On June 19, 2021, at 2:21 in the afternoon, a Tallapoosa County Girls Ranch van carrying eight children, ages 4 to 17, returning from a vacation, was struck by an autohauler truck on Interstate 65 near Greenville, Alabama, struck again by a second truck and pushed into the median, and then consumed by fire.
The sequence was straightforward. A Hansen & Adkins Auto Transport Volvo truck-tractor traveling approximately 51 mph in wet conditions plowed into stopped traffic on a bridge. Seconds later, an Asmat Express Freightliner driven by 41-year-old Mamuye Ayane Takelu slammed into the pileup at highway speeds, pushing the children’s van into the median, where ruptured fuel tanks ignited. Ten people died in the crash. What followed the crash was a lesson in how American institutions protect themselves first. The case is probably one you’ve never heard of. I’m the only one I am aware of to cover this story every single year. There is also no reliable way to know how much of this went unreported or underreported during the previous administration. Federal interest in CDL fraud enforcement, English proficiency violations, and carrier oversight failures was, by any measurable standard, limited. Prior to independent coverage of these cases, detailed in the “30 Days of Why” series on The Tea Substack, these investigations received virtually no attention at scale from traditional media or government communications offices. The current administration has been the most active on commercial trucking enforcement and DOT oversight in recent memory. What that activity is exposing is a backlog of systemic failures that have quietly compounded for years.
THE DRIVER WHO WENT BACK TO WORK
Takelu had been involved in three crashes in the 10 years before June 19, 2021, a rate significantly above the industry average. He obtained his commercial driver’s license in 2016. His employer, Asmat Express, was based in Clarkston, Georgia, a designated federal refugee resettlement community where the Ethiopian community represents one of the largest immigrant populations and where the trucking workforce pipeline has been extensively documented. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Ethiopian ancestry represents 12% of Clarkston’s population, making it the second-largest ancestry group in the city, behind African American at 23.6%. Burmese, Congolese, and Nepalese round out the top five.
What the NTSB did establish is the crash sequence. Traffic had slowed and stopped on the bridge on northbound I-65. The Hansen & Adkins Volvo failed to stop for that backup, struck a sport-utility vehicle in the left lane at approximately 51 mph, and entered the van’s lane. Takelu, approaching from behind, failed to stop for the resulting crash and struck the van at between 60 and 73 mph, pushing it into the median where ruptured fuel tanks ignited.
What was Takelu’s immigration status at the time of the crash? How did he obtain his CDL, and were proper procedures followed? What was his English proficiency level? Could he actually read American traffic signs and respond to official inquiries, as federal law requires? Were translators used during post-crash interviews? These are not secondary questions in a case involving a carrier built around an immigrant labor pipeline. They are the central questions, and the NTSB chose not to ask them.
In April 2024, less than three years after the crash, Takelu formed E&V Login Trucking LLC, obtained USDOT number 4233479, and listed himself as registered agent at 3834 Brockett Trail, Apt. A, Clarkston, GA 30021, and returned to commercial hauling. Georgia Corporations Division records confirm the filing. Since receiving authority, E&V Login has been operating with state violations, including running an incomplete vehicle without proper DOT door markings.
The federal agency that issues operating authority ran its standard processing. No flags, no review of crash history, no connection to a mass casualty event three years prior. The regulatory system that failed to prevent him from killing children saw no reason to prevent him from starting a company.
No criminal charges were ever filed.
Why didn’t the FMCSA flag this new entity? Jack Van Steenburg, former FMCSA Chief Safety Officer and Acting Administrator, explained that “he only had a DOT number; he didn’t have operating authority.”
The DOT number and operating authority are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a significant portion of the accountability problem in this industry lives.
According to FMCSA’s own registration data, as of early 2026, there are over 2 million registered entities holding DOT numbers in the United States. As of December 2023, only 787,189 of those had what FMCSA classifies as recent activity operating in interstate or intrastate hazmat service. That’s roughly 787,000 carriers out of 2 million registered. The remaining gap, somewhere north of 1.3 million entities, sits in the system with a DOT number and no meaningful footprint of recent regulated activity.
Now, some of those are legitimately private carriers, hauling their own goods with their own trucks and not subject to the operating authority requirement. That is a legal and legitimate category. Private carriers who move their own product are not required to hold a Motor Carrier number because they are not operating for hire. They just need a DOT number. The system accounts for that. Of the roughly 787,000 with recent activity, about 197,500 registered as private carriers. Another 67,600 registered as both for-hire and private. Those categories make sense, and those operators understand what they are.
The problem is the other people with free DOT numbers who are for-hire in everything but paperwork.
Here is what happens in practice. You want to drive a truck and make money. You do not want the overhead and responsibility of running your own authority, maintaining your own insurance policy at the levels a for-hire carrier must carry, filing the OP-1 application, paying the $300 application fee, and going through a 21-day waiting period that includes a public protest window where your fitness can be challenged. That is the operating authority path. That is what you are supposed to do if you want to haul freight for compensation in interstate commerce.
Or you can get a free DOT number, lease yourself and your truck to a carrier that already has authority, and go to work under their MC number, their insurance, and their DOT on the door. The magnet goes on the truck. Their name is in the window. Their number is what gets scanned when a trooper runs the plate at a weigh station. You are now operating under their authority, and every safety event that occurs while you are under that lease, every violation, every out-of-service order, every crash, goes into their CSA file, not yours.
Any safety event is attributed to the leasing carrier’s USDOT number, not the owner’s or lessor’s DOT number shown on the vehicle. That is the regulatory architecture. The carrier with the door magnet takes the hit. You drive away clean.
This creates an incentive structure that should make every safety director and risk manager in the country deeply uncomfortable. The owner-operator’s own DOT number, the free one, the one with no authority attached, the one that required nothing to obtain, stays pristine no matter how the underlying driver behaves. They crash under a lease, and the crash hits the carrier. They get put out of service under a lease, and the OOS rate hits the carrier. They accumulate HOS violations under a lease; the hours-of-service BASIC takes the weight. They move to the next carrier’s authority and repeat the process.
THE CARRIER THAT WAS NEVER HELD ACCOUNTABLE
Asmat reported 1.725 million miles in 2016 (pre-ELD mandate) across 13 trucks, implying 132,692 miles per tractor. For context, Knight-Swift, one of the largest and most efficiently run carriers in the country, reported actual tractor mileage of 83,650 per unit in 2025, according to company financial filings. Asmat’s number is 59% higher than the actual achievement of America’s most optimized large carrier. The typical small carrier averages about 60,000 miles per truck per year. Asmat’s implied figure is more than double that. To reach 132,692 miles per truck in a calendar year under legal HOS limits, every truck in the fleet would have needed to operate at roughly 75 percent of the federal driving maximum every single day of the year, with zero days off for maintenance, zero loading or unloading time, and zero empty miles. For a 13-truck operation with documented safety deficiencies and a policy manual serving as its driver training program, those numbers do not describe a fleet operating in compliance with federal law. They describe either falsified mileage records or systematic violations of hours-of-service regulations. No one at FMCSA appears to have run the math.
Mamuye Ayane Takelu’s current company was cited for state law violations and CMV marking violations on April 22, 2025. Five months later, he was in another crash on October 23, 2025, that resulted in a tow-away with two injuries.
Asmat Express began operating as an interstate carrier in 2014. Its safety program consisted of a policy manual. The carrier offered no driver training of any kind, a fact the NTSB explicitly noted, in contrast to Hansen & Adkins, which had required its drivers to complete inclement-weather training before the crash. In the days leading up to June 19, 2021, Alabama Law Enforcement Agency records showed that the Freightliner driver had not accounted for all mileage and had been in violation of hours-of-service regulations. The FMCSA post-crash compliance review resulted in an Unsatisfactory rating and an out-of-service order on Sept. 15, 2021. Nineteen days later, after Asmat submitted a corrective action plan, the order was rescinded, and the rating was upgraded to Conditional. The carrier never resumed operations.
The carrier’s base in Clarkston, where 52.9 percent of residents are foreign-born, and more than 60 languages are spoken within 1.4 square miles, placed it at the center of what federal investigators described broadly but never examined specifically: a pipeline that channels refugees into commercial trucking through a system that prioritizes speed and volume over actual competency.
Following the crash, FMCSA conducted a compliance review and found what should have been found years earlier: unsafe driving practices, failure to maintain records, inadequate safety management controls, and driver qualification deficiencies. The agency assigned Asmat an Unsatisfactory safety rating on September 15, 2021. Nineteen days later, the company was upgraded to Conditional after submitting a corrective action plan. That’s the response to eight dead children.
By 2023, Asmat Express had quietly ceased operations. No executives faced criminal charges. Owner Alebachew Ademe continues to operate other businesses, including Lux Limousine, LLC, and has reportedly operated at least eight companies since the crash, avoiding any meaningful accountability for his role in what happened on I-65.
The English proficiency requirement has been federal law since the 1930s, requiring commercial drivers to read and speak English sufficiently to understand traffic signs, respond to official inquiries, and make entries on required records. Enforcement was effectively suspended in 2016 when the Obama administration directed inspectors not to place drivers out of service for English proficiency violations. That policy held until President Trump signed an executive order in 2025 requiring strict enforcement. By then, eight children were already dead.
THE BROKER THAT CONNECTED THEM
The third layer of failure belongs to MoLo Solutions, the Chicago-based freight brokerage that connected Asmat Express with the load they were hauling at the time of the crash.
Founded in 2017, MoLo built itself to 70,000 carrier partners and $274 million in revenue by 2020 through a technology-driven model that matched freight to available capacity at the lowest possible cost. MoLo failed to properly vet Asmat Express, continued the business relationship despite the carrier’s record, and provided no meaningful oversight of driver qualifications.
Three months after the Alabama crash, ArcBest Corporation acquired MoLo Solutions for $235 million in cash. That acquisition transferred all pre-acquisition liabilities. ArcBest became legally responsible for MoLo’s carrier selection decisions, including the one that led to Asmat Express being on the road with that load. Civil lawsuits were settled for undisclosed amounts and without admission of wrongdoing. The corporation that profited from the acquisition continues operations. This is precisely why TQL and CH Robinson currently have broker liability cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. TQL and CH Robinson both have an interest in protecting brokers from liability for crashes in which the carriers they hire are involved.
WHAT THE INVESTIGATION MISSED
The NTSB did solid reconstruction work on the physics of this crash. They got the speeds right, documented the weather conditions, and analyzed the vehicle data. What they never did was investigate how an apparently unqualified driver came to hold a commercial license and an employer willing to put him behind the wheel of a 40-ton vehicle.
The FMCSA conducted standard compliance reviews and issued standard ratings. No systemic changes followed. No new broker accountability measures. No enhanced CDL verification requirements.
Every agency involved had institutional incentives to look away from the questions that mattered most. The result was an investigation that identified contributing factors while ignoring the conditions that made those factors inevitable.
WHERE IT STANDS
Today, Mamuye Ayane Takelu operates his own federally authorized trucking company out of the same Clarkston community where this story began. The network that produced him continues. The CDL mill system is intact. The broker accountability gap that allowed MoLo to profit from unsafe carrier relationships is still being litigated at the Supreme Court level. Civil suits were resolved quietly. The wrongful death claims have been settled. Nobody went to prison.
This case has received almost no coverage from traditional media since it was first reported in early 2024. The defendants are an auto transport company, a marginal Ethiopian-owned carrier, a major freight brokerage that was absorbed into a publicly traded corporation, and a driver who now operates his own business under active federal authority. In any other industry, a story about the man responsible for eight children’s deaths obtaining a federal business license three years later would be national news.
The question the NTSB report never asked is the one that matters: how many other dangerous drivers currently hold commercial authority on American highways? How many other carriers like Asmat Express are operating right now with the same deficiencies, serving the same pipelines, hauling freight for the same brokers that prioritize cost over vetting?
The regulatory system does not know. It does not appear to be trying to find out.
A note on sourcing: This article is a condensed version of a more comprehensive investigation published across the “30 Days of Why” series on The Tea Substack. The full CDL fraud case repository covering all 69 documented cases, immigration cross-reference data, and extended systemic analysis that doesn’t fit publication constraints is available there.
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