A Bedford Heights scrap metal company says a $239,000 shipment of copper it sent from its Solon Road facility never reached its destination, after a driver allegedly told the trucking company hauling it that he had hijacked the cargo near Oklahoma City. The copper has never been found.
Joseph Krash Metal Co. filed the lawsuit against Cleveland Express Trucking and Cleveland Express Transportation, which was recently transferred from Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court to federal court in Cleveland, according to cleveland.com. The company, which operates a scrap metal processing facility at 25600 Solon Road in Bedford Heights, hired Cleveland Express on February 5 to ship copper to Aurubis Richmond, a copper-recycling plant in Augusta, Georgia. That relocation to federal court is a routine outcome under the Carmack Amendment, the 1906 federal statute that governs interstate carrier liability and preempts state-level breach-of-contract or negligence claims in shipping disputes, according to the State Bar of Texas.
How the Load Went Missing
According to the lawsuit, a driver loaded the copper at the Solon Road facility and set off on the roughly 1,100-mile route toward Georgia. But rather than handling the shipment itself, Cleveland Express allegedly subcontracted the job to TransMac Freight, a Las Vegas-based shipping company, without Joseph Krash Metals’ knowledge — even though the scrap company expected Cleveland Express to ship the copper directly rather than farm it out to subcontractors, per the same account.
The load eventually reached a United Van Lines transfer station in Oklahoma City, where a driver attempted to unload the copper and reload it into a new trailer on February 6. Cleveland Express lost the shipment’s GPS tracking signal during the drive despite having tracked the cargo by GPS monitoring, the suit states. It was United Van Lines employees who ultimately alerted both Cleveland Express and Oklahoma City police about the shipment, though Oklahoma City police did not respond to questions about the incident, per the report.
A Driver’s Alleged Confession
The copper cargo was detained at the Oklahoma City transfer station until Cleveland Express could find another carrier, and it was there, according to the lawsuit, that the driver told Cleveland Express he had hijacked the cargo. Three days after the cargo was detained, Cleveland Express hired Voyager 1 Transportation, a North Carolina-based shipping company, to take over — but the copper was never delivered and has not been found. Voyager 1 lists an apartment building as its address in U.S. Department of Transportation records, the lawsuit notes, and the company did not return a message seeking comment…