The Region - News from Aug. 2, 1987

The wife and two daughters of a Whittier truck driver who died when the cab of his 18-wheeler caught fire after rear-ending a second truck on Interstate 5 near Coalinga will receive $900,000 as the settlement in a wrongful death case filed against the drivers of the other truck. Attorneys representing the survivors of truck driver Robert Cartwright had argued in a Los Angeles Superior Court trial that the man died in the 1982 accident because the drivers of the second truck, owned by Watsonville-based Southwest Trucking Co., failed to come to his aid for more than 15 minutes after the fire erupted. “If he had been pulled out 90 seconds earlier, he’d be alive today,” said Santa Ana attorney John F. Murphy. Cartwright, 41, died of smoke inhalation and heart failure less than two days after the collision. The case was settled in the sixth day of the trial.