The driver got two years. The carrier got a new DOT number.

A Ukrainian driver conviction in the Thomasville crash. The company tells a story similar to the one that killed 7 Marines in NH and another in AL, where 10 kids burned alive.

This case, when I originally reported on it, had issues, and it actually started because the State of Alabama couldn’t initially find a translator.

On Thursday, Andrii Dmyterko, the 45-year-old Ukrainian truck driver, pleaded guilty in Clarke County, Alabama, to two counts of criminally negligent homicide for the May 6, 2025, crash that killed Woodie Earl Beck III and Ashley Marie Springer McDonald in Thomasville. Two counts of homicide by vehicle were dismissed in the deal. He got one year on each count, to run consecutively, in the county jail. With a year and 65 days of credit for time served, he is months from release.

I pulled the carrier records, the crash report, the Illinois corporate filings, and the federal court file on this one. What they show is a pattern we’ve seen before, most famously on a two-lane highway in Randolph, New Hampshire, in June 2019. A driver who should not have been dispatched. A carrier that dispatched him anyway. When the enforcement finally arrived, ten months late, a corporate structure was already built to survive it.

Three days on the job

The crash itself took about four seconds and covered a quarter mile. Court filings identify the haul: a box trailer moving from an RHI US Ltd. facility in York, Pennsylvania, to Outokumpu Stainless USA in Calvert, Alabama. Police described the cargo as metal shavings. The truck was on final approach, less than 40 miles of Highway 43 between that red light and the mill gate, when it went through the line of stopped cars.

At 11:51 a.m. on May 6, 2025, a 2019 Freightliner Cascadia hauling building materials came down U.S. Highway 43 toward the red light at South Industrial Park Drive in Thomasville. Four vehicles sat stopped at the signal. The Alabama uniform crash report is blunt about what happened next: the truck “did not apply its brakes approaching the traffic light.” It struck the rear car, driving the entire line through the intersection.

McDonald, 37, was on her way to work. Her car was pushed 390 feet and burst into flames. Beck, 53, a beloved coach at Wilcox Academy, was pulled from his overturned vehicle and pronounced dead at the scene. Another car flipped and caught fire as the flames spread; bystanders pulled the driver out. The truck finally came to rest 768 feet from the point of impact. Investigators found skid marks beginning only after the collision. Estimated speed: 57 in a 55.

Dmyterko’s passenger and co-driver, 31-year-old Denys Kucher of Warminster, Pennsylvania, also in the country on a work visa, told police what happened in the cab. Dmyterko was trying to answer a call from his wife.

Dmyterko held a Pennsylvania Class A CDL. He required an interpreter to communicate with police, the courts, and eventually his own lawyers. Alabama has exactly one state-certified Ukrainian interpreter, and that interpreter was tied up on another case, so Dmyterko sat in the Clarke County Jail for more than six months without a preliminary hearing. A grand jury indicted him in August anyway. A qualified interpreter, Nataliia Worrell, was not appointed until December.

It took a court order from Circuit Judge J. Perry Newton, entered in November at $120 an hour from the State General Fund, to finally get Nataliia Worrell into the case as a qualified Ukrainian interpreter.

A Clarke County grand jury indicted him on Aug. 8, 2025, on four counts, and the homicide-by-vehicle counts tell you what the state believed it could prove: that he was speeding and ran the light, the same violations the crash report’s math supports at an estimated 57 in a 55. On Thursday, he pleaded guilty to the two criminally negligent homicide counts, and the homicide-by-vehicle counts were dismissed.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made this crash a centerpiece of the September 2025 emergency rule restricting non-domiciled CDLs. The driver, Duffy said, had “less than six weeks of experience” and had previously failed his skills test for speeding. The crash came on his third day of employment with the carrier. The interim final rule itself cites the Thomasville crash by name as part of its justification.

So, who put him in that truck?

The company behind the truck

The carrier was said to be 4 US Transportation Company, out of Chicago; the media left it there. Even the responding officers left it there. On the truck and bus supplement of the crash report, the fields for carrier name, carrier address, and USDOT number are all coded “Not Set.” Two people died under an 80,000-pound commercial vehicle, and the investigating agency never recorded the carrier’s DOT number on the federal crash form. File that under the data-quality problem I keep writing about, because it matters later. Alabama is a mess.

The actual carrier is 4US Corp, USDOT 2993809, an Illinois corporation formed June 7, 2016, with an office in a suite on East Northwest Highway in Palatine and a fleet that grew to roughly 40 trucks. The crash report lists the truck’s owner at an address in Lake Zurich, Illinois. That address belongs to the company’s registered agent, Illia Malikovskyi. The corporation’s president and secretary, per its Illinois Secretary of State filings, are Eli Malikovsky and a residential address on Carnation Drive in Oswego, Illinois. The company’s own recruiting page on Instagram features a Ukrainian flag in its bio, advertising CDL-A driver and owner-operator positions with a $500 sign-on bonus.

The dates are the story.

The crash happened on May 6, 2025. 4US Corp’s 2025 Illinois annual report is stamped filed May 6, 2025. The same day its truck killed two people in Alabama, the company’s paperwork landed in Springfield. Two days after that, on May 8, the company updated its federal MCS-150, reporting more than 1.5 million annual miles. The truck itself was inspected under 4US Corp authority in Arkansas in March 2024 and Washington State in February 2025.

On May 14, 2025, eight days after the crash, federal inspection records show the crash truck went through a Level 1 inspection in Alabama while impounded. Inspectors recorded one violation, serious enough to be an out-of-service condition. The dashcam video that circulated within days shows no brake lights. The criminal theory was a distraction. The maintenance question has never been publicly answered.

At the time of the crash, the crash report indicates that 4US Corp’s liability coverage was provided by Obsidian Insurance Company, a fronting carrier. Read my insurance articles to understand why I name them here.

Shut down, but not gone

The City of Thomasville said in May 2025 that USDOT had assigned an agent to investigate the Chicago-based company. Nobody ever reported what came of that. Here is what came of it: according to the FMCSA’s system, 4US Corp is no longer authorized to operate and has been subject to a federal out-of-service order since March 24, 2026. Ten months and eighteen days after the crash, the government shut the company down.

Except “the company” is a slippery thing in this business.

On August 19, 2024, nearly nine months before the crash, a new carrier registered with FMCSA: 4USA Logistics Inc., USDOT 4283955, based in Oswego, Illinois, at the same residential address that appears on 4US Corp’s corporate filings for Eli Malikovsky. Federal registration data lists Malikovsky as an officer of both companies. Today, with 4US Corp dead, 4USA Logistics is authorized to operate and carries no out-of-service order. It is a clean-slate entity with no inspection history, which scores as low risk in every screening system a broker is likely to use.

Five civil actions name Dmyterko: Nancy Calvert’s suit, filed three days after the crash and later voluntarily dismissed; the Beck estate’s case, brought by Tiffany Andrews Beck through Utsey & Utsey and Cunningham Bounds; a companion suit filed the same August day by James Richard McDonald Jr. and Tiffany Springer on behalf of Ashley’s family; Horace Larrimore’s November filing; and a district-court action brought by State Farm in 2026, the kind of filing that usually means even the insurers are lining up to recover what his employer’s coverage won’t. The Beck case was removed to federal court in Mobile in November, where the defendant list runs past the driver and 4US Corp to Mercedes-Benz and Daimler Truck entities, on claims that the 2019 Cascadia lacked functioning collision-avoidance technology. When a small carrier’s coverage tower is short, plaintiffs go looking for deeper pockets, and the truck’s manufacturer has the deepest ones on the caption. Dmyterko himself has invoked the Fifth Amendment and asked the civil courts to leave him alone indefinitely.

The equipment never stopped moving. Carrier-network data from FMCSA shows 4US Corp’s fleet of 59 VINs shares 50 of them with 18 other carriers, the heaviest overlap running to 4U USA Corp Inc., USDOT 4007951, and Bison Logistics Inc. of Rolling Meadows, both active and authorized today. A fourth entity, 4U USA Truck Corp, shares a phone number with 4U USA Corp. Some of that VIN sharing is ordinary trailer interchange. Four entities carrying the 4US brand across four DOT numbers, with the founder’s newest company registered at his home address while his oldest one sat under federal investigation, is succession planning.

If that pattern sounds familiar, it should.

The Randolph rhyme

On June 21, 2019, Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, driving for Westfield Transport of West Springfield, Massachusetts, crossed the centerline on Route 2 in Randolph, New Hampshire, and killed seven members of the Jarheads Motorcycle Club. It remains the deadliest commercial vehicle crash in New Hampshire history, and it was, in every sense that matters, a dispatch failure. Zhukovskyy had been terminated by his previous employer two weeks earlier for failing to complete a drug test after rolling a commercial vehicle in Texas. Westfield hired him without a background check. His first trip ended with seven dead.

The NTSB found that of 150 Westfield driving logs reviewed, 28 were falsified, and that the company showed drivers how to tamper with their KeepTruckin ELDs. Investigators found the owners tried to add Zhukovskyy to the insurance policy an hour after the crash. Federal investigators later identified a web of affiliated carriers sharing trucks, drivers, addresses, and ownership with the Westfield operators, some of which still hold active authority.

The insurance side rhymed too. Westfield’s commercial auto policy carried a $1 million combined single limit. In November 2019, Pilgrim Insurance filed a federal interpleader in Boston asking to deposit that single million dollars with the court, to be divided among the claims of seven dead and multiple injured, and to end its duty to defend anyone. Seven funerals, one policy limit. In Thomasville, the plaintiffs are already litigating around the same math: the Beck wrongful-death suit, removed to federal court in Mobile in November, names not just Dmyterko and 4US Corp but Mercedes-Benz and Daimler Truck entities on claims that the 2019 Cascadia lacked functioning collision-avoidance technology. When the carrier’s coverage tower is short, plaintiffs go looking for deeper pockets, and the truck’s manufacturer has the deepest ones on the caption. Dmyterko, for his part, has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and asked the civil court to leave him alone indefinitely.

Accountability for the Westfield owners has been thin. Dunyadar Gasanov pleaded guilty in 2024 to three counts of lying to federal investigators, including about how long he had known the driver who killed seven people. Prosecutors asked for a year. He got two months. His brother and co-owner, Dartanyan Gasanov, rejected a plea deal that carried no prison time and was set for trial March 2, 2026, in Springfield. Court records show that the trial has been continued to this summer. Seven years after Randolph, the last criminal chapter is still open.

Say the names right

The Randolph crash gets folded into “Ukrainian trucking” stories because Zhukovskyy came to the U.S. from Ukraine as a child. His employers did not. Gasanov is the Russified form of Hasanov, a common Turkic surname. Dunyadar Gasanov was born in Uzbekistan. Randolph was a Ukrainian driver working for Uzbek-born owners. Thomasville is a Ukrainian driver working for a Ukrainian-branded carrier based in Illinois. The crash that dominated last week’s news out of Ohio belongs to a different diaspora entirely.

Over the July Fourth holiday weekend, on I-71 in Madison County, Ohio, a Freightliner Cascadia rear-ended a Honda Accord, crossed through the median barrier into oncoming lanes and triggered a second crash. The Accord’s driver, 21-year-old Tobias Forsythe, a goalkeeper for UMass Lowell and a Gahanna, Ohio native, died at the scene. The truck’s driver, 42-year-old Bekhzod Asrarov, an Uzbek national who entered the U.S. in 2024 and obtained an Ohio CDL that fall, needed Google Translate to communicate with troopers and medics. According to court records, a trooper noticed the truck’s dashcam mount was empty, with the cord still hanging. Asked where the camera went, Asrarov pointed to his pocket. He is charged with tampering with evidence and falsification, is out on bond with an ankle monitor, and prosecutors say more charges may follow crash reconstruction and toxicology. His attorney told the court he had driven for his trucking company for about a year. Neither the Ohio State Highway Patrol nor anyone else has publicly named that company.

They will have to eventually. The post-crash inspection will be entered into the federal data with a DOT number attached, the same way 4US Corp’s was. When it does, the carrier workup starts over, and I would not bet against finding a familiar shape.

Three crashes, three nationalities, one sequence: a driver with no business behind the wheel, a carrier that put him there anyway, an oversight system that missed every off-ramp, and a corporate structure ready to outlive the consequences. The nationality is a fact in the record. The system failure is the story.

Alabama already knew

Alabama, of all places, already knew how this would end, because the state had run this experiment before with a worse outcome and less accountability.

On June 19, 2021, on I-65 near Greenville, about a hundred miles up the road from Thomasville, a Hansen & Adkins auto hauler failed to stop for backed-up traffic on a bridge and hit a sport utility vehicle at roughly 51 mph. Seconds later, a second truck, an Asmat Express Freightliner driven by Mamuye Ayane Takelu, came into the pileup at between 60 and 73 mph and drove a Tallapoosa County Girls Ranch van into the median, where ruptured fuel tanks ignited. Eight children, ages 4 to 17, burned to death in that van. Ten people died in all. It remains one of the deadliest highway crashes in state history, and I have covered it every year since 2024, mostly alone.

Takelu had been in three crashes in the ten years before that afternoon. He was never criminally charged. His employer, a Clarkston, Georgia carrier whose entire safety program was a policy manual and which the NTSB noted offered no driver training of any kind, drew an unsatisfactory rating and a federal out-of-service order that September, then got upgraded to conditional 19 days later on a corrective action plan. It quietly folded by 2023 while its owner went on operating other companies. In April 2024, Takelu formed his own carrier, E&V Login Trucking LLC, USDOT 4233479, listed himself as registered agent at his Clarkston apartment, and went back to hauling under federal authority. His new company was cited for marking violations in April 2025. That October, he was in another crash, a tow-away with two injuries.

So line up the Alabama ledger. Dmyterko answered a phone call, killed two people, and got two years in a county jail. Takelu hit a van full of children at highway speed with a decade of crashes behind him, killed eight of them, was never charged with anything, and today holds his own DOT number. The punishment in this industry does not track the harm, and it barely tracks the culpability. It tracks whether anyone in the system ever bothered to look. In Clarke County, somebody looked. On I-65, five years on, nobody has. In Thomasville, the carrier reincarnated. On I-65, the driver did.

Three clocks

The Thomasville conviction starts three clocks running at once. Dmyterko’s jail credit means he is months from release into an ICE detainer, though where a Ukrainian national gets removed to, with repatriation flights to a war zone suspended, is a question immigration authorities have been dodging since they faced it with Zhukovskyy.

Dartanyan Gasanov’s federal trial, the last criminal proceeding from Randolph, is now set for this summer in Springfield.

Zhukovskyy’s New Hampshire driving suspension, the maximum seven years allowed under state law, ran from June 24, 2019. It lapsed on June 24, 2026, two and a half weeks ago. He was acquitted at trial, remains free under an ICE supervision order because his deportation cannot be carried out, and, as of that date, nothing in New Hampshire law prevents him from applying to have his license reinstated. No agency has said whether he has. Nobody, as far as I can tell, is even watching. He’s still here on TPS.

The driver who killed seven Marines is eligible for a license. The owner who was involved in a fatal crash on Alabama’s Highway 43 has an authorized carrier registered at his house. The system that produced all these outcomes is the same one screening the next driver, at the next carrier, rolling toward the next red light.