PENN TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA — A Philadelphia FedEx truck driver who killed a New York father and his two children on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in July 2024 while distracted by his phone was sentenced Tuesday to a minimum of just under three years and a maximum of 12 years in state prison.
Santos M. Valentin, 31, was convicted in July of three counts of homicide by vehicle, three counts of involuntary manslaughter, and six summary traffic offenses. On Tuesday he received his sentence in Lancaster County Court.
The Crash
At approximately 4:30 a.m. on July 20, 2024, Valentin’s 47,000-pound double tractor-trailer rear-ended a Honda Accord near mile marker 268.7 in Penn Township, about three miles east of the Lancaster-Lebanon interchange. The impact pushed the car into a drainage culvert. The momentum carried the tractor and first trailer over the top of the Hicksons’ vehicle. Both vehicles came to rest with the second trailer on top of the car in a tree line approximately 60 feet from the eastbound lanes.
Donnell Hickson, 43, of Baldwin, New York, his 18-year-old son Decir Hickson, and his 11-year-old daughter Kyla Hickson were all killed. The coroner ruled the deaths accidental, with all three dying from multiple traumatic injuries. Valentin was transported to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The Evidence
Prosecutors said Valentin was not paying attention to the road. Pennsylvania State Police obtained more than eight hours of inward and outward-facing dashcam footage from the truck. The footage showed Valentin appearing to scroll through social media and applications on his phone for five minutes before the crash. One image indicated he may have been texting in the moment immediately before impact.
Valentin testified he never saw the Hicksons’ vehicle before striking it, saying he had been using a navigation app on his phone to search for a gas station. In his initial police interview he claimed the car had “come out of nowhere.”
Assistant District Attorney Kyle Linardo told the jury during closing arguments that Valentin’s own dashcam footage made the case. “He might as well have been driving with his eyes closed. He never had a chance to do anything because he wasn’t paying attention.” Linardo described Valentin as turning the truck into a “missile” by creating “a blind spot of his own making in his hands” by focusing on his phone instead of the road.
The defense argued Valentin did not have time to safely avoid the crash. The jury deliberated for approximately one hour before returning guilty verdicts on all counts.
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