A wrongful-death lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court in Louisville, Kentucky, after six people were killed when a tractor-trailer rear-ended their Ford Expedition. The crash happened on March 2, 2013, in the northbound lanes of Interstate 65 near Glendale, Ky; the truck driver, Ibrahim Fetic, rear-ended the Gollnow family’s vehicle, which caught on fire. James and Barbara Gollnows, their foster children Gabriel Zumig, 10, and Soledad Smith, 8, their adopted daughter Sereena Gollnow, 18, and their friend Marion Champnoise were “trapped inside the vehicle while it burned, resulting in their deaths,” according to the lawsuit. Two other minors escaped the SUV.
The family was headed back to their home in rural Wisconsin after a trip to Florida. The wrongful death suit names the driver and his company, Highway Star. Fetic was driving in “an unsafe manner” when he rear-ended the Gollnow’s Expedition. He had driven his truck in excess of the allowed number of hours, which caused driver fatigue, and he was maintaining two sets of driver log books in an effort to hide information from regulatory agencies.
The lawsuit is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and a trial by jury. A few weeks after the crash, the U.S. Department of Transportation ordered Highway Star to immediately cease operations and declared the company to be an imminent hazard to public safety for failing to ensure its drivers complied with federal safety regulations, according to a news release. Fetic was also declared an imminent hazard by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which ordered him to immediately cease all commercial motor vehicle operations because of his failure to comply with federal hours-of-service regulations. The highway department investigation also discovered Highway Star allowed or required its drivers to falsify their records-of-duty status and failed to preserve the records, resulting in the company being unable to monitor its drivers’ compliance with regulations setting maximum hours of service and requiring off-duty and rest hours.
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