Summary

On December 4, Gulvinder Singh Sandhu, a former driver for Montreal-based Garfield Container Transport, Inc., was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to pay $9,200 in fines, serve 48 months incarceration and 36 months supervised release for his conviction related to a fatal tractor trailer accident that occurred 7 years earlier. On September 22, 1999, a tractor trailer driven by Sandhu and loaded with rock salt jumped a guardrail on Interstate 78 north of Philadelphia resulting in an accident that killed four occupants of a minivan, including a 4-year-old boy and his parents. Our investigation found that Sandhu falsified his FMSCA regulated logbooks on a near-daily basis between August 2 and September 22, 1999, to conceal that he was driving more than the maximum driving hours in violation of federal highway safety regulations. Sandhu was indicted by a federal grand jury in April 2002, and in May 2006, he voluntarily returned to the United States after more than 4 years as a fugitive in Canada. In August 2006, Sandhu pleaded guilty to 42 counts of making false statements on his commercial driver's license daily logbooks. This investigation was conducted by the DOT OIG with assistance from the Canadian Ministry of Justice and FMCSA.