Sadly, it’s not news when a truck driver dies. At least it’s not news to most truck drivers. But what happened on Wednesday, December 5th puts a devastating new spin on truck driver deaths. A young trucker was walking through the Jane Lew Truck Stop and was run over by a rig that had just entered the lot.

I learned of the tragedy on the Twisted Truckers page on Facebook. Initially, I saw the altered image of a truck driving upward toward heaven. That was unusual. Then I read the text and discovered the horrific truth. The last sentence of the post read: “Everyone needs to slow down in these truck stops and pay more attention to everything and everyone around you.”

A follow-up post on Twisted Truckers, a day or two after the tragedy, showed a picture of a set of truck keys, which the author said belonged to the deceased driver. She said the driver had a wife and children who now had to spend the holidays without him. She said she can think of no reason that anyone should be traveling fast enough through a truck stop to kill someone.

Details unknown

I asked my friend Tony if he had heard any of the details. He stops at Jane Lew frequently when he’s passing through West Virginia on his way back from the Carolinas. He later told me that he talked to a waitress at the truck stop’s restaurant. She said the truck in question came barreling into the lot and ran over the victim with all five axles.

How exactly the calamity happened, I don’t know. No doubt an investigation has started that will look at all the possible angles and answer key questions, such as:

• Was the truck travelling at too high a rate of speed?
• Was hitting the victim unavoidable? (Were his clothes too dark to see? Was he wearing reflective clothing or carrying a flashlight?)
• Is it possible that the driver was unaware that he hit the victim?

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