A Trucker Possessed : He’s on the Hunt for Hit-Run Driver of 18-Wheeler Who Killed His Son

Claude Sams buried his son Paul on Wednesday and left for Las Vegas this morning.

It will be a long, slow trip. At each truck stop, rest stop and turn-out along Interstate 15--wherever the big rigs and their drivers are--Claude Sams will be there, too. He’ll be asking every driver he meets if they know a guy who drives the interstates in an 18-wheel double rig--a yellow cab and two paint-peeled white trailers.

He will offer a $500 reward for the information. No big sum of money, but that is all that comes easily to hand for Sams.

And chances are, Sams figures, the money will not matter much. He thinks most of his fellow truck drivers will be glad to help if they can.

Sams is looking for the man who killed his son.

“I pray somebody will see him--a highway patrolman, a passing motorist, maybe another truck driver, anybody,” he said Wednesday, his voice choking. “I would like to see this man brought to justice and punished.”

Sams has been a truck driver for 27 years. Like his father before him, he has driven most every kind of big rig and hauled all sorts of cargo. It had always seemed like an honorable way to make a living, the trucker said, although in recent years he had seen more and more of the type he calls “hot-doggers” on the road.

They are bad drivers. Go too fast. Tailgate. Drive too long, too hard. Cheat on their logs to show less time behind the wheel than they have really spent. Do booze and drugs while working.

Sams has been thinking a lot about these types lately. Especially since last week, when one of them killed his 24-year-old son, Paul.

Employed as an auto repossessor, the young Monrovia man was driving to Las Vegas with a friend on March 26. He had a flat tire in the northbound lanes of Interstate 15 and pulled over onto the shoulder to change it. It was about 9:45 p.m. when the double rig roared up.

California Highway Patrol officers later found skid marks, indicating the driver had tried to stop, Claude Sams said. But he didn’t--at least not in time, anyway, and Paul Sams died of neck and head injuries when he was struck by the truck’s cab. The driver continued on.

Paul’s friend was too shaken up to get much of a description of the big rig--just that it was a yellow cab with two white trailers. No idea of a name on the sides or back. No license plate.

The CHP investigator who telephoned Claude Sams at his home in Arcadia to break the news said officers were doing all they could.

“Within 25 minutes they had an all-points bulletin out,” Sams said. “They were stopping any yellow truck on the road, at the (truck) scales--north, south, east and west. They called the Nevada Highway Patrol.”

But authorities found nothing.

Maybe, Sams theorized, the hit-and-run driver backtracked down the freeway, crossed over on California 138 and headed to Los Angeles to lose himself and his rig in the city’s traffic. Or, perhaps, he took off across the desert on dirt roads, where the authorities would not think to look, he added.

“Fifty-five feet of truck, you can’t hide easy,” Sams said. But somehow, so far, the man who killed Paul Sams has.

Claude Sams drove up to Barstow the night of the incident with his wife Vernalee.

No Reward Needed

“I passed the word at some of the truck stops there about the reward,” he said. “Friends of mine, other drivers, passed the word. The drivers told me I didn’t need to offer the reward. The reward for them would be catching the guy so it doesn’t happen again to somebody else’s son.”

Sams called The Times this week after he read a story in Monday’s editions about how the increase in truck-related accidents in recent years may be due, in part, to federal deregulation and a new breed of “don’t-give-a-damn” truck drivers.

He said he was inclined to agree that deregulation and the pressure of competition have something to do with the increase in truck accidents. Then he added another factor: inadequate training of young drivers.

“We’ve got schools in this city that will take a man off the street who’s never driven anything bigger than a pickup and in one to three weeks, he’s got a truck driver’s license,” Sams said. “I was talking to my barber this morning and he had to go to school for four or five months before he could get his license to cut hair.

‘18 Wheels of Death’

“And the state licenses you to drive trucks after a couple of weeks of training. The state and some companies that don’t check you out before hiring you, they put 18 wheels of death in your hands.”

There are too many truck drivers out there with “concrete between their ears,” Sams said. Their attitude, he believes, is, “I’ve got an 18-wheeler, stay out of my way.”

Before the death of his son, Clyde Sams was thinking about forming some kind of organization of truck drivers that would turn in big-rig drivers they see driving unsafely. He is talking about that idea with fellow drivers right now, while making his way, slowly, up to Las Vegas.

“If I can save one boy’s life,” he said just before his son’s funeral Wednesday at Live Oak Memorial Park in Monrovia, “that will make me, and my son, happy.”