On June 19, 2021, at 2:21 in the afternoon, a Tallapoosa County Girls Ranch van carrying eight children, ages 4 to 17, returning from a vacation, was struck by an autohauler truck on Interstate 65 near Greenville, Alabama, struck again by a second truck and pushed into the median, and then consumed by fire.
The sequence was straightforward. A Hansen & Adkins Auto Transport Volvo truck-tractor traveling approximately 51 mph in wet conditions plowed into stopped traffic on a bridge. Seconds later, an Asmat Express Freightliner driven by 41-year-old Mamuye Ayane Takelu slammed into the pileup at highway speeds, pushing the children’s van into the median, where ruptured fuel tanks ignited. Ten people died in the crash. What followed the crash was a lesson in how American institutions protect themselves first. The case is probably one you’ve never heard of. I’m the only one I am aware of to cover this story every single year. There is also no reliable way to know how much of this went unreported or underreported during the previous administration. Federal interest in CDL fraud enforcement, English proficiency violations, and carrier oversight failures was, by any measurable standard, limited. Prior to independent coverage of these cases, detailed in the “30 Days of Why” series on The Tea Substack, these investigations received virtually no attention at scale from traditional media or government communications offices. The current administration has been the most active on commercial trucking enforcement and DOT oversight in recent memory. What that activity is exposing is a backlog of systemic failures that have quietly compounded for years.
THE DRIVER WHO WENT BACK TO WORK…