Jacksonville, NC — A young man was critically injured and his passenger was hospitalized in less-serious condition after their car was hit by a heavy-duty work truck in an accident on Highway 258. Andre Truett, 19, was identified as the badly injured driver of a Dodge Shadow while Brainerd Bushey, 69, was identified as the heavy truck driver.
The accident happened around 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon, November 6, 2015.
Andre Truett was driving his Dodge Shadow south along Highway 258 that afternoon while Mr. Bushey was driving his heavy-duty truck north.
As they approached the intersection with Highway 111 (Catherine Lake Road), Bushey apparently tried to make a left turn in front of Truett’s car without yielding. The news said that the heavy-duty truck had a flashing yellow arrow at the time. The two vehicles collided and Truett was sent to a hospital with critical injuries.
His unnamed passenger was taken to a nearby hospital, but wasn’t in life-threatening condition. Bushey, on the other hand, had a leg injury.
Police said that it appears Bushey will face a citation for not yielding to Truett’s truck.
Map of the Accident
View from the Road
Commentary:
I’m not sure that giving this driver a citation is really going to be fixing the problem here, which seems to me that a potentially unsafe driver is on the road, causing accidents. Was this a one-time event? Or is it possible that something similar might happen again in the future?
While doing a little research on this accident, I found some records for someone whose name, age, etc all match the news’ information for the truck driver. As it turns out, since the mid-1980’s, it appears that this truck driver had a fairly extensive criminal history with the State of North Carolina for various infractions and offenses.
Now, I don’t bring that out because I think we ought to start passing judgement, but when you’re evaluating whether someone is a safe driver and that his company made a good decision by hiring him and putting him at the wheel of a large, commercial truck, you have to look at the driver’s background at some point. At the very least, we now know a little more “behind the scenes” information on what happened here.
If an in-depth investigation was ever done here, we might uncover even more.
— Grossman Law Offices