Prosecutors on Friday filed 40 charges, including four counts of vehicular homicide, against a 23-year-old truck driver accused of causing a fiery pileup that killed four people on a Colorado highway last week.
Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos of Houston was "operating the vehicle under circumstances where he was exhibiting extreme indifference to the value of human life," Jefferson County District Attorney Pete Weir said.
Defense attorney Robert Corry called the charges "excessive, duplicative and prosecutorial overkill."
The truck was going at least 85 mph on a part of Interstate 70 where commercial vehicles are limited to 45 mph, police say.
Aguilera-Mederos told investigators that the brakes on his semitrailer failed. He plowed into vehicles on the crowded highway April 25 just after it descends from mountains west of Denver, setting off a 28-vehicle chain reaction of explosions from ruptured gas tanks, authorities said.
Just before the crash, police say the truck traveled past a ramp to the side of the highway that is designed to safely stop trucks and other vehicles that have lost their brakes.
The speeding truck had a "free and unobstructed path" to the ramp but instead swerved away from it, police said.
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1 comment:
Every truck driver is scared sh*tless to take that runaway ramp, but if they do, the odds are good the driver will survive, and the odds are 100% that all the others will be unharmed as a result of his equipment's brake failure. But it's a scary thing to steer that truck into a uphill unpaved sand pile at 85 MPH. The alternative is to do what he did. And you go to prison for that. It is a split second decision to take the ramp, or not, when they go flying by it. The ramps work, and it's why they are built into the sides of dangerous downgrades with a history of truck brake failures. He SHOULD go to prison for taking the risk of passing by that ramp, and risking all those other lives for saving his own. The driver deserves many years in prison, if not the rest of his life, for what he did.
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