Phoenix, AZ — December 10, 2024, Aaron Soto and Angel Loera were killed and another person was injured in a truck accident about 7 a.m. near the intersection of 33rd and Grand avenues.
Authorities said the two men were in a car that crashed with a semi-truck on Grand Avenue which was turning left onto 33rd Avenue.
Driver Aaron Soto and passenger Angel Loera died as a result of the crash, according to authorities. Both men were 28. Police have not identified the truck driver, who reportedly suffered minor injuries in the crash.
Currently, additional details about the crash remain unconfirmed.
Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman
To be crystal clear up front, I don’t have more information about what happened here than what’s available in the news. However, certain details make me worry this crash may not be getting the attention it deserves. The reason I say that is because all the stories on this crash which I’ve seen claim that the victims’ vehicle was going at a high rate of speed and hit the back of a tractor-trailer. No doubt a lot of people read those details and made up their mind already on what went wrong here. However, I don’t see any mention of whether or not the truck making the left turn here had the right-of-way when it entered the path of the oncoming car. Did authorities look into that at all? Did they check who had a green light at the time? And what information are they basing their current claims on? Here’s why that’s so important.
Regardless of what happened here, commercial truck wrecks almost always present unique challenges. Authorities are not always up to those challenges. Sometimes, officers don’t have the right equipment to examine the roadway and the vehicles. Other times, inexperienced officers are left in charge of complex situations they aren’t trained to handle on their own. And other times, there can be outside forces affecting the integrity of the evidence. For example, there are cases I’ve handled where the first two people to arrive on a crash scene were the paramedics and a lawyer from a trucking company. I’ve even had a case where a company landed a helicopter near the scene so their representative could speak to the police in the middle of the investigations. In one case not long ago, we had to pull out every legal tool in the book to salvage an investigation because an officer allowed a trucking company to take their vehicle from the scene before anyone had a chance to look at the truck’s Engine Control Module data (which can show things like speed and braking in the moments prior to a collision).
Again, I’m not saying that sort of stuff happened here. That said, I’ve handled hundreds of commercial vehicle accident cases. Knowing the speeds of the vehicles involved is important, but so is knowing who had the right-of-way, who had a green light, what visibility was like at the time, who all spoke to authorities at the scene, whether or not there’s video of the crash, and all kinds of other details these current reports don’t mention. People may see what’s in the news right now and just assume everything is open-and-shut when in reality the news is likely only giving a small fraction of the larger picture. Until that picture is complete, no one should be jumping to conclusions one way or the other.
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