Wakeman, OH — A local woman, 38-year old Kari Stephens, was injured along Highway 18 after an accident with a semi-truck this past Tuesday. Police said that a semi-truck failed to brake in time and ran over her car on Tuesday night (January 13, 2015) at about 10:00 p.m.
This happened along Ohio Highway 18 near the intersection with Chenango Road, as pictured in the map below. It appears that Kari Stephens was driving a Chevrolet Malibu east along the Highway on Tuesday night, following her son (16-year old Austyn Stephens) who was in front of her in a Chevrolet Trailblazer.
As they neared the intersection with Chenango Road, both Austyn and Kari Stephens came to a stop for unknown reasons, perhaps to make a turn. As they did, a semi-truck driving behind them failed to brake in time and crashed into the back of Kari Stephens’ car.
Her Chevy Malibu was pushed into the back of her son’s SUV, then the semi-truck proceeded to run over her Malibu while Mrs. Stephens was still in it. As a result, she was critically injured and had to be airlifted to two separate hospitals.
Her son, Austyn, was also injured, but not as seriously. The semi-truck driver, 43-year old Mark Francis, was uninjured. However, his truck was disabled after the wreck and required towing. Right now, it’s not clear if any charges are going to be filed against Mr. Francis for failing to brake.
Map of the Accident
View from the Road
Commentary:
I did a little research on this truck driver, because hitting someone from behind (to me, at least) suggests that he wasn’t paying attention to the road. Given that his job is to be a professional driver, I was curious to see if there was anything else that might come to the surface. From what I can tell, it appears that this driver has a commercial Class A license and has multiple citations and charges on his criminal record — all of them traffic-related. There were several speeding tickets, citations for failure to control his load (commercial vehicle charge), and charges for failing to maintain reasonable control of his truck. In six of the charges, he reportedly pled guilty.
Folks, I’m not trying be dramatic, but I’m wondering if this driver should have ever been on the road in the first place. Now I think the information I found was correct. If that’s true, I sure wouldn’t want that driver on my crew. And this isn’t very surprising news to me, actually, because we handle cases all the time where the truck driver wasn’t even qualified to be behind the wheel. A lot of it stems from the personnel shortage right now in the trucking industry. Demand for drivers and transportation has never been higher, but there often aren’t enough drivers to go around.
I guarantee you that if someone with a driving record like that applied for a position as a commercial truck driver, they’d get turned down every time. Or, at least that’s what should happen. But, when there aren’t enough truck drivers to go around, companies stop worrying about things like background checks and they just hire the driver with no regards.
— Grossman Law Offices
