A Lancaster County jury convicted 31-year-old Philadelphia commercial truck driver Santos M. Valentin on three counts of homicide by vehicle and three counts of involuntary manslaughter, finding that he was scrolling through his phone in the seconds before his FedEx tractor-trailer slammed into a family’s car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in July 2024, killing a father and his two children. Judge Todd Brown, who presided over the three-day trial, separately found Valentin guilty of six summary traffic offenses.
The verdict came on July 10, 2026, after jurors deliberated for about an hour, according to prosecutors cited by NBC10 Philadelphia. The crash killed 43-year-old Donnell Hickson, a former Long Island track star from Baldwin, New York, along with his children, 18-year-old Decir and 11-year-old Kyla, as the family traveled in a 2018 Honda Accord. The victims were identified in earlier reporting by Newsday, which first detailed the family’s background.
Prosecutors described the 47,000-pound double-tractor-trailer Valentin was driving as a missile that careened down the highway, per their characterization at trial. The crash happened around 4:25 a.m. near mile marker 268.7 in Penn Township, about three miles east of the Lancaster-Lebanon interchange, when Valentin’s FedEx rig rear-ended the Hicksons’ vehicle. The impact pushed the Honda into a drainage culvert, and the vehicles came to rest with a second trailer on top of the car in a tree line roughly 60 feet from the Turnpike’s eastbound lanes.
Dashcam Footage Told a Damning Story
An official court record review of 48 seconds of inward-facing dashcam footage before the crash showed Valentin looking down at his phone 25 times, compared with just 20 glances up at the road, according to reporting by Newsday. Prosecutors said video evidence showed Valentin appeared to be scrolling through social media and other applications on his phone for five minutes before the collision. Pennsylvania State Police obtained more than eight hours of inward- and outward-facing dashcam footage from Valentin’s truck as part of the investigation…