DeKalb County, GA — July 26, 2024, Keith Richardson Jr. was injured following a semi-truck accident that happened Friday afternoon on Memorial Drive.
Authorities said in preliminary statements that the accident happened at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Rays Road, east of Atlanta.
Fox 5 Atlanta published dash cam footage of the accident. It appears that 29-year-old Keith Lamont Richardson Jr. was stopped at the light waiting to make a left turn. The video shows an 18-wheeler approaching from behind drifting out of its lane, eventually slamming into the back of Richardson’s vehicle. As a result of the accident, Richardson appeared to be seriously injured.
Authorities allege that the truck driver left the scene initially, but the truck driver’s employer reportedly claims the driver experienced a medical emergency, then pulled over a mile from the crash.
Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman
Right now, it appears there are pending citations against the truck driver. I can’t confirm any other details right now, but two things immediately concern me, and I wonder if authorities have dug into these details at all.
For one, the news says that the truck driver’s employer told them this all happened due to a medical emergency. Let’s just say, for example, that’s true. That doesn’t automatically make a crash unavoidable. I had a case not long ago where a trucking company said the same thing, writing off a serious crash as simply unavoidable. Our investigations showed the truck driver did indeed suffer a medical emergency. However, we pulled his medical records, and it turned the crash was completely avoidable.
In short, the driver had a laundry list of conditions which made it undeniable the driver wouldn’t be able to perform his job safely. It was inevitable that something would go wrong, and any responsible company would have ensured he wasn’t operating a multi-ton commercial vehicle. That company, however, ignored the red flags, and it predictably ended in catastrophe. Companies who fail to prevent otherwise preventable accidents like that don’t get a free pass just because a crash happened for medical reasons. Obviously, a lot of medical emergencies really are unavoidable, but it’s important investigators are able to make this distinction.
The second thing that stands out to me is that the news names a company associated with the crash, and I see some red flags. To be clear, I would have to see more information to say if the company named in the news is involved in the crash and if the company I found in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s online database is the same company. But what I do notice is that their records show a rate of failure for driver inspections and truck inspections higher than the national average.
The company appears to be small, so that could just be statistical noise due to the few number of drivers and trucks the company seems to have. At the same time, with a serious crash like this, any red flag, big or small, that comes up is worth consideration. It could truly be this all was just bad luck, and no one could have seen this coming. Or, it could be there were signs of problems from a company that has a hard time following the rules. Any reasonable person should agree this possibility alone is worth consideration, even if it’s just to rule out more serious problems authorities have yet to address.
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