A Washington State Patrol trooper did everything short of impounding the truck. He pulled over a car-hauling semitruck, uncovered a laundry list of violations, issued citations totaling over $1,000, and looked the driver in the eye. “You can’t drive,” the trooper said plainly. “You don’t have a commercial driver’s license, you don’t have a medical card, you don’t have a logbook.” He even followed the driver to a nearby truck stop to make sure the rig was parked. That should have been the end of it.
It wasn’t. Weeks later, in December 2025, that same driver, 40-year-old Juan Hernandez-Santos, was allegedly back behind the wheel of that same car-hauling semitruck on Interstate 5 near Lacey, Washington. According to the Washington State Patrol, he rear-ended a school bus during the morning commute and set off a pileup involving four other vehicles. The freeway shut down for hours. Four people were transported to the hospital.
The school bus, fortunately, had no students aboard at the time. That detail sits somewhere between a relief and a grim reminder of how differently this could have ended. Body camera footage from the November traffic stop has since been released, and the footage shows a trooper calmly but firmly trying to get through to a driver who struggled to understand English. The trooper’s frustration is palpable. So is the futility…