USPS claims government immunity in deadly accident involving uninsured trucking company

A response was filed this week in a lawsuit involving the US Postal Service and the surviving members of a family killed in a deadly crash with a semi truck working for them. 

The June 2022 crash involved an uninsured semi truck with faulty brakes driven by Jesus Puebla, who did not have a valid CDL at the time of the crash. Five people were killed when Puebla’s semi truck crashed into their car at 70 mph as the family waited in traffic in Weld County, Colorado. The Godinez family has since filed a federal lawsuit for the deadly crash. Puebla was sentenced to 11 years in prison earlier this year, but the lawsuit over the accident is still being worked through.

According to 9 News, the USPS initially contracted with a trucking company called Caminantes. Caminantes then subcontracted the job to a company called Lucky 22 – an illegal act. Since being cited in the Lawsuit in August of this year, the USPS has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds of government immunity and the sheer fact that USPS was unaware of the illegal details of the situation. 

“USPS did not know at the time of the accident that Puebla’s medical certificate had expired, making his CDL invalid,” lawyers representing USPS wrote in a filing. “Nor did USPS know that the truck was not covered by an insurance policy.”

“In essence what we have is the US Postal Service saying, well yeah, we didn’t have a contract with this subcontractor, but we didn’t know about them. So, therefore, we shouldn’t be held responsible,”  said Grant Lawson, an attorney representing the Godinez family.

“There is no question that had the US Postal Service followed its own rules, that this truck would have never been allowed to enter the facility, let alone be loaded with mail and drive down the road,” he continued. “When you have people who shouldn’t even be driving and trucks that are unsafe and aren’t even insured, it’s causing absolute horror.”

“There’s no criminal accountability,” Lawson said. “For the family, they’re left with, yeah, this guy gets prosecuted, but everyone else is getting a free pass for everything that they did wrong that led to this guy even being allowed to be on the road.

 “It’s a broken system. It was a cascade of failures that led to these five seconds that took five lives.”

Lawyer representing USPS argue that the contractor should be the one held responsible for maintaining the trucks, vetting the drivers, and operating legally.