A Delaware County court on Thursday, October 29, sentenced truck driver Modou Ngom, 50, to 22 years and six months in prison for a nine-vehicle pile-up on Interstate 71 in Ohio that killed a husband, his wife and their one-year-old son. The judge also suspended Ngom's driving licence for life, and he will not be eligible for parole until 2048, NBC 4 reported.
Source: CDLLife
The crash happened on the evening of April 11, 2026, just before 6:30 p.m., on Interstate 71 north of Columbus in Delaware County, Ohio. Prosecutors said Ngom's Freightliner semi-truck ran into a line of traffic that had slowed in a road construction zone, and that he failed to brake before impact. The pile-up ultimately involved nine vehicles.
The three people killed were Luke Soposki, 37, his wife Lynnea Soposki, 36, and their one-year-old son Logan. Other people were injured in the pile-up, and the charges against Ngom included five counts of vehicular assault alongside the three homicide counts. At Thursday's hearing, grieving relatives gave victim-impact statements describing the devastation the crash caused, The Fatu Network reported.
Source: The Fatu Network
A Delaware County jury had found Ngom guilty in September on all eight charges — three counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and five counts of vehicular assault. At sentencing, prosecuting attorneys accused him of “making up lies” during his testimony, ABC 6 reported. The judge set the 22-and-a-half-year total after considering the victim-impact statements, the severity of the crash, Ngom's apparent lack of remorse and his history of fraudulent commercial licences, CDLLife reported.
“You wiped out an entire family. The effects of that will be lifelong, life altering, life changing,” the judge told Ngom at the hearing, according to The Fatu Network's report of the sentencing.
A licence built on another identity
The case did not end with the crash itself. Investigators said Ngom fraudulently obtained a regular driver's licence in 2003 and fraudulently obtained his commercial driving licence (CDL) in 2007 using a different identity. He was later naturalised as a U.S. citizen in the mid-2010s using the same identity he had used to obtain the CDL, and he changed his name back to Modou Ngom in 2015, CDLLife reported, citing the investigation.
Ohio Department of Public Safety Director Andy Wilson said state investigators were instructed to hand their findings to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio and the Delaware County Prosecutor's Office were also notified, according to earlier local reporting on the investigation. No federal charges arising from the identity findings had been reported by Thursday.
Warnings on the record before the crash
Federal investigators also found that Ngom had been cited for a brake violation in Kansas about three weeks before the fatal wreck, over a malfunctioning ABS warning light. He had earlier been convicted of driving an “unsafe vehicle” after a 2024 crash in the same county in which a drive-shaft malfunction sent parts into a car behind him — a crash reported to state agencies but not listed on his federal record, ABC 6's investigation found. An owner-operator, Ngom had accumulated 11 violations since 2024, including low tire pressure and an inoperable turn signal found in roadside inspections, and the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio was unable to complete a compliance investigation requested by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, according to that reporting.
For Punjabi and other immigrant truckers who drive the I-71, I-70 and I-75 freight corridors through Ohio every week, the case is a hard reminder of two things at once: a few seconds without braking in a construction zone can end lives and a driving career, and a licence obtained or held under a false identity can surface years later and follow a driver into federal hands. Carriers and owner-operators are routinely judged, after a crash, on exactly the paper trail this case exposed — inspection violations, brake citations and licence history.
Not everyone has accepted the sentence as the end of the story. An online petition calling for clemency for Ngom, started on Change.org, had passed 23,000 verified signatures according to regional reports before sentencing, with supporters arguing for leniency. The court, however, imposed a term at the top of what Ngom faced: before sentencing, regional reports noted the maximum available was 22 and a half years.
What happens next
Ngom will serve his sentence in Ohio with a lifetime driving suspension and parole eligibility only in 2048. Whether federal authorities act on the identity-fraud findings handed to Homeland Security Investigations is the remaining open question in the case, and Awaaz Punjab will report any federal filing if one is made. For the Soposki family, relatives said at the hearing, no sentence changes what was lost on April 11.