The truck driver who struck and killed an Illinois State Police officer has been charged with reckless homicide, but the trooper’s family blames the trucker’s employer in a wrongful death lawsuit.<\/p>\n
Johnny Felton Jr. was driving a truck for Dot Transportation along Interstate 55 outside of Litchfield, Illinois in November when he struck and killed officer Kyle Deatherage, who was 32 years old and the father of two small children. Montgomery County state prosecutors have charged Felton with reckless homicide and operating a tractor-trailer in violation of his driver’s license restrictions that prohibited him from operating a commercial vehicle outside the state of Georgia.<\/p>\n
Deatherage’s widow has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Felton’s employer, claiming that Dot Transportation must have been aware that Felton was not licensed to operate a commercial vehicle in Illinois and that Felton should not have driven the truck due to an unspecified medical condition. In January, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a citation to Dot Transportation for knowingly permitting Felton to drive a commercial vehicle without a proper license.<\/p>\n
According to Dot Transportation, Felton had held an interstate license for most of the five years he was employed by the company, but in July when he renewed his license, he checked a box for \u201cintrastate\u201d rather than \u201cinterstate,\u201d thus unknowingly restricting his license. Dot Transportation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dot Foods, which is based in Mt. Sterling, Illinois and describes itself as the country’s largest food redistributor.<\/p>\n
Dot Foods is seeking to transfer the wrongful death lawsuit from Madison County to Montgomery County, where the accident took place.<\/p>\n
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El conductor del cami\u00f3n que golpe\u00f3 y mat\u00f3 a un oficial de la Polic\u00eda Estatal Illinois ha sido acusado de homicidio imprudente, pero la familia del polic\u00eda culpa al empleador del camionero en una demanda por homicidio culposo. Johnny Felton Jr. conduc\u00eda un cami\u00f3n para Dot Transporte a lo largo de la Interestatal 55 a las afueras de Litchfield, Illinois en noviembre, cuando golpe\u00f3 y mat\u00f3 a...<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,18,21],"tags":[146,147,148,149,150,77],"class_list":["post-2011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-press","category-work-accidents","category-wrongful-death","tag-dot-foods","tag-dot-transportation","tag-johnny-felton-jr","tag-kyle-deatherage","tag-montgomery-county","tag-wrongful-death-2"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briskmanandbriskman.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}