Charges Sought in Fatal Truck Accident

Three months after a load of concrete pipes tumbled off a flatbed truck, crashing into two vehicles and killing six people on a Mojave Desert highway, the California Highway Patrol on Thursday said it is seeking vehicular manslaughter charges against the truck driver.

The three 30-foot-long pipes, each weighing about 15,000 pounds, were improperly loaded and inadequately supported by a frail wooden support beam that broke, triggering the tragedy, said CHP spokesman Todd Weichers.

The San Bernardino County chief prosecutor in Barstow, Gary Roth, said he needed to review a 160-page report he received from the CHP on Thursday before deciding whether to press charges.

Truck driver Richard Sommerville was responsible for the accident and should be charged, Weichers said.

The CHP also asked that Sommerville be charged with driving under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident. His blood-alcohol level was 0.05%; the legal limit for drivers of commercial vehicles is 0.04%, compared to 0.08% for motorists.

Sommerville, 59, of Pedley, a community near Riverside, was arrested and jailed shortly after the Aug. 2 crash, but was released because authorities did not immediately press charges.

Sommerville could not be reached for comment Thursday, and the owner of the company for which he was driving, First Class Service Trucking Co., in Tracy, Calif., declined to comment.

The CHP’s West said the pipes were held in place by four nylon straps, “and there should probably have been at least five, and he had access to more.”

However, the cause of the lost load was not the adequacy of the straps but, rather, a defective wooden 4-by-4 that was one of two such beams supporting the pipes and that broke under the weight, the CHP concluded.

The pipes were supposed to be supported at both ends of the flatbed by the two wooden beams, 8 feet long in order to span the width of the bed, and placed over the trailer’s structural steel I-beams, Weichers said.

The rear 4-by-4, however, was only about 6 feet long, was of poor quality and was not placed atop the trailer’s I-beam, the CHP found. When the wood broke, the pipes shifted, snapping the restraining straps, investigators found.

The pipes fell off the truck as it was traveling along a curve on California 58 between Kramer and Boron shortly after midnight. Two vehicles, each approaching the truck from the opposite direction, crashed into one of the pipes. A Redlands family of four traveling in a mini-van was killed instantly: Randy and Melissa Ledford, their son, Lonny, 9, and their daughter, Skyler, 6. A Las Vegas couple, Sandra and Manuel Vigil, were killed in their own vehicle.