Welcome To The Jungle, Part Two

Developments in the Austin Crash, and a terrible appointment from President Trump

A couple of major news items came down the pipe on, Tuesday, March 25, 2025, and what a coincidence that both of them have major implications for the trucking industry.

I want to thank Texas based investigative journalist Sarah Fields who along with her associate the anon account FFA Family did the hard yards of tracking down a lot of the information I’m about to present you about Solomun Weldekeal Araya, the ‘driver’ who ended the lives of 5 people in Austin, Texas a couple of weeks ago.

In case you didn’t hear about that collision, I recommend reading part one of my commentary on this story, where I connect Mr Araya and the small company he works for to terrible policies of the Biden Administration, Amazon, and the possibility he was brought to America by an NGO -

According to Ms Fields reporting, in the form of a great Twitter thread which she has given me permission to reprint here, we find out that many issues myself and others like American Truckers United have been making noise about with regards to safety in the trucking industry are reflected heavily in this case.


The following is directly from Ms Fields thread, lightly edited for brevity, bolding emphasis mine.

Solomun Weldekeal Araya, an 18-wheeler driver who was arrested and is facing intoxication charges after a North Austin crash that claimed five lives, including a four-year-old and an infant, was a contract driver for Amazon on a work visa from Ethiopia. He was transporting items from an out-of-state warehouse. He is not a Texas resident, and his CDL was not issued by Texas.

The mainstream media is focusing on possible bad “work zone conditions” instead of the driver himself. A few days ago, I promised I would drop a thread on all of our findings.

We investigated the LLC he works for and found information that the MSM has either not investigated or is refusing to report on.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton may want to look into this

Included is the HEAVILY redacted Austin Police Report.

According to the eye-witness reports that I will attach in this thread, Araya approached the nearly dead-stop traffic and never slowed down, plowing through 17 vehicles. It was the vehicles themselves that finally forced the 18-wheeler to come to a stop.

He is currently charged with seven counts of intoxication manslaughter with a vehicle. Until the toxicology report returns, Araya will be labeled under intoxication by sleep deprivation due to the fact that he blew a zero when tested for alcohol.

Solomun Weldekeal-Araya worked for an LLC called ZBN Transport. According to records, there are two inspection dates for ZBN. A truck was inspected in NM on 1/14/25 as ZBN. The next day it was inspected in Texas as Bay Area Lines LLC.

I spoke with a professional in the trucking world. He stated that this is not unusual, however, “day to day companies swapping is very concerning”

According to Court Dockets, Araya was set for a court day just one week from the tragic incident that took 5 lives. Previously, Araya had received a ticket for going 63 in a 30. A violation that could have cost him his CDL. If he had been restricted from driving, this tragedy could have been prevented from his reckless driving. Araya has only had his LICENSE FOR FOUR MONTHS.

Very strange. (Could be considered a data entry error or something else), according to inventory, two of the vehicles, built in a different year, have the same exact VIN number.

Here is where things take an even stranger turn. According to the Texas Secretary of State Website, this is ZBN LLC’s physical address. 9180 Forest Ln. APT. 202. Dallas, Tx. 75243. Which leads us back to an apartment complex in Dallas. Millennium Dallas apartments.

When searching related companies associated with the exact same address, we found nearly a dozen more transportation LLCs operating from the exact same address! They each had different apartment numbers. Here are just 4 of the pages I printed out for my records. It is now clear that this entire apartment building is part of a larger operation.

We then searched for the owner of the apartment building. As it turns out, the entire apartment building is owned by an LLC that is registered in TX to a FL company.

We then decided to research Araya’s address we were able to find by doing a background check. His background held very little information aside from his address. Shocking! His address belongs to an LLC in California. unfortunately, you cannot see who owns the address in California because it is registered under multiple LLCs.

According to a source who has provided me information regarding immigrants who have claimed asylum under the Biden administration, they stated that a majority of them were given the same birthday of 1/1/? I searched Araya’s birthday and sure enough, his birthdate according to his record is 1/1/88.

Affidavit warrant of arrest -

APD Officer Solomon was the first officer to arrive on the scene. Officer Solomon was approached by a witness and told that one of the drivers was trying to leave. The witness pointed to the yellow Volvo. Officer Solomon approached the yellow Volvo and observed a male hiding in the personal cabin area of the truck, peeking his head out from the curtains. Officer Solomon gave commands to the individual to exit the yellow Volvo and detained him. The individual was identified as: Weldekeal Araya, Solomun B/M 01/01/1988 Officer Solomon brought Mr. Weldekeal Araya to the staging area for medical treatment. APD Officer Seweryn, who is trained as a Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) and a member of APD's Impaired Driving Investigation Unit, spoke with Mr. Weldekeal Araya. Mr. Weldekeal Araya primarily spoke Tigrinya, but also understood and spoke English. Throughout the interaction with the APD officers on the scene, Mr. Weldckcal Araya appeared very calm and indifferent to what happened, which given the circumstances of the collision could be considered unusual. Following the SFSTs and additional field sobriety tests, Officer Seweryn determined that, due to the introduction of a controlled substance, a drug, a dangerous drug, or a combination thereof into Mr. Weldekeal Araya's system, Mr. Weldekeal Araya did not have the normal use of mental and physical faculties to operate a motor vehicle safely. Therefore, Mr. Weldekeal Araya was placed under arrest for Driving While Intoxicated.

We have obtained the Austin Police Report. I fully understand the importance of redacting victim information. However, this extends well past that. It is clear that Araya is being protected by a woke PD and woke Biden-appointed NTSB Vice Chairman Alvin Brown.

I have reached out to ZBN LLC For comment. They have not responded. I also sent my own investigator to the site of the apartment complex owned by ZBN LLC. There were no big rigs on site. Most residents were of Latino decent. Mostly Texas plates, with a few Florida plates scattered throughout. I will attach my other posts regarding his matter in this thread. The MSM will not begin investigating the LLC or ask questions about a clear operation in Dallas. Instead, they’re redirecting their focus to the construction on the highway. Two lawsuits, including one seeking $100 million, have been filed in deadly I-35 crash in Austin. I have a copy of this suit but will not share out of respect for the survivor’s privacy.

And that’s most of the thread.

Once again, I’d like to thank Ms Fields and FFA Family for digging this info up and being so gracious as to make it publicly available, and granting me permission to reprint.

There are some notable problems found here with all of the entities involved in ZBN, the small company who Mr Araya worked for and were also apparently his address.

Back in October of 2023 I was invited to the Future of Freight Festival, or F3, an annual freight tech and networking conference put on by FreightWaves, an organization whom I am friendly with and whose work I quote here often. One of the things I noticed about F3 was that many of the tech products and services they were selling to shippers and freight brokers involved ‘trust and verification’, as in, software packages which would verify the legitimacy of small trucking companies like that which employed Mr Araya, and who were hauling loads for Amazon.

As you can see from the above documents, if you hire some random carrier from a load board, figuring out who owns what, where they are from, and what kind of safety and competency you can expect out of them, is something of a challenge. Why would anyone use no-name carriers like this, given the risks involved, and the multiple layers of companies you have to navigate to arrive at an operator?

Risks.

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, there are risks involved with using these carriers, and that is the point. Companies like Amazon can get freight moved at a severe discount compared to using legacy carriers who do things properly and employ drivers that are fluent in English, competent, didn’t show up here yesterday, and aren’t likely to get whacked out on drugs and crash their trucks. And because these companies are subcontractors, those who use them can keep an arm’s length from the eventual lawsuits, thus mitigating the risk of owning trucks themselves, and lowering the cost by not employing established trucking companies with safe and competent drivers.

Speaking of lawsuits -

https://www.kvue.com/article/news/crime/amazon-zbn-transport-sued-i35-crash-survivor-austin-texas/269-3197667b-beb1-4204-a3fa-041257bcd7b4

The devastating crash on Interstate 35 has now led to multiple lawsuits from victims seeking more than $150 million combined.

One of the survivors of the crash, Nathan Jonard, filed a $100 million lawsuit in Travis County against Amazon Logistics, ZBN Transport and a truck driver, accusing them of negligence that resulted in multiple deaths and injuries.

The lawsuit also accuses truck driver Solomun Weldekeal Araya of barreling down I-35 with "absolute disregard for human life."

According to the lawsuit, Jonard was driving on I-35 when Araya allegedly slammed into stopped traffic, hitting 17 vehicles. Five people were killed in the crash and 11 others were left injured. Araya was accused of being on central nervous system (CNS) depressants when the crash happened.

Jonard claims the crash left him unconscious and mangled his vehicle. The aftermath left him with spinal injuries, broken bones and severe cuts covering his body that left his life permanently altered.

"On I-35, it's a very dangerous road, and we've got folks that are out there driving that shouldn't be," Jonard's attorney, Brad Beckworth, said.

Beckworth argues that Amazon and ZBN Transport are responsible for hiring Araya, accusing him of having a history of reckless driving and safety violations. In his arrest records, the Texas Department of Public Safety noted that Araya had multiple violations for "hours of service" driving time in the weeks before the crash.

In addition to the intoxication charges, Beckworth said it's inexcusable for large corporations to employ people who "bring needless danger to the community."

“It's dangerous enough just driving sober,” Beckworth said. “We can't have drivers that don't obey the law. We can't have drivers that are under the influence, and we can't have companies that are so willing to make money that they'll hire anybody to drive.”

”we can't have companies that are so willing to make money that they'll hire anybody to drive.”

I’d like to remind everyone here of a report from CBS I shared in Part One of this series regards Amazon’s record of ‘hire anybody’

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-trucking-contractors-have-higher-rates-of-safety-violations/

In the past two years, at least 57 people have died in more than four dozen crashes involving federally regulated carriers shipping for Amazon, according to FMCSA data, though the data does not indicate who was at fault in these incidents. The FMCSA produces a crash involvement score for carriers, but it is not public.

Two more incidents involving Amazon trucking contractors have come to my attention, both crashing in the same area near San Diego back in February, only ninety minutes apart on the same night.

https://onscene.tv/2-amazon-prime-big-rigs-crash-in-san-diego-ca/

DETAILS on Chula Vista Crash: Another male driver of an Amazon semi-truck crashed into the center divider wall and jack-knifed his truck & trailer. The trailer is blocking the #1 lane. A large amount of oil has spilled onto the freeway. The driver is not injured. This is the 2nd Amazon semi-truck crash in the last few hours.

DETAILS ON MISSION VALLEY CRASH: Every time it rains, it seems an Amazon truck driver crashes in the exact same spot. This morning was no exception as the driver of the semi-truck slid on the wet pavement due to his downhill speed. The semi-truck ended up on the right shoulder and into the traffic lanes. The male driver was injured and transported to a local hospital for his injuries. The northbound lanes are closed and traffic is being diverted to the I-8. The freeway will remain closed for several hours waiting for the removal of the truck/trailer and a HAZMAT clean up.

As I have argued here and on Twitter, there are some simple steps we can take to limit the ability of Amazon and other large companies to take advantage of untrained, unvetted, often illiterate, and utterly incompetent insourced labor; labor that is insourced here for one reason, and one reason only - wage suppression.

One of those steps would be for the FMCSA to overturn the 2016 memorandum that waived enforcement of English language requirements of those who drive commercial vehicles. As I mentioned in a piece I released over the weekend about this very fight on the state level in Arkansas -

https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/the-battle-in-arkansas

I’m assuming the ATA are here alluding to the FMCSA waiver issued in 2016 that terminated meaningful enforcement of Federal CDL requirements for English Proficiency. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a court case in front of the Feds to argue about that.

I say take them on, and get some nerd in court to argue that the feelings of migrants are more important than road safety which requires being able to read signs, weather reports, and other important information, or communicate with enforcement officials or the general public, and meeting the skill and competency requirements in possessing a real CDL. Expose these corporatist frauds for what they are, and what’s really going on here - wage suppression through the encouragement of mass migration by any means necessary.

Speaking of the FMCSA and whether or not we will see this very easily achieved and necessary change -

In a very odd co-incidence to all of this, the acting head of the FMCSA, Adrienne Camire, a lawyer who only held the position for two and half weeks, stepped down yesterday. Camire, who has zero experience in the operational side of the trucking business, and was one of these odd appointments that are very puzzling to people whom believe competency and expertise ought guide them. Perhaps in being a lawyer, she recognized the utter mess that the FMCSA has made of the business over the years, and saw their complicity in failing to stop the sneaky workarounds and ‘streamlining’ that were used to bring us so many deadly and incompetent ‘truckers’.

Today we hear that Trump has already found a replacement for Camire, someone whose name I mentioned on this Substack a few weeks ago, Derek Barrs.


https://www.freightwaves.com/news/trump-nominates-trucking-official-to-head-fmcsa

Barrs, who was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in October to the School Board of Flagler County, is a member of the American Trucking Associations’ Law Enforcement Advisory Board, as well as a member of the Florida Trucking Association (FTA).

FTA President and CEO Alix Miller called Barrs “an instrumental leader in the trucking industry,” in a press release praising Barrs’ nomination.

From my own Substack on the nomination of Mr Barrs by the scumbags at the American Trucking Association, whom are the source of many of trucking’s problems, and due to their stranglehold on lobbying in DC about anything involving trucking, are also the biggest roadblock to change -


https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/more-corporate-welfare-and-regulatory

The questions we should have for Mr Barrs before he is considered to head the FMCSA are thus - will Mr Barrs listen to truckers with many decades of experience on the road, and take their suggestions to heart? Will Mr Barrs reject the strictures of wokedom, and consider that perhaps a great deal of the problems on our highways are a direct result of insourced labor from other countries? Will he overturn the Obama era memorandum that prevents law enforcement from placing those who can’t speak English out of service? Will Mr Barrs listen to academics like Karen Levy of Cornell, who correctly point out that no amount of surveillance technology and the constant punishment it represents can do anything about the incentive structures in trucking behind drivers behavior?

In other documents I have obtained about Mr Barrs, it does not seem likely.


Mr Barrs lengthy resume shows that he has done nothing but either be a cop or sit on boards; he seems to be quite the meeting enjoyer, and his latest position is with an infrastructure consulting group called HNTB.

The rest is worth a read, but the TL;dr version is that Barrs is a career cop and bureaucrat with a tech fetish. It seems more likely that he will carry on with the FMCSA and its particular focus on meddling with equipment which has proven useless in reducing crash statistics. More surveillance technology, the mandating of speed limiters, more DOT requirements for the likes of front collision avoidance and lane control systems that have their own troubling record of causing problems on the road and are not the panacea many believe them to be for poorly trained human drivers.

I am extremely skeptical that Mr Barrs understands the human element involved, or that he will do anything to acknowledge that responsibility for the ever increasing amount of crashes and fatal collisions on our roads that lies with those who put him in this position. The ATA, Amazon, et al, are the real problem here, as has been conclusively proven by the continued involvement of their preferred cheap foreign truckers in deadly collisions, and in the case of Canada, over and above turning most of the country’s highways into deathtraps, their unfortunate involvement in drug smuggling.

That said, there is some hope on the horizon.

On Wednesday, our friends at the Owner Operator/Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) gave some pretty hard hitting testimony in front of the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure in a hearing called "How Trucking Supports American Communities”.

With reporting from my friends at Overdrive Magazine -

While OOIDA has given plenty of comment to federal and state governments on all those issues, the organization's petition of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance earlier this month to once again make lacking English proficiency an out-of-service violation, likewise involvement in an ongoing showdown at the Arkansas State House over drivers issed non-domiciled CDLs, ups the ante on those issues.

Pugh's testimony sought to help Congress prioritize the next surface transportation reauthorization legislation, or “highway bill," to "pass the most pro-trucker highway bill in history."

Pugh said "FMCSA issued regulatory guidance in 2019 that created a loophole for states to issue more 'non-domiciled CDLs'," and that his organization is "hearing growing concerns from our members and from truckers at large about the prevalence of drivers using these licenses."

Here is a short clip of OOIDA executive VP Lewie Pugh giving testimony at this hearing -

This is good news, as it is about time that the government realized that a mess they create is in need of cleaning, lest anymore innocent people be killed.


I’m typing this out as I’m about to head in to the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, KY. My friend Chris from over near Morehead, Kentucky, was detoured en route to Louisville yesterday due to a truck crash, and my colleagues at American Truckers United were delayed in arriving here due to a fatal truck involved collision near Nashville late yesterday.


I expect this issue to be top of mind for everyone at the country’s largest truck show and industry conference.

If any of my readers are here in Louisville, feel free to send an email; let’s meet!


Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com