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18 wheels and countless dangers

Trucking companies often put non-English speakers, felons, addicts in driver's seat, but rarely take blame in fatal crashes


12:16 AM CDT on Sunday, September 17, 2006

By GREGG JONES, HOLLY BECKA, JENNIFER LaFLEUR and STEVE McGONIGLE / The Dallas Morning News


First of three parts

On a sunny December afternoon, Kim Hughes turned onto State Highway 114 in Wise County and headed west toward home in Paradise. Christmas was eight days away. Four generations were crammed into her GMC Yukon after a morning of holiday shopping.

In the cab of an 18-wheeler leased to TXI Transportation Co., Ricardo Rodriguez drove east on Highway 114, riding herd on 73,000 pounds of truck and a trailerload of sand. An illegal immigrant from Mexico, Mr. Rodriguez had used a fake Social Security number to get a Texas commercial driver's license six years earlier. He had found steady work around North Texas driving rock trucks and other 18-wheelers, his history of immigration arrests and truck safety violations ignored or overlooked.

Just east of Paradise, on a flat stretch of road, the mom and the trucker met.

Mr. Rodriguez crossed the center line of the two-lane road and barreled head-on toward Ms. Hughes at 60 to 65 mph, a civil jury later concluded. With trees and a creek bed blocking her escape to the right, Ms. Hughes turned left, into the oncoming eastbound lane.

Just then, Mr. Rodriguez turned back toward his lane. Too late, Ms. Hughes swerved right. The Yukon struck the big rig on the driver's side, scraped along the trailer and spun off the back. A Ford pickup behind the truck smashed into the Yukon, injuring the pickup's occupants and nearly tearing apart the SUV.

Ms. Hughes' 14-year-old son, Shiloh, and 70-year-old mother, Joyce Watkins, died almost instantly. Ms. Hughes, 38, and her 17-year-old daughter, Afton Hughes Royse, pregnant with twins, died later in a Fort Worth hospital, without regaining consciousness.

Amid the Christmas presents and holiday treats, the only sounds of life from the shattered SUV were the screams of Afton's 14-month- old son, Jagr Royse, and the frantic shouts of a female voice on Shiloh's cellphone.

Mr. Rodriguez climbed from his truck, uninjured.

Trucking companies in Texas often gamble on drivers such as Mr. Rodriguez, a seven-month Dallas Morning News investigation has found. They hire illegal immigrants who struggle to read road signs and communicate in English with police and emergency personnel. They hire felons, drunks and drug addicts. Sometimes, they make only cursory checks of work history and driving records, then put the new hires behind the wheel of rigs with the destructive potential of guided missiles.

When accidents occur, trucking companies defend their drivers and often blame the other vehicles – and in many cases the dead occupants – regardless of the evidence. They typically fight any release of information about their drivers and vehicles, and wage protracted legal battles to avoid blame.

Beyond that, the companies suffer few consequences, in part because the soaring number of trucks on Texas highways are overwhelming regulators and law enforcement officers. Mr. Rodriguez was never ticketed by the Texas Department of Public Safety or charged with a crime. Federal immigration authorities didn't deport him. State officials didn't suspend his license.

DPS never took action against TXI for its role in putting Mr. Rodriguez on the road that day and continuing to employ him, even after he admitted under oath that he entered the U.S. illegally, exaggerated his truck-driving experience on his job application and had a fake Social Security number. Mr. Rodriguez continued driving for TXI for at least another six months after he made those disclosures in front of a company lawyer.

DPS did not even subject TXI to a compliance review – a procedure by which trucking companies can be fined or forced out of business for failing to comply with rules and one which regulators say promotes greater road safety.

Ultimately, Mr. Rodriguez and TXI, part of Dallas-based Texas Industries Inc., were held accountable by the recourse of last resort for many truck accident victims: a lawsuit.

On May 13, 2004, a Wise County civil jury unanimously found Mr. Rodriguez, TXI and the owner of the leased truck, Aurelio Melendez, negligent: Mr. Rodriguez for his operation of the rock truck, Mr. Melendez for entrusting the rig to him, and TXI for hiring the truck and its driver. The jury awarded $23.5 million in damages to the victims' families.

TXI, which under federal regulations is responsible for the damages against Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Melendez, is appealing the verdict. It contends the dead driver, not the trucker, caused the accident.

"We had an experienced driver with a good driving record with good equipment," said Mark Stradley, a Dallas attorney who represents TXI in the Wise County lawsuit. He described the 46-year-old Mr. Rodriguez as a hard-working father of three.

Randy Hughes, who lost his ex-wife and children in the accident, feels betrayed by the trucking industry that once was his livelihood and by authorities responsible for enforcing trucking regulations.

"It feels like you've been let down, that people didn't do their job right or he wouldn't have been here and maybe my family would," he said. "I think every day, how many more is out there that's like this guy was? Whose family is he going to run over?"



Profits soar, safety drops

More than 5,200 people died in accidents involving large trucks in the U.S. last year – 502 in Texas. The state consistently leads the nation in fatalities, in part because it has more roadway miles and the second-highest number of registered trucks.

The state's fatality rate, measured in truck crash deaths per 100,000 people, was 24th nationwide. California, the only state whose volume of truck traffic exceeds Texas, ranked No. 38. Another 10,000 people, on average, are injured in Texas each year in crashes involving big trucks.

Responsibility for these accidents is hotly contested; DPS investigators typically don't assess blame. Even the department's database refers only to "contributing factors" not "cause."

The most comprehensive national study, released in March by the U.S. Department of Transportation, found that truck drivers were at fault in at least 44 percent of all accidents between cars and big trucks. The American Trucking Associations, which represents the industry's biggest companies, says trucks cause only about 25 percent of fatal accidents involving cars.

When trucking companies are to blame, records show, it's because truckers drive too fast, don't pay attention, work too many hours or take to the road in poorly maintained equipment – sometimes with the knowledge and encouragement of their employers.

Many Texas trucking companies and their drivers also flout safety laws with little fear of punishment. Only about 1,000 of the state's more than 64,000 registered trucking companies faced compliance reviews last year. And only about 37 percent of the trucks inspected in Texas last year underwent the most thorough inspection, known as a Level 1. The majority of those were done on Mexican trucks that travel only a few miles north of the border before returning home.

Nationwide, the rates of fatal crashes and fatalities have declined about 24 percent in the last decade, in part because of rising seat-belt usage and safety innovations, such as airbags and anti-lock brakes. But the number of deaths in large-truck accidents is about the same as it was in 1994 because more trucks are on the road, driving more miles than ever.

"If you have enough trucks on the road, I don't care how confident your safety director is and how closely you adhere to the guidelines, you're going to have accidents," said Tom Fee, a Dallas lawyer who defends trucking companies. "It's unfair to paint with a broad brush that this is a dirty industry that is cutting corners just to put money in their pocket. But there are bad apples, fly-by-night operators that spoil the whole apple cart."

In Texas, the number of intrastate carriers increased 43 percent in the past five years, with a similar increase in the number of interstate carriers based here. The number of registered large trucks in the U.S. increased 24 percent from 1994 to 2004. Business is so good, in fact, that U.S. trucking companies reported a record year in 2005: They generated $623 billion in revenue while hauling nearly 70 percent of the nation's freight.


Trucking boom costly

The Dallas-Fort Worth area is both an important hub for the nation's trucking companies and a crossroads in the movement of goods. On the streets and highways of Dallas and surrounding counties, long-haul, interstate trucks moving food, appliances and other commodities vie for space with short-haul, intrastate trucks carrying rock, sand and gravel to area construction sites.

The trucking industry's growth has overwhelmed law enforcement agencies. The problem is especially acute in Texas, where U.S.-based trucks pick up loads at the Mexican border and fan out across the country. U.S.-Mexico trade has more than doubled since the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented in 1994, according to federal data. About 68 percent of truck traffic from Mexico enters the U.S. at the Texas border.

In the late 1990s, DPS asked the state Legislature for additional enforcement officers to keep weigh stations open and conduct roadside inspections. The Legislature cut in half one department request. Two years later, it slashed DPS' request for 127 more troopers to five.

Since then, DPS has had to rely on federal money for additional truck inspectors, almost all of whom have been assigned to the border. That has left staffing throughout the rest of Texas stagnant, at slightly more than 300 inspectors.

"The whole attitude is the industry will regulate itself," said Alan Powers, a Decatur attorney who represented victims in the TXI accident.

Maj. Mark Rogers of the DPS Commercial Vehicle Enforcement service in Austin said his force had no permanent presence in 128 of the state's 254 counties.

He also said some trucking companies openly taunt the state's overwhelmed commercial vehicle officers.

Trooper Randy McDonald, based in Decatur, northwest of Fort Worth, said that when he recently ticketed a big-rig driver for a local oil company, the trucker passed on a message from his boss: The troopers could write all the tickets they wanted, but it wouldn't change anything. The company was willing to break truck weight limits and other safety rules to maximize profits.

"I've been here a long time," said Maj. Rogers, "and they've been saying that same thing for a long time."


Pressures of low pay

One of the chief legacies of the federal government's deregulation of shipping rates in the early 1980s, which made it possible for virtually anyone with a truck to go into business, is that trucking has become fiercely competitive. The vast majority of trucking companies operate along the margins of profitability, and about 40,000 go out of business every year, said Jerry Donaldson, senior research director for the nonprofit Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

Corporate America has leveraged this competition to push shipping rates even lower. It has also put more pressure on trucking companies to deliver loads at a specific time, as part of "just-in-time" inventory management that lets companies keep fewer products and spare parts on hand and use trucks as rolling warehouses. Late drivers can lose a load, money, even a customer.

In response, trucking companies push their truckers hard.

"The managers, the owners of trucking companies unquestionably put the dollar above the safety of the traveling public," said Frank Branson, a Dallas plaintiff's attorney who has handled hundreds of truck accident cases. "They treat mutilations and deaths as the cost of doing business."

Trucking companies say a shortage of drivers, not safety shortcuts, is the biggest problem facing their industry. Long-haul trucking companies need 20,000 additional drivers, and that could exceed 100,000 drivers over the next eight years, according to a 2005 study commissioned by the American Trucking Associations.

Industry experts and independent truckers say the problem is a lack of drivers willing to work for such low pay in a business notorious for long hours, extended time away from home, delivery deadlines that don't accommodate bad weather or traffic and unpaid downtime waiting for loads.

Some of the biggest carriers have tried to stem the declining pool of experienced drivers by increasing wages and benefits. They pay drivers by the hour rather than by the load or mile, a practice safety experts say encourages drivers to speed and drive fatigued.

Drivers for J.B. Hunt Transport Inc. had fewer accidents after the Arkansas- based company increased driver pay in 1997, University of Michigan researchers found. A 1 percent increase in pay rate resulted in a 1.33 percent decrease in crash risk, said Daniel Rodriguez, one of the study's authors who is now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Lax vetting of drivers

Regardless of pay, companies are supposed to hire safe drivers and make sure they follow the rules.

Federal regulations require prospective drivers to disclose in writing such information as the previous three years' employers, motor vehicle accidents and traffic tickets, and the reason for leaving a job. The company is supposed to verify that information and check a driver's motor vehicle and safety performance records for the previous three years. Although the law doesn't require companies to do criminal background checks, it does ban truckers convicted of certain crimes from driving for a period of time.

Every driver a company hires is supposed to read and speak English well enough to converse with the general public, understand highway traffic signs and signals, respond to official inquiries and make entries on reports and records.

Texas doesn't require intrastate truck drivers to speak English and doesn't enforce the English- language requirement on interstate drivers unless "it becomes a true safety issue," said Maj. Rogers. He said the law was never intended to be enforced in roadside inspections, rather by the companies themselves.

The employer's responsibilities also apply to leased trucks and drivers, which companies often use to lower overhead costs.

But some companies do nothing more than make a phone call or send a fax to one of the former employers listed, court documents reviewed by The News show. If the former employer doesn't respond, the company is supposed to make a note of that in the driver investigation file and report the failure to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, but that often doesn't happen.

Clay Miller, a Dallas lawyer who has sued trucking companies in dozens of wrongful death and injury cases, said inadequate vetting of drivers "is a huge issue," especially with smaller companies. Larger companies often subscribe to a service that does a cursory background check on a driver, he said, allowing companies to say they've fulfilled their legal obligations.


Trucking's day laborers

Driver vetting is especially lax in the sand and gravel hauling business, an industry crucial to North Texas' booming construction sector. Dallas County leads the state in the number of active gravel pits and rock quarries, with 40. Nationally, Texas ranks second to California in construction sand and gravel sold or used.

Many sand and gravel haulers are the trucking industry's equivalent of undocumented day laborers. Paid by the load, they are frequently hired by homebuilders and construction contractors, even though they often lack proper insurance or registration.

"You can sit outside any rock quarry in Texas and find them," said Bill Webb, former president of the Texas Motor Transportation Association, the state's largest trucking industry group.

Questions about a trucker's training and experience surfaced soon after Wise County resident Pamela Nielsen sued Aggregate Haulers Inc. in 2002, two years after being seriously injured when one of the company's 18-wheel rock trucks forced her off the road on Highway 114 between Boyd and Paradise.

The truck driver, Esteban Hernandez, was ticketed for an improper lane change at the accident scene. He testified in a deposition that he had driven a bus for the El Conejo line in Texas before buying a big truck and signing an exclusive lease agreement with Aggregate Haulers to transport sand and gravel.

The San Antonio-based company hired Mr. Hernandez in violation of its own guidelines that required drivers to have a minimum of two years of verifiable experience, Ms. Nielsen's attorneys argued in court filings. Mr. Hernandez testified he had only 10 months of experience driving a rock hauler in the U.S.

Aggregate also didn't verify his previous three years' experience, as required by federal law, but played down the importance of that requirement.

"We don't get responses very often, in fact, and we put people to work every day that we get absolutely no response from previous employers," testified Jay Griffin, Aggregate's director of safety. "The fact of the matter is we still put them to work. We still feel confident that we're putting a safe driver on the road."

The company contended that Ms. Nielsen caused the accident by suddenly passing its truck in the right lane. But in October 2003, it agreed to pay the woman an undisclosed amount and to set up $100,000 trust funds for each of her two daughters. The company did not admit liability.

JTM Materials of Denton broke no laws in employing Jerry Lee Largent as a rock hauler under a lease agreement with Hammer Trucking Co., but was apparently unaware of his criminal record and traffic violations, court records show.

In his job application for JTM, Mr. Largent noted his 15 years of experience driving rock trucks for small Wise County companies. He disclosed that he had been involved in a fatal accident in November 1993, had received a speeding ticket in June 1996 and temporarily lost driving privileges for not having insurance on his personal vehicle. He checked "no" beside the question: Have you ever been convicted of a crime?

JTM used a private service to obtain a driver's record report that stated Mr. Largent's driving record contained "no reported convictions or accidents" in the three years preceding Sept. 12, 1996.

The trucking company didn't obtain a DPS report on Mr. Largent's driving record or run a criminal background check on him, according to court documents. If it had, JTM would have learned that Mr. Largent had been arrested for burglary in the early 1970s, convicted of driving while intoxicated in 1980 and convicted of methamphetamine possession in 1984 and sentenced to three months in jail. He was charged with driving while intoxicated in February 1994 but pleaded guilty to reckless conduct, received deferred adjudication and was sentenced to community service. He also had been ticketed five times between 1982 and 1990 for driving without liability insurance, a DPS report showed.

Mr. Largent was hired in September 1996 to haul crushed rock from a JTM quarry in Wise County to Dallas-area construction sites. Late one Saturday evening two months later, Mr. Largent's 18-wheeler collided with a car driven by Grant Morris on a Bridgeport street. Mr. Morris was seriously injured; Mr. Largent pleaded guilty to driving while drunk. After a protracted legal battle, Mr. Morris received a $1.9 million settlement.


Cutting corners

An attempt to require quarries and concrete plants to check the insurance and state registrations of trucks picking up loads failed last year when sand and gravel producers used their political clout in Austin to defeat legislation proposed by the Texas Motor Transportation Association.

Leading the effort to kill the legislation were the Texas Aggregates and Concrete Association and the Associated General Contractors, said Mr. Webb.

"When we start talking to them about policing the unregistered trucks, they say they can't do it – it would drive up their costs," he said.

Jennifer Newton, a spokeswoman for the Associated General Contractors in Austin, said she was unfamiliar with the legislation cited by Mr. Webb and would have no comment on it.

Michael Stewart, executive director of the Texas Aggregates and Concrete Association in Austin, said operators of quarries and concrete plants already check the insurance and registration of haulers to protect themselves from liability. "If they don't they're foolish, and they're playing Russian roulette with the system," he said.

Maintaining big trucks also drives up costs, so some companies try to run the rigs as long as possible between overhauls. They seek maximum mileage from tires. They ignore worn brake pads or maladjusted air brakes. They overlook or miss loose lug nuts and cracked trailer frames, as seen in recent spot truck inspections in Wise County.

State and federal inspectors ordered off the road about one-third of the trucks they stopped in each of three recent crackdowns. Some drivers said they had reported the maintenance problems to their employers but were told to keep driving.

With an 80,000-pound rig, the consequences of ignoring a problem are sometimes deadly.

In March 2002, Nelta Osborn was driving her rig for Celadon Trucking Service Inc. west along Interstate 30 in southwest Arkansas when another trucker radioed that a hose on her trailer was dragging the ground. Ms. Osborn pulled over and found a tiny hole had been worn in one of her air brake hoses. Her co-driver, husband Tom Osborn, stuck a toothpick in the hole and wrapped it with electrical tape, according to court records.

Back on the road, Mr. Osborn described the fix to a Celadon dispatcher. The dispatcher advised the trucker to get the hose fixed at a garage but remarked on his ingenuity: "Were you a Boy Scout?"

As they roared southwest along I-30 into Texas, the Osborns passed truck garages where they could have had the brake hose repaired or replaced, but they drove on. Just west of Texarkana, the hose failed, and the air brakes locked. The 18-wheeler screeched to a stop in the interstate's passing lane. Matthew Giuliano, a 23-year-old newly commissioned Army second lieutenant driving to Fort Hood for his first assignment, slammed into the back of the truck and was killed.

"If you look behind the curtain, you tend to see an industry that is paying truck drivers less because of the fierce competition," said Fort Worth attorney Steve Laird, who represented the Giuliano family in a lawsuit against Celadon. "And when truck drivers are not paid as well as they once were, they feel that there is an incentive to not only push the envelope but to sometimes break the rules."

In April 2005, a Waco jury found Indiana-based Celadon at fault and awarded the Giuliano family $17.5 million. Celadon settled the case by agreeing to pay the family $1.25 million, with no admission of liability. After the jury trial, Celadon chairman and chief executive officer Steve Russell extended condolences to the family and defended his company's business practices.

"This tragic situation was an isolated incident and is not reflective of the way our company does business," he said in a statement. "The owner-operator team involved was immediately suspended after the accident and never drove for the company again."


A history of problems

In the December 2002 accident that killed four members of the Hughes family, investigators determined the TXI-leased truck was properly maintained. Driver log records showed that Mr. Rodriguez was under the state daily driving limit of 12 hours at the time. His driving record wasn't even particularly alarming by rock hauler standards: He overturned an 18-wheeler leased to TXI and got three speeding tickets in the late 1990s.

The case against TXI came down to whether the company had fulfilled its legal obligations to check the driver's qualifications and prior work history. Regulations didn't require TXI to road-test Mr. Rodriguez.

There were several problems with the application Mr. Rodriguez filled out for TXI. For starters, he didn't say why he had left three trucking jobs in three years, as federal regulations required. There were also questions about his experience.

Mr. Rodriguez later testified he had 20 years of experience in trucking and had driven for "many, many companies" in Mexico over several years. But he could identify only one by name.

On his TXI application, Mr. Rodriguez listed a series of truck-driving jobs in the U.S. dating to 1994. However, he told U.S. immigration officers on two occasions that he didn't enter the U.S. until 1996. He testified in his civil trial deposition that he had worked in the U.S. in the 1980s and returned in 1996. But state records showed he didn't obtain a Texas commercial driver's license until October 1996.

TXI's transportation manager, Jonathan Kennemer, testified that he believed the company had tried, but failed, to confirm Mr. Rodriguez's claim to have worked for a Coronado Trucking in Dallas from 1994 to 1996. "If I remember correctly, they were out of business," said Mr. Kennemer, who recently left the company.

Mr. Rodriguez also stated that he had driven for a company called Data Documents from February 1996 to January 1997. It turned out he had worked at the company, but not as a truck driver. And he had claimed to have driven a truck for Aggregate Haulers from December 1999 until May 2001; Aggregate later informed TXI that Mr. Rodriguez had driven for the company for only three months, according to court records.

Mr. Rodriguez also stated on his job application that he left a job with Aggregate Haulers for a better paying job, when actually he had been deported by U.S. immigration authorities.

Mr. Kennemer would later describe Mr. Rodriguez's job application as "incomplete," but said it didn't raise concerns.

The trucker testified that he used the fake Social Security number to take his commercial driver's license test in Texas in 1996. Under state law, he was allowed to take the test in Spanish. Even in his native tongue, Mr. Rodriguez failed the general knowledge and air brake tests on his first try, according to DPS records.

His shaky knowledge of trucks and spotty English didn't hurt his ability to find work driving 18-wheelers in the Dallas area. After six years of driving, interrupted only by two arrests by U.S. immigration authorities as he went back and forth to Mexico, Mr. Rodriguez went to work driving trucks for a Dallas man named Aurelio Melendez in 2002.

Mr. Melendez owned nine trucks at the time, all leased to TXI. He testified that he road-tested Mr. Rodriguez but didn't make any record of it, as federal rules require. He also testified that he wasn't familiar with the Texas Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, which govern trucking companies.

Mr. Rodriguez was hauling his last load of the day to a construction site in Richardson when he collided with the Hughes family. He told the lead DPS investigator that the SUV was in his lane and that he tried to avoid it by steering to the right. Mr. Rodriguez was the only eyewitness. The trooper working the case had never been lead investigator on a fatal accident, and she accepted Mr. Rodriguez's version of events as fact. The trooper found Ms. Hughes at fault, and no charges were filed.


TXI stands by its driver

Attorneys for TXI and the plaintiffs continue to contest most of the key facts as to what happened, and an appeal is pending.

TXI blames Ms. Hughes, suggesting that she crossed the center line either because she was eating, talking on a cellphone or had a tire blow out.

The judge hearing the civil case, however, rejected the company's request to introduce phone records showing that Ms. Hughes' ex-husband had called her around the time of the accident. The court ruled there was no evidence that a phone call might have caused the accident.

Attorneys for the family said Ms. Hughes' son, Shiloh, was the only person in the Yukon on a cellphone at the time of the accident. When a motorist approached the Yukon to render assistance, she heard Shiloh's friend screaming through the open line.

Another crucial point of dispute is who crossed the center line first. At the accident scene, and in a later deposition, Mr. Rodriguez said it was Ms. Hughes. He said he steered to the right "for two or three seconds" in an attempt to avoid the Yukon. The DPS investigator and experts for the plaintiffs and TXI all agreed that a gouge mark 6 inches inside Mr. Rodriguez's lane was a point of impact. But they disagreed over whether it was the initial point of impact.

Plaintiffs' attorneys argued that if Mr. Rodriguez had steered to the right for two or three seconds, or even one second, and if initial impact was just 6 inches inside his lane, he must have started his turn on the wrong side of the center line.

Mr. Rodriguez changed his statement when he took the witness stand, now saying he had turned to the right for only one second. Under questioning from plaintiffs' attorneys, Mr. Rodriguez testified that he never crossed the center line while driving, on this or any other day.

Mr. Rodriguez continued driving for TXI after the accident, using his fraudulently obtained commercial driver's license. DPS and U.S. immigration didn't file charges against him, and the state didn't revoke his license.

In July 2003, as part of a broader security check following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, DPS notified Mr. Rodriguez by form letter that the Social Security Administration had noticed a discrepancy in the number he used to obtain his commercial driver's license and asked him to report to his local driver's license office to verify his information or risk losing his license.

Mr. Rodriguez didn't respond, DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange said.

In July 2005, Mr. Rodriguez went to a Dallas-area DPS office to renew his commercial driver's license. But he could not verify his Social Security number and was denied. He was allowed to renew his regular driver's license, which according to DPS is valid until May 2, 2011. The News tried to find Mr. Rodriguez at four Dallas addresses listed for him in public records but was unsuccessful.

TXI's attorney said Mr. Rodriguez stopped driving for TXI in late May or early June 2004 after the company was convinced he was in the U.S. illegally.

"I think everybody would have assumed that he would be deported," said Michael Simpson, the attorney who represented the victims' families. "But he kept driving, just like nothing occurred."

So what the heck are the rules for CDL in Texas..If you are here legally then you have rules but if you are here illegally you don't...How in the Hell can one Drive without a grasp of the English language...How in the hell do they get to be tested in another language...I sure hope that medical staffs are not all speaking different languages during major surgeries..
I guess we know the outcome by reading this..story!
The question now is how do we stop this... Do we focus on the companies.