IIRC the exit on I-70 would be around Colfax ave. or Colorado Mills Parkway. That's several miles down the road from where he had at that point lost his brakes.
Who was the trucking company that hired him? What kind of a record does this company have?
That is really the thing with this.
The guy was a young fellow (22, I think) who had never been in the mountains, at all. The company had no business sending him, alone, on a run like that.
Some petition sites are asking for only the employer to be charged. But the employer did not make the poor decisions that caused the deaths and injuries and physical damage. The employer hired someone who had passed CDL skill and health criteria.
Both those points are debatable. From what I've been able to find, there's a lot of this that ought to come back to the employer. That kid was in way over his head, and probably had no business being in that truck in the first place - certainly not on that piece of highway.
The trucking company, Castellano 03, was operating a fleet of 5 trucks at the time of the accident, employing 5 drivers. In the year and a half prior to the accident, they had been tagged for at least 30 violations, 23 of which were safety related, and at least 10 of which involved brakes. Additionally, they had been cited 3 times for employing drivers who did not speak sufficient English to meet DOT requirements. How those drivers received CDLs in the first place is an open question, but, you know... Texas. So who knows.
And keep in mind, Aguilera-Mederos needed a translator just to give a statement after the accident, as well as at all his legal proceedings and court appearances. He also was unable to understand any documents in English, and was unable to understand many road signs when tested after the accident. This is ultimately on his employer, and it sounds as though they had a pattern of hiring bottom-of-the-barrel drivers with minimal qualifications.
Also, Aguilera-Mederos did have the presence of mind to pull over before he started down that grade and call his supervisor because he had serious doubts about his capabilities to drive that stretch of road. His boss told him something to the effect of "don't worry, you know what you're doing, it'll be fine". He still didn't feel right about it, so he called another driver with the company, a veteran he trusted and who apparently helped train him, and that driver also told him to go ahead.
That doesn't completely absolve him of responsibility, though - if he was having that many doubts, the prudent thing to do would have been to wave off. But having said that, I can understand why he didn't, because he had good reason to believe he would lose his job, and he had a wife and baby to support. And, to be honest, he doesn't seem like the sharpest bulb on the elevator; a little naive, at best.
So he made what turned out be a very bad decision, but again - he never should have been in the position of having to make that decision; that comes back to his supervisor. The liability for this decision is shared between the driver and the employer; to what degree would be for a court decide, but there's plenty to go around for everyone here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by StealthRabbit
No clemency for "I didn't mean to do it". The accident was not intentional, but the driver admittedly made several disastrous decisions, including failing to take the designated remedy purposely provided for his problem (escape ramp). These are well marked and have a broad target.
Alternatively, he should have ditched his vehicle off the right side of the road. Never taking a risk to cross a median.
I didn't see video of the entire downhill run, but in the snippets i was able to find, I was looking for escape routes, and there weren't many that looked good (although it's difficult to evaluate without knowing the vehicle speed or the exact grade). One of the things I was looking for was level terrain on the right side of the road to run off on, but in every stretch of road I saw, the ground either dropped off the edge of a cliff or sloped upward so sharply that it would have rolled the rig right back onto the highway on its side or upside down. There was at least one exit ramp that looked promising for a moment, just before the actual crash, but as we got closer, I could see that it was very unlikely to have been steep enough and/or long enough to stop or even significantly slow the truck (although, again, without knowing the vehicle speed it's hard to be sure).
There was one small area at the beginning of the exit ramp where - if he'd been thinking really fast, and a skilled driver - he may have been able to slice all the way across the ramp straight onto a fairly level grassy area, with a narrow parking lot/service alley just on the other side of it (looked like the back end of a strip mall), but he would have had to have had very fast reactions and a cool head to keep control of the truck - not to mention some serious skills. But still, it was a chance, and at that point I think he could see the stopped traffic a few hundred yards ahead of him, and had to know he was about to hit those cars and what was going to happen when he did. I would have probably gone for it and just hoped I survived, because what is there to lose? One way or another, I'm only seconds away from definitely hitting something - but I think he was too panicky at that point to react to it. But anyway, that looked like his last real chance to prevent what happened.
As far as the runaway ramp, that looked like experience and language issues played a big part. He was already losing control of the truck, and from the video, it looked like he was trying to figure out how to use his gears to slow it down. But he didn't know what he was doing, and his handling of the truck at that point was horrible. Just awful. I think he was just realizing A) how much trouble he was in, and B) that he had absolutely no clue what to do. My hunch is that he was so totally out of his depth and overloaded, and that so many things were coming at him way too fast to process, he didn't even comprehend what the sign said until he was already past it. Again, that's not an excuse - he was supposed to be able to know that, and he should have known he was supposed to be able to do that. It's on him at that moment. I'm not excusing him, just saying that's what i think happened. An experienced, well-trained driver with good English skills probably just coasts right up that ramp and gets on his cell phone when he stops.
Another thing he did wrong is that even after he missed the marked entrance to that runaway lane, he could still have swerved into it for several hundred yards. In the Midwest, we don't have many of those, but from what I remember in the West, they have a gradually thickening layer of sand and gravel to slow down a truck, but I couldn't see that clearly in the video. If that's the case, then he may not have had that much space to swerve onto the ramp without risking flipping the truck, but there should have been at least some margin of safety for him to make a belated attempt.
So yeah, there is definitely a lot here that he needs (and deserves) to be held accountable for, but it's not all on him by any means. He doesn't seem very bright, is clearly not well-trained and a questionable decisionmaker, and is completely lacking in basic English skills - but the company he drove for has a responsibility not to put people like that in their trucks and on stretches of road like that. We've got a lot of people screaming for vengeance and calling it justice, but if justice is the goal, life without parole for the driver and no consequences whatsoever for the company is not even remotely close to it. It seems quite excessive even for Colorado.
Some solid commentary has been posted here in the last several hours. There is another thing that ties into this situation and that is the commercial inspection stations AKA Port of Entries. Now there ARE times where the Ports will be closed from time to time, but considering the company he works for and the fact that this driver speaks little or no English, then how in the hell did he get past the inspection stations? Since this is a company that is based in Houston, how did he get across the New Mexico and Colorado state lines. On each side of the border both states have Port of Entries who will check your paper work and your log book. With all the different stories I have read online I have not seen this addressed and it certainly should be addressed.
Some solid commentary has been posted here in the last several hours. There is another thing that ties into this situation and that is the commercial inspection stations AKA Port of Entries. Now there ARE times where the Ports will be closed from time to time, but considering the company he works for and the fact that this driver speaks little or no English, then how in the hell did he get past the inspection stations? Since this is a company that is based in Houston, how did he get across the New Mexico and Colorado state lines. On each side of the border both states have Port of Entries who will check your paper work and your log book. With all the different stories I have read online I have not seen this addressed and it certainly should be addressed.
You do not have to speak or read English to get a CDL in some states and you are allowed to go anywhere in the country if you have a CDL and the appropriate paperwork regardless of language spoken. Since 2011 Mexican national trucks are allowed on the road as well, and the only thing they need different from Mexico is US insurance.
Fact is if people knew who are driving a lot of these semis there would be a public outcry. The largest growth in drivers ae eastern Europeans here on work visas, Somalian refugees, and Mexican nationals. The eastern Europeans and Mexican nationals all come here for 9 months at a time and work themselves to exhaustion, then go back home and live until the money runs out and they do it again. All 3 groups literally live with 3-4 drivers in the trucks so they have to park a minimal amount of time and can keep trucks running 24 hours a day 7 days a week. All of them usually share a small 2 bedroom apartment in Texas or another favorable state where they can take their 2 days off a month so the people staying there are constantly rotating.
When I say favorable states, what I mean is states where the CDL testing is minimal. There are some states in the country were you can take a written test in 1 of 20 languages or so, and then your driving test is literally driving a 26 ft box truck around an parking lot and backing into a parking space. No trailer, no highway driving, and no 10 speed manual transmissions. In Texas you have to stay in state for a certain number of hours/miles driving before they will give you the national CDL, but in other states they hand it right to you.
The good news is that there are new federal regulations on minimum training standards that are supposed to be put in place early next year. I say supposed too because they were supposed to take affect on March 1st of this year, but the new administration refused to implement the changes until they had time to review (in other words they did not want credit going to Trump.). Sad part is it should have been done 50 years ago when the union was forced out.
You do not have to speak or read English to get a CDL in some states and you are allowed to go anywhere in the country if you have a CDL and the appropriate paperwork regardless of language spoken. Since 2011 Mexican national trucks are allowed on the road as well, and the only thing they need different from Mexico is US insurance.
Fact is if people knew who are driving a lot of these semis there would be a public outcry. The largest growth in drivers ae eastern Europeans here on work visas, Somalian refugees, and Mexican nationals. The eastern Europeans and Mexican nationals all come here for 9 months at a time and work themselves to exhaustion, then go back home and live until the money runs out and they do it again. All 3 groups literally live with 3-4 drivers in the trucks so they have to park a minimal amount of time and can keep trucks running 24 hours a day 7 days a week. All of them usually share a small 2 bedroom apartment in Texas or another favorable state where they can take their 2 days off a month so the people staying there are constantly rotating.
When I say favorable states, what I mean is states where the CDL testing is minimal. There are some states in the country were you can take a written test in 1 of 20 languages or so, and then your driving test is literally driving a 26 ft box truck around an parking lot and backing into a parking space. No trailer, no highway driving, and no 10 speed manual transmissions. In Texas you have to stay in state for a certain number of hours/miles driving before they will give you the national CDL, but in other states they hand it right to you.
The good news is that there are new federal regulations on minimum training standards that are supposed to be put in place early next year. I say supposed too because they were supposed to take affect on March 1st of this year, but the new administration refused to implement the changes until they had time to review (in other words they did not want credit going to Trump.). Sad part is it should have been done 50 years ago when the union was forced out.
Does the major driver shortage they talk about effect this also? If this shortage exists, what could really be done to change anything?
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