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Trucker, owner and inspection shop found guilty in fatal highway accident
December 31, 2009
COURTHOUSE — Montgomery County prosecutors made history this year by convicting a commercial tractor-trailer truck owner and a garage proprietor with homicide.
In January, a 1997 Kenworth truck hauling a trailer failed to stop in... time when it rounded the Schuylkill Expressway’s Conshohocken Curve and plowed into four cars, killing 49-year-old David Schreffler, a Fort Washington man.
Schreffler, whose Infiniti sedan was pinned under the 37-ton rig, was pronounced dead at the scene by the Montgomery County coroner.
The state police and district attorney’s investigation revealed that the truck had been traveling across the country; on the morning of the crash it was hauling produce to New Jersey. The truck’s severely-worn brakes were deemed to be the cause of the collision.
The truck’s driver, the rig’s owner and the inspection station owner, who sold inspection stickers to the truckers without even working on the vehicle, were charged with homicide by vehicle and related offenses.
County Detective Rob Turner, the Detective Bureau’s traffic reconstructionist, said the DA’s Office spent many hours on the crash investigation. Recently, he pulled out pictures of the truck’s 10 sets of brakes laid out in a certified inspection shop.
“We spent an entire week just inspecting the brakes,” Turner said.
The Kenworth truck’s left front brakes were found to be “worn and dangerously thin,” according to court papers. As well, many brakes showed signs of overheating, scoring and improper sizing.
Inspection reports determined leaking fluid contaminated the brake linings in a rear axle. In another rear wheel, the brake lining had been heated up to such an extent, the lining had adhered to the brake shoe. The trailer’s brakes were also reportedly scored and “heat cracked.”
Days before the Jan. 23 crash, the rig’s driver, Valerijs Belovs, called his boss, Victor Kalinitchii, when he was near Chicago to complain that he had trouble getting the tractor-trailer to stop when he applied the brakes, but the owner urged him to continue on to California to pick up a load of produce.
The brakes were so bad, Belovs told investigators he resorted to using the emergency brake to attempt to slow the vehicle. Previously, the driver had been stopped by police driving the truck in Maryland, Iowa, Arizona and California, and the vehicle had been in an accident in 2008 in Kentucky.
Joseph Jadczak Jr., the owner of Pratt Auto Service, at 2224 Granite St., in Philadelphia, claimed the truck and trailer were inspected there in December 2008 and sold two numbered stickers. Police allegedly caught him selling stickers to another truck driver the day he was arrested. The shop has since closed.
Belovs, now 56, pleaded guilty to homicide by vehicle in June, and the garage owner. Jadczak, 61, who fraudulently sold the inspection sticker, pleaded guilty to the homicide charge in July.
In December, Kalinitchii, the truck’s 41-year-old owner, admitted responsibility for allowing the tractor-trailer to be driven knowing its brakes were defective. He, too, entered a plea of vehicular homicide. Besides owning the truck, Kalinitchii also owned the trucking company, First Guild Inc.
Assistant District Attorney James Zoll, who prosecuted the case, said the DA’s Office wanted to charge all three men to send a message to the trucking industry about the seriousness of the offenses.
“It would have been easy to charge only the driver,” Zoll said. “When we took a look and saw the condition of the truck, we knew other people were responsible for the crash, we decided to hold everybody accountable who had a part in it.”
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