Semi Truck Drivers Often Carry Rap Sheets

Semi Truck Drivers Often Carry Rap Sheets
December 10 , 2006
By Gregg Jones & Holly Becka / The Dallas Morning News
First of three parts

Turner Yarbrough drove his 18-wheeler into Dallas one afternoon in August 2004, hauling a load of medical waste. A 15-year veteran of the road, he was a crack cocaine user with a long criminal record.

At an exit on LBJ Freeway, he plowed into a line of cars. Three people were hurt, including a 76-year-old man who later died. The trucker, tests showed, had cocaine in his system. Mr. Yarbrough may not be the typical trucker on Texas highways, but he is hardly unique. Faced with a shortage of experienced drivers, some trucking companies are turning to ex-convicts as an attractive pool of low-cost labor. And the state of Texas is helping to train them.

Of 953 truckers faulted in fatal crashes from 2000 through 2005, a Dallas Morning News analysis found, at least one in four had been convicted of a criminal offense or received deferred adjudication before the crash. In deferred-adjudication cases, a defendant's record doesn't reflect a conviction as long as probation is completed.

More than 14 percent had committed drug or alcohol offenses prior to their accidents, and more than one in 10 were felons.

The News' analysis also showed that at least 137 truckers had one or more criminal offenses in the 10 years prior to their fatal accident. At least 72 had an offense within five years, and 28 truckers had at least one offense in the two years before their fatal accident.

"I'm all for people rehabilitating themselves and getting jobs," said Tom Smith, who heads the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. But when it comes to putting felons in 18-wheelers, "clearly there should be limits."

State taxpayers are helping to put some of these former criminals behind the wheel of big rigs through classes that train Texas prison inmates to become truck drivers.

Over the last 10 years, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice program has trained more than 1,200 inmates to drive big trucks. More than 900 received their commercial driver's licenses while in prison, state records show.

How these drivers have performed on Texas highways is unclear. The state-run school district that trains inmates to be truckers said it doesn't track them once they leave prison. It refused to release inmate names so The News could cross-check them with Texas accident and driver's license records, and it declined a request to let reporters observe prison truck-driver training classes. The newspaper has asked the attorney general for a ruling under the Texas Public Information Act.

However, The News has determined that a number of truckers who received their commercial driver's licenses while in prison were later faulted in accidents.

By analyzing public records databases and matching names and dates of birth against the Texas Department of Public Safety truck accident database, The News identified 80 truckers faulted in accidents from 2000 through 2005 who received their commercial driver's licenses at the two prisons where the truck-driver training program is offered.

The Texas Workforce Commission also is spending state and federal tax dollars to send former prison inmates, parolees and probationers to truck-driving school, on the premise that it is worthwhile rehabilitation.

All of this is legal. With only a few exceptions, it's also legal to hire drivers with criminal records.

"It's like anything else: It's good if it's watched, regulated and there's proper training," said Dr. James Marquart, director of the crime and justice studies program at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former correctional officer in the Texas prison system.

But government oversight groups say putting a driver with a history of questionable judgment behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound rig jeopardizes public safety.

The job pressures truckers face and the fact that 5,000 people a year already die in large-truck crashes in the United States make felons and big rigs a potentially dangerous mix, said Joan Claybrook, national president of Public Citizen.

"I'm not saying everyone who has a prison record is incapable of doing this job," she said. "But my concern is the way the system is set up with so little oversight, such harsh working conditions and cheating already – I worry it's going to get even worse."

Large Labor Pool
Trucks carry about 70 percent of the nation's goods, and the growing demand for their services has left companies scrambling to hire enough truckers willing to drive for relatively low pay under difficult conditions. Some companies try to attract better drivers by sweetening pay and benefits; others tap into the nation's large and growing pool of former criminals.

"Ten years ago, companies didn't want to take a look at felons," said Martin Garsee, a Houston Community College administrator who helps oversee the school's truck-driver training program, which trained Texas prison inmates in 2004-05. "Now, companies take it case by case."

Federal and state laws, in general, don't prohibit trucking companies from hiring drivers with criminal records and don't even require companies to conduct criminal background checks of prospective drivers. There are some prohibitions on hiring people convicted of a felony, such as those who used a commercial vehicle in a crime or those who had drug or alcohol offenses while driving a commercial vehicle.

American Trucking Associations, which represents the nation's largest carriers, said it supports "additional, reasonable measures" to improve driver vetting, such as a national database of truckers who failed drug or alcohol tests.

But the group does not support requiring companies to perform mandatory criminal background checks because the industry cannot review the FBI's national criminal database, despite association lobbying for such access.

"Mandatory jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction criminal history records checks would be an inefficient and ineffective approach," said Tiffany Wlazlowski, spokeswoman for the group.

Trucking companies make no bones about their willingness to hire ex-convicts.

Werner Enterprises of Omaha, Neb., one of the nation's largest carriers, rejects applicants with drunken-driving convictions within the last five years but doesn't exclude other criminal convictions, according to its Web site. Celadon Group Inc. of Indianapolis, another major national carrier, won't accept drivers with "DWI, DUI, careless or reckless driving or chemical refusal convictions within the last five years," but it doesn't specifically exclude other criminal convictions on its Web site.

Swift Transportation of Phoenix, the nation's largest trucking company, asks applicants if they have ever been convicted of a crime or given probation or parole. But the application for owner-operators includes this parenthetical statement: "A 'yes' answer will not necessarily disqualify you from employment."

Many smaller carriers say they consider ex-cons on a case-by-case basis.

Incentive to Hire
Employers have an incentive for hiring felons: a federal tax credit of $2,400 on the first $6,000 an ex-offender earns under a provision established to encourage employers to hire individuals from groups with a high unemployment rate.

There are plenty of takers, said Carter MacKenzie, chief executive officer of BoDart Recruiters Inc., a Lubbock company that places Texas inmates in jobs after their release. And at the head of the pack are trucking companies and heavy equipment operators.

"When you consider the alternatives" – illegal immigrants, for example – "they're a very attractive pool of labor," said Mr. MacKenzie, a former heavy equipment manufacturer who began recruiting ex-convicts after watching his customers struggle to find good workers.

In Texas, trucking companies have an especially large pool of candidates. Texas prisons freed nearly 70,000 inmates in fiscal 2005. Texas led the nation with 430,312 people on probation at the end of 2005, and it was second to California with 101,916 men and women on parole, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Mr. Garsee said employers have been pleased with the quality of ex-offenders they've hired from his truck-driving program.
"We've had a local company who for years has hired people from our open class who were felons," he said. "The guy who runs the company said, 'I don't go out to hire felons, but I haven't seen a difference in the work ethic of those that were felons and those that weren't.' There's a little more loyalty to the company for giving them a chance."

Teaching Job Skills
Studies have shown that more than 60 percent of offenders released from prison are rearrested for a serious crime within three years, and nearly half wind up back in prison. In an attempt to change that trend, chain gangs and license-plate factories have given way to programs that teach inmates real-world vocational skills so they can become productive citizens after their release.

Thirty years after starting a program to teach prison inmates to drive big trucks, Texas remains one of the only states to offer such training. Montana trains about 20 to 25 prison inmates a year to drive big trucks, according to Larry Burke, vocational training director for the state's corrections department. Texas is the only other state he is aware of that trains prison inmates to drive big trucks, he said.

The Texas prison system operates two truck-driving schools, at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville and at the Central Unit outside Sugar Land. According to officials with the Windham School District, which operates prison educational programs, the state paid Lee College $36,542 in fiscal 2005 to operate the Wynne school, an amount that doesn't include instructor salaries. The program at Central Unit cost $145,280, they said.

Admission to the trucking program is determined by the inmate's crime and prison behavior. Students can't have capital murder, murder, voluntary manslaughter or sexual misconduct convictions, or a "pattern" of violent crimes. They must also have a clear driving record and be within 24 months of parole eligibility or discharge, according to Bambi Kiser, spokeswoman for the Windham School District.

But no state agency tracks the safety record of graduates of the Texas prison truck-driving program.

An attorney for the Windham School District, Michael Mondville, said he wasn't aware of any truck drivers trained in the Texas prison program who were involved in fatal accidents, but he acknowledged that the district did not track former offenders "for any purpose."

Mr. MacKenzie, the employment recruiter, also said he wasn't aware of any major accidents involving graduates of the Texas prison truckers program that he placed in jobs. "I'm 100 percent confident that they're well trained and they're not a safety risk," he said.

The News' investigation, however, found many truckers who received their commercial driver's license while in prison and had crashes after their release. Among them:

William J. Yarbrough – no apparent relation to Turner Yarbrough – was faulted by authorities in accidents that caused four injuries in 2000 and 2005. He was following too closely and distracted by a cellphone in a 2000 accident in Baytown, and he was going too fast for prevailing driving conditions in the second accident in Houston, according to state records.

Dan Ibarra was involved in an April 2005 accident on Interstate 45 in Montgomery County that seriously injured three people, according to state records. Authorities ticketed Mr. Ibarra and said his speeding contributed to the crash.

Attempts to locate the men through public records databases were unsuccessful. Telephone numbers associated with the men or family members were nonworking. Letters delivered to their most recent addresses went unanswered.

Toll of Ex-con Truckers
The newspaper's cross-reference of the Texas Department of Public Safety truck accident database with national criminal records databases found more than 200 truckers with criminal records who were at fault in fatal accidents from 2000 through 2005.

One was Ted Couch, whose criminal career began in 1985, when he was charged with aggravated assault, later upgraded to attempted murder. He was sentenced to seven years of deferred-adjudication probation, according to court records.

Two years after the supervision ended, Mr. Couch was in trouble again. A Wise County judge sentenced him to 12 months of deferred-adjudication probation for assaulting a family member.

In April 1997, Mr. Couch was sentenced to 60 days in jail after being arrested for driving with a suspended license. In November 2000, Mr. Couch was sentenced to 90 days in jail and one year's probation after pleading guilty to a charge of assault causing bodily injury, public records show.

On the morning of Nov. 13, 2002, Mr. Couch was driving an 18-wheeler for Big E Industries Inc. of Keller on U.S. Highway 287 near Bowie, Texas. A motorist behind him had just called the Montague County Sheriff's Department to report the trucker's "erratic" driving when Mr. Couch careened into a caravan of construction vehicles parked on the highway shoulder. A 26-year-old highway worker was crushed to death, and three colleagues were injured.

A drug test showed that Mr. Couch's blood contained traces of methamphetamine at the time of the accident. He later pleaded guilty to intoxication manslaughter and intoxication assault and is serving concurrent prison terms of 10 years and five years.

Jaun Robert Olds had spent six years in an Indiana prison in the 1980s for criminal confinement – defined as holding or removing someone without their consent – and served more than three years' probation in Florida in 1992 for aggravated assault, public records show. He had also amassed four pages of accidents, traffic tickets and other vehicle infractions in five states, most of them in his work as a truck driver.

Just hours after Mr. Couch's crash in Montague County, Mr. Olds was driving an 18-wheeler loaded with 47,000 pounds of concrete platforms northbound on Interstate 35E in Lancaster. Only two of his rig's 10 brakes were working. Mr. Olds recently told The News that his boss said there were new brakes on the truck.

A driver testified that Mr. Olds suddenly passed her going more than 60 mph, then nearly hit her as he cut back into her lane as they approached a construction zone.

Moments later, Mr. Olds rammed into a pickup truck that was at the end of a line of vehicles backed up at the construction zone. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Hampton died.

Mr. Olds cried and asked for mercy in July 2004 as he pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

"I'm not a monster," he told the judge. "I'm a man who was trying to do a job, and I messed up... Regardless of what anyone thinks or doesn't think about me, I care."

In a written response from prison to the newspaper's questions, Mr. Olds expressed remorse for the girl's death but said his criminal past should not have prevented him from driving big trucks. As it was, he said, his criminal record made it harder to get work with a reputable company. "You end up driving for the bottom of the barrel companies," he said.

In Demand
Turner Yarbrough's ability to get hired again and again, despite his string of arrests and convictions, highlights the willingness of trucking companies to take a chance on drivers with criminal pasts.

After leaving the Army, he got his commercial driver's license in 1990 at American Career Tech in Fort Worth. His first trucking job was with a company based in Joplin, Mo. Tired of being away from home after a few months, he started driving for a short-haul trucking firm based in Waxahachie, he testified in a March 2006 deposition for a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against him and his employer by the widow of Robert Bohne. The elderly man died five months after the accident.

He repeated that pattern in the years that followed. Mr. Yarbrough later explained that his job-hopping was typical in the trucking industry: "Truck drivers often do that, get blowed out, they leave, they stop, they go back."

He interspersed stints driving big rigs with a succession of jobs as a bus driver, for the Department of Veterans Affairs, Greyhound, a charter bus company called Adventure Express and Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

As a contract employee, Mr. Yarbrough was behind the wheel of a DART bus in January 2001 when he cut a corner too sharply and hit a utility pole, injuring one passenger, according to state records. Asked in the March deposition if he had cocaine in his system at the time of the accident, Mr. Yarbrough replied: "I believe I did."

In late 2002, Mr. Yarbrough's deferred-adjudication probation on a forged-check charge was revoked and he was ordered to prison for six months. He was released in early 2003.

Hired Again
Sometime in 2003 or 2004, Mr. Yarbrough moved to Louisiana and started driving an 18-wheeler for Dallas-based EnviroClean Management Services Inc., hauling "blood, needles, body parts, limbs," he later testified.

By then, he said, he had been convicted "approximately five to six" times for driving with a suspended license. He had convictions for marijuana possession, theft by check and driving without liability insurance. He said he noted his criminal past on his EnviroClean job application, but "no one ever asked me about it," according to the deposition.

EnviroClean didn't respond to interview requests. It referred questions to attorney Andrew Woodward, who is defending the company, its parent, MedSolutions Inc., and Mr. Yarbrough in the Bohne family's lawsuit.

In response to questions about company policies on hiring ex-criminals as truckers, Mr. Woodward said the company "makes every effort to comply with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety regulations and the requirements that are required in those regulations as far as qualifying their drivers."

He wouldn't say whether the company conducted a criminal background check on Mr. Yarbrough. But he noted that "under the regulations, a criminal background check is not part of the requirements as far as qualifying a driver. Some people do it and some don't. But a criminal conviction by itself does not disqualify a driver from operating a commercial motor vehicle under the federal regulations."

Mr. Woodward said his clients "have sympathy for the Bohne family for their loss, but there's no evidence that any actions on the part of my clients were the cause of Mr. Bohne's death."

In initial responses to the lawsuit by Mr. Bohne's family, EnviroClean, MedSolutions and Mr. Yarbrough alleged that Mr. Bohne's claims of physical and mental ailments were caused by "prior and/or subsequent accidents, events or occurrences." More recently, the defendants have also alleged in court filings that another 18-wheeler "started the accident and kept on going."

At the scene of the 2004 accident, police ticketed Mr. Yarbrough but did not test him for drugs or alcohol. He tested positive for cocaine later that day in a screening required by U.S. Transportation Department regulations.

Mr. Yarbrough testified that he knew he had cocaine in his system because he had smoked crack for a six-hour period, ending the day before the accident. But he maintained that he was well rested and "not under the influence of drugs" the day of the accident.

He said that EnviroClean never spoke to him about the positive test results and that he decided to leave the company immediately after the accident. The company says he was fired.

Last year, Mr. Yarbrough resumed his career as a truck driver, hauling lumber for a company around Shreveport, La. The job lasted for only a few months and, by last March, he was no longer driving a truck, Mr. Yarbrough said in the deposition.

In September, he renewed his Texas commercial driver's license.

By late November, when he did not meet a deadline to resolve several outstanding traffic tickets, the Department of Public Safety declared his license expired.

Reached by telephone at his home in Mansfield, La., one recent evening, Mr. Yarbrough politely declined to answer questions about his trucking days or the 2004 accident.

"I really don't want to talk about this," he said. "No harm meant or anything, but that's an issue I'm still trying to put out of my head, and it brings up a lot of bitter things."

Staff researcher Darby Tober contributed to this report.
E-mail trucks@dallasnews.com

IN TEXAS ...
• 502 people died in big-truck accidents in 2005.
• 9,807 were injured last year.
• 344,000 trucks were registered here.
• 632 state troopers enforce truck safety on nearly 302,000 miles of roadway.

LEARNING BEHIND BARS
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice operates truck-driving schools for prison inmates at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville and the Central Unit outside Sugar Land. The truck-driving program is one of a range of vocational classes offered to prison inmates. The course runs for about 600 hours over six months. Inmates who successfully complete the course are allowed to take the commercial driver's license examination at a local Department of Public Safety office.

METHODOLOGY
Dallas Morning News reporters and researchers consulted state and public records databases to determine how many truckers with criminal records had been involved in fatal crashes. Using the Texas Department of Public Safety crash database, The News identified 953 truckers either ticketed for or found to have contributed to fatal crashes from 2000 through 2005. The News ran a criminal background check on these truckers' names and birth dates, using the Accurint and DCS Information Systems public records databases. Drivers whose names were so common their identity couldn't be positively established weren't included in the search.

Accurint includes statewide criminal conviction databases for 38 states and the District of Columbia and includes county court records and arrest logs for select counties. DCS Information Services uses Texas Department of Public Safety criminal convictions data. On average in Texas, about 70 percent of such records are reported to the state, so the actual number of criminal convictions is probably higher in most cases.

The News didn't include traffic offenses in its analysis because many local governments don't consistently report such information to the state. Accident dates drawn from the DPS crash database were used to determine how many truckers had committed crimes before their fatal crashes.

The News also identified some truckers who got their commercial driver's licenses while inmates in state prisons. Using public records databases, The News matched people whose driver's license address was the same as one of the two prison units where truck-driver training is offered against the DPS crash database to identify truck drivers who contributed to fatal accidents. The News then requested under the Texas Public Information Act these truckers' driver's license applications to determine whether they had received their commercial driver's license while living at one of the two prison units where training is provided. The News then consulted public records databases to confirm that these truckers had criminal records that matched the time frame of their license applications.

ABOUT THIS SERIES
Reporters for The Dallas Morning News have spent a year investigating safety problems involving 18-wheelers in Texas. Their reporting is based on federal, state and local accident and inspection reports and databases, court records, criminal public records databases and interviews with truckers, company owners, law enforcement, lawyers, academicians and other safety experts. Stories in this installment focus on the use of felons as drivers, the harsh working conditions truckers face and the industry's political influence in shaping laws and regulations. For previous stories in the Road Hazards series, please see www.dallasnews.com/roadhazards. If you have information you would like to share, please e-mail trucks@dallasnews.com.

Project Team
Reporters: Holly Becka, Gregg Jones, Jennifer LaFleur, Steve McGonigle
Photographers: Ron Baselice, Jennifer LaFleur, Kye R. Lee
Graphics: Sergio Peçanha, Tom Setzer, Layne Smith
Researchers/data analysis: Darlean Spangenberger, Darby Tober
Copy editor: Travis Pinson
Designer: Elizabeth Wishaw
Online coordinators: Karen Dee Davis, Chris McNary
Photo editors: Irwin Thompson, Chris Wilkins
Project editors: Maud Beelman, Doug Swanson


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