A FedEx truck driver who killed a New York father and his two children on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in July 2024 while distracted by his phone has been sentenced to a minimum of just under three years and a maximum of 12 years in state prison, according to court reporting from Lancaster County.

Source: CDLLife

Santos Valentin, 31, was convicted in July of three counts of homicide by vehicle, three counts of involuntary manslaughter and six summary traffic offences. He was sentenced earlier this month in Lancaster County Court.

Source: American Truck Drivers (ATruckDrivers.com)

The crash happened at about 4:30 a.m. on July 20, 2024, near mile marker 268.7 in Penn Township, about three miles east of the Lancaster-Lebanon interchange. Valentin's 47,000-pound double tractor-trailer rear-ended a Honda Accord, pushing the car into a drainage culvert, and the tractor and first trailer came to rest over the car in a tree line about 60 feet from the eastbound lanes. A 43-year-old father and his children, aged 18 and 11, were killed. In line with this site's policy, the child victim is not named.

Prosecutors said Pennsylvania State Police obtained more than eight hours of inward- and outward-facing dashcam footage from the truck, which showed Valentin appearing to scroll through social media and applications on his phone for five minutes before the crash, with one image indicating he may have been texting in the moment immediately before impact. According to CDLLife, citing Local 21, Valentin had told police he was using a GPS app to locate a gas station and that the other car had come out of nowhere.

The case is a stark warning for every commercial driver on North America's highways, including the many Punjabi truckers who run the Turnpike and I-81 corridors: a few minutes on a phone behind the wheel of a loaded rig can end lives — and end in a prison cell.