Transcript
911 Dispatch: We’re following breaking news overnight from Western Vigo County. That’s where police and emergency crews responded to crashes on Interstate 70.
Caller: [foreign language 00:00:09] van. There’s extensive damage.
David Craig: Every now and then you get a case that you can’t forget. Gerald English is one of those cases. The English family received a phone call from the Indiana State Police advising them that their father, husband was killed in a traffic wreck. And the determination from the state police was unsafe speed on Mr. English and the wreck was completely his fault. The daughter talked to her mom and said, “This is just not right. I can’t believe this.” Well, that’s what this case is about.
Cindy English: This man, even in high school, I knew then at such a young age that this is the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. You could just tell the aura of him. He cared about people. He was just very family oriented. He loved, loved his children and grandchildren. He was always a hard worker and he did whatever he had to do to support our family. That’s just who he was.
Amanda Dwight: My dad had a heart of gold. He was our rock. I could call him for anything. He was the greatest person, very loving, caring. All around just the best person I knew.
David Craig: On February 24, 2022, the day this wreck happened, there had been other wrecks on I-70. This wreck happened in Vigo County near Terre Haute. Gerald was traveling in a van. And according to the police report, traffic had been backed up for multiple wrecks that had occurred earlier that morning. It was raining. The roads were wet. It was still dark out. And they said that the flatbed truck that Mr. English struck was stopped due to this traffic.
Cindy English: My daughter, Jennifer, she was the one that was really trying to find him. She called the people that he worked for. So she said, “Looks like he’s been in an accident.” He didn’t have a chance. He hit that 18-wheeler because he was sitting in the middle of the road and he died instantly, and then it conceded to burn for 35 minutes before they can get him out of that van.
David Craig: The police blamed Mr. English for this wreck. They said that Mr. English plowed into the back end of a flatbed trailer at a high rate of speed too fast for the conditions, and that force was so high, so strong that it caused the van that he was driving to explode and burst into flames, and the wreck was completely his fault.
Amanda Dwight: When I received the police report, I looked over it and it was barely a paragraph long. So I immediately was like, “Something’s not right.” He taught us all how to drive. He was a safe driver. He went the speed limit; most of the time, under the speed limit. When we went on vacation, he was the last one there. So I called up my brother-in-law and then he told us to contact a lawyer.
David Craig: When they contacted me, they told me that the police report was against them. So we get hired in March, a little less than a month after the wreck occurred. The first thing that our law office does is we put together a team. We meet and we discuss, “What are we going to do? How are we going to figure this out?” Because I couldn’t promise the clients that I could help them, but I did promise the clients that I could help them figure out what happened. A case is not just a case at Craig, Kelley & Faultless. A case is a cause. The cause is this family. We need to help this family in the grieving process in determining whether this wreck really was his fault or not. They believed that it wasn’t. They believed that he was wrongfully accused of killing himself.
The first thing we did was we sent out preservations of evidence letters, and those preservation of evidence letters to the trucking company saying, “Please do not destroy or alter any evidence if it’s still available. We would like to download it and then inspect it.” We then put in place a team of experts, mechanical accident reconstructionists, and we went out and we downloaded the vehicle. We then subpoenaed the 911 calls. We then subpoenaed the records of that truck driver. We then subpoenaed the police. And what we found was when the police were running to the scene, there was no traffic around this wreck. There were no witnesses listed. If you plow into the back of a flatbed trailer, then there’s traffic all around you. You stop for traffic. There would’ve been witnesses. Where were they?
And, there was a note that the truck driver had said that he had been in the sleeper berth and he had just got back out and was getting ready to drive his truck. We believe that he went back to the sleeper birth and fell asleep and he never got back to the truck.
As the traffic cleared for the other prior wrecks, it left him sitting in the highway and he didn’t have his lights on, he didn’t have his flashers on. Traffic moves on. And as Mr. English is driving down the road, we could tell from his vehicle that he swerved at the last second, but it was too late.
After we completed our investigation, I got to make the phone call to the family. I got to tell the family that they were right, that their suspicions were correct. The police report was wrong, that Mr. English did nothing wrong that caused or contributed to his death. That in fact, his death was caused by a negligent and careless truck driver. So we were able to call the family. We were able to get policy limits. We were able to help the family out financially. But more importantly to them, we are able to prove that Mr. English did nothing wrong and we closed our file on this case.
Cindy English: Till this date, it’s been two years and it seems like it’s not real to me. It feels like he’s going to walk right through that door. And the hardest thing is my oldest daughter, Jennifer, was devastated. She just said she just wants to be with her daddy. In the end, she turned to alcohol, ended up overdosing. She could not recover. She has two children that are four and 10 and a husband and she just could not shake it.
Amanda Dwight: My sister never recovered from his death. And now I don’t have my sister. I don’t know. It’s just been hard.
Cindy English: It’s all I can do to keep myself together. I can’t tell you the blow, because of his death, what it’s done to our family. It could have been prevented.
I hope this helps the next person and that they won’t have to go through what we did. I don’t think I could have picked a better law firm, and I would absolutely recommend y’all to anybody.
Amanda Dwight: Craig, Kelley & Faultless has been nothing but a blessing to our family. It’s been a hard road. Even when we thought that we had no case, they believed in us. They fought for us. They fought for my dad.
Cindy English: We were so lucky and blessed that we found y’all, and y’all seemed like y’all cared about us.