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 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 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.
By the time a state investigator visited SDS Trucking Inc. in April 2005, the Midlothian building materials hauler had been in 10 traffic accidents in 12 months. One accident killed a motorcyclist, and four others injured 12 people.
An in-depth examination of the company’s records found enough safety violations to earn SDS a rating of unsatisfactory, the lowest possible in the compliance review system that Texas uses to evaluate trucking company safety. Two months later, the Texas Department of Public Safety ordered SDS to cease operations.
Research suggests that the threat of shutdown implicit in a compliance review reduces truck-related accidents and saves lives. One expert called compliance reviews “the nuclear weapon” of safety enforcement.
DPS officials, too, regard compliance reviews as one of their most effective tools in improving the safety performance of high-risk motor carriers.
But last year in Texas – which leads the nation every year in deaths from large-truck accidents – DPS completed compliance reviews for only one of every 10 companies it identified as the biggest potential dangers on the road.
Unfortunately, it only appears that things will get worse before they get better. In the Texas Dept. of Transportation Motor Carrier Division’s 2005 annual report, the division stressed the increasing demands of the trucking industry. For example, nationwide in 2005 there were 250,000 new trucks added to the nation’s fleet, and registered intrastate carriers increased almost 50% from 2000 to 2005. The report continued to emphasize the the demands of the transportation industry are outstripping the state’s ability to meet those demands, particularly when examined in terms of traffic congestion slowing transportation. As these demands increase, it’s likely that carriers will find new ways to cut corners to do their job.
