Enforcement at the roadside. Accountability dies in the Courtroom
Inspectors wrote 6,455 English proficiency violations through October. After the crash, the court record goes almost completely silent.
The country is furious that a truck driver got four years and eight months for killing three people in California. In Virginia, a driver charged with killing three people got zero. The charges were nolle prossed, his license was untouched, and the only fact the court would confirm is that he needed a translator. We searched for more than 6,000 federal trucking lawsuits for the word interpreter. What we found, and what we didn’t, is the story.
Three people died on Interstate 81 in Roanoke County the week before Christmas. Lorraine Renee Williams, 65. Ebony Latasha Williams, 49. Shazziyah Lesley, 2, is properly secured in her car seat. Their minivan was stopped on the shoulder when a 2014 Volvo tractor-trailer ran off the road and hit it.
The driver, El Hadji Karamoko Ouattara of Montgomery Village, Maryland, was charged with reckless driving the next day. Six days later, the charges were upgraded to three counts of involuntary manslaughter. The same day, he was granted bond at a hearing that appeared nowhere on the public docket and walked out of the Roanoke County jail.
I asked the Roanoke County General District Court for the case records. They told me everything must be paid for in advance and mailed. My FOIA requests to Virginia State Police were denied twice, citing an active investigation into a crash on a public highway that was cleared within hours.
The clerk did later confirm that a translator was provided for his initial hearings. The case record I finally obtained confirms the rest. On February 12, the preliminary hearing was finalized, and the Commonwealth entered a nolle prosequi. The disposition form reads “With Prejudice: N.” The charges can be refiled anytime. Virginia has no statute of limitations on felonies, which also means nobody ever has to decide. As of this writing, nothing has been filed in circuit court.
The same form has a line for license consequences. It reads: Operator License Suspension Time, 00 Years, 00 Months, 000 Days. Without conviction, there is no CDL disqualification. Nothing in the licensing system prevents Ouattara from driving a truck tonight.
One more detail from that record. The defense attorney line reads Woods Rogers, one of the oldest and largest law firms in Virginia. Hourly truck drivers from Montgomery Village, Maryland, do not walk off the street and retain Woods Rogers. Somebody paid for that representation. The carrier he was driving for was DM Bowman. Trucking and logistics company headquartered in Williamsport, Maryland. Founded in 1959, the company is privately owned. Mr. Bowman has been heavily involved with trucking, trucking history, and trucking associations.
Three dead. Dropped charges. A translator. That’s the whole public record.
The California case
On Tuesday, a San Bernardino County judge sentenced Jashanpreet Singh to four years and eight months for the I-10 crash in Ontario that killed three people. The reaction was instant and national. Cabinet officials weighed in. The number was called an insult to three lives, and I understand why people feel that way.
Singh was arrested at the scene, held without bail, charged, prosecuted, convicted on his own guilty plea, and sentenced. He will serve prison time. His CDL is gone. The system ran from start to finish in under nine months. In Roanoke County, the system never left the driveway. No trial. No plea. No sentence. No license action. Zero days for three deaths. The outrage machine only sees the cases that reach a sentencing hearing. The scandal is the ones that never get there.
The numbers
I’ve been tracking enforcement of English Language Proficiency since the executive order restarted it last June. The roadside numbers are big and getting bigger.
In October, inspectors issued 6,455 ELP violations in a single month and placed 1,816 drivers out of service. Violations jumped from 1,399 in May to 3,925 in June when the revised CVSA out-of-service criteria took effect and peaked at 7,140 in September. Federal inspections alone accounted for 15,193 ELP-related enforcement actions through October. Texas led the nation with 7,090 violations while its own state law still prohibits requiring English proficiency for intrastate CDLs.
The regulation behind all of this is 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2). A CMV driver must read and speak English well enough to converse with the public, understand highway signs, respond to official inquiries, and fill out reports. Every carrier certifies it in every driver qualification file. Every one of those 6,455 violations is a certification that failed a test on the shoulder of a highway.
So we know the drivers are out there. We write them up by the thousands every month.
Now go look for them in the courtroom.
Then the crash
The criminal dockets tell you what the roadside numbers can’t. Right now, in at least six states, fatal truck crash prosecutions are running through interpreters.
In Florida, Harjinder Singh faces three counts of vehicular homicide for the U-turn crash that killed three people on the Turnpike. At his first appearance, he sat mostly unresponsive until an interpreter finally got a “that’s fine” out of him so the judge could appoint counsel. The judge’s bond denial had to be relayed to him through an interpreter. He now appears at routine docket calls by Zoom with a Punjabi interpreter at his side, and the case has been continued into 2026. Federal investigators administered an English proficiency assessment to him after the crash. He failed it on the verbal questions and on the highway signs.
In California, Jashanpreet Singh made his first appearance with an interpreter beside him, and court filings required a Punjabi interpreter at his hearings from arraignment through the guilty plea that ended the case Tuesday. The court that handled it, San Bernardino Superior, says on its website that if an interpreter is unavailable, the case may be delayed or continued until one can be assigned, and it acknowledges a statewide shortage of certified interpreters.
In Oregon, Rajinder Kumar is charged with manslaughter after a newlywed couple died when they hit his jackknifed rig on Highway 20. He appears on a closed-circuit camera with a Hindi interpreter. He postponed his plea by six weeks, waived his right to a speedy trial, and no trial date had been set.
In Wisconsin, the language barrier sat on the other side of the courtroom. Jorge Sanchez-Tzanahua is charged with killing a truck driver, Steven Nasholm, an owner-operator with a wife and three kids. When his sentencing was scheduled, the judge warned that the 90-minute hearing would take about half a day because of the time needed to translate between English and Spanish. Three dozen of Nasholm’s family and friends sat in that courtroom.
In Alabama, Andrii Dmyterko sat in the Clarke County jail for more than six months without a preliminary hearing after the Thomasville crash that killed two people. Not because of any legal dispute. Because the state’s one certified Ukrainian court interpreter was tied up on another case. The court finally appointed one in December at $120 an hour, paid from the State General Fund. The victims’ families waited on the same clock he did.
In Virginia, Oswaldo Martinez has been held for 21 years in the killing of 16-year-old Brittany Binger, never tried, because he is deaf, illiterate, and cannot communicate well enough to assist in his own defense. The commonwealth concedes he may never become competent. He sits in a state hospital on an endless six-month review cycle. That’s not a trucking case. It’s the ceiling on how long language can stall American justice.
The certification and the contradiction
Put the two halves side by side.
Every driver in every one of these cases holds a CDL. Every carrier that employed them certified, or should have, that the driver meets 391.11(b)(2). English proficient. Hired. Put on the road.
Then the crash happens, and a judge appoints an interpreter. That appointment order is a judicial finding that the carrier didn’t care enough to check. Nobody cross-references the two. FMCSA doesn’t collect interpreter appointments. Plaintiff lawyers stumble onto them one case at a time. The carrier’s DQ file and the court’s interpreter order sit in two filing systems that never meet.
When the criminal case stalls or dies, the way Dmyterko’s stalled for six months and Ouattara’s died in district court, the civil case idles behind it, the evidence goes stale, and the family waits.
We test English on the shoulder of Highway 6,000 times a month. Then someone dies, and the one institution that could make the finding stick treats the language barrier as a scheduling problem, writes it into a form nobody reads, seals it, or drops the case entirely.
The Williams family buried three generations on the week of Christmas. The court confirmed one fact about the man who was driving. He needed a translator. Then he went back to driving a truck.