OPINION
Aleks Latsabidze is 46 years old, from New York, and he’s now sitting with a motor vehicle homicide charge because of six hours on I-80 near North Platte, Nebraska. According to the Nebraska State Patrol, his flatbed had been parked on the shoulder. He pulled back into the driving lane below the minimum speed limit. A dry van driven by Jose Espinosa Salazar, 40, of Florida, hit him from behind. The cab of Espinosa Salazar’s truck was crushed. A fire started that melted the aluminum trailer. He didn’t survive.
I keep coming back to how ordinary this sounds, and how that’s exactly the problem.
This was the second fatal wreck on I-80 in Lincoln County in three days. The fourth crash overall in that same stretch. A few days earlier, a woman was killed near Sutherland when a different semi drifted onto the shoulder and hit a parked pickup — a separate driver, a separate homicide charge, the same basic failure. Trucks stopping on the shoulder. Trucks failing to get back up to speed before they merge. Over and over, on the same sixty miles of highway, in the space of less than a week.
A Charge Isn’t a Fix
I don’t have a problem with the charge itself. Merging into 75-mile-an-hour traffic below the minimum speed limit, without building up speed on the shoulder first, is the kind of call that gets people killed, and it should carry consequences. But let’s not pretend a homicide charge does anything for the next driver standing on that same shoulder, weighing the exact same bad decision. It doesn’t retrain anybody. It doesn’t reach the guy who still thinks of the shoulder as a pull-off for a phone call or a bathroom break or an easier grade onto the highway.
A charge only ever shows up after the fact. Somebody’s already dead by the time it gets filed. Whatever’s actually going to prevent the next one has to happen earlier than that — in the truck, sure, but really it has to happen back at the beginning, in whatever training got that driver a license in the first place.
The Training System Has a Serious Problem, and It’s Not New
This crash isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s landing right in the middle of a much bigger story that’s been building for months: the federal government finally admitting, out loud, that its own driver-training pipeline has holes you could drive a truck through.
On August 31, DOT and FMCSA pulled more than 110 Entry-Level Driver Training providers off the registry, effective immediately, after tying those schools to roughly 5,000 English Language Proficiency violations among the drivers they’d certified. That wasn’t a one-off. A separate sweep in July had already gone through nearly 400 providers across 40 states and flagged more than 160 of them for proposed removal.
What investigators found reads like a checklist of things that should never have made it past the front door: training ranges too small for the maneuvers students were supposedly being tested on, instructors running programs without the licenses to do it, no records of anyone ever being assessed, and — the one that’s almost darkly funny if it weren’t so serious — a “classroom” that turned out to be a school bus sitting in a trailer park.
Once a school gets pulled from that registry, it’s done. It can’t certify anyone. Without that certification, no state DMV will let a student sit for the CDL skills test. Good. That’s how it should work. But it also forces a question nobody in this industry likes sitting with: how many drivers are out there right now, hauling freight past you on the interstate today, who came out of a program exactly like the ones just getting shut down — and simply never got caught?
I want to be careful here. Nothing in the preliminary reporting on this crash ties it to a specific training provider, and I’m not going to speculate about where either driver got their training. That’s not my call to make, and it’s not fair to either of them to guess. But the timing is hard to ignore. Federal regulators are telling us, plainly, that the entry-level training and testing system has been broken at scale — questionable facilities, unlicensed instructors, missing paperwork, outright fraud — at the same moment fatal crashes involving commercial vehicles keep piling up. This one on I-80 is one example. It’s not the only kind, and it’s not the only place it’s happening.
You don’t need a straight line connecting this specific crash to a specific bad school to see the larger point. A system that let hundreds of providers slide through with no real oversight was never going to reliably produce drivers who’ve internalized the harder judgment calls, such as how much room you actually need before you commit to a merge, following distance, when you’re too tired to keep going, how to secure a load so it doesn’t shift, etc. Those are the calls that only become visible as a headline once somebody misses one.
The Real Problem Sits Upstream of All of This
Here’s what actually gets me, though, and it’s not the bad schools themselves — bad actors exist in every industry, that’s not news. It’s how the system was built to catch them.
The Training Provider Registry doesn’t inspect a school before letting it register. There’s no third-party accreditation required. A provider signs up, checks a box attesting — under penalty of perjury — that they meet the federal curriculum, facility and instructor requirements, and FMCSA takes their word for it.
Nobody shows up to look.
The only time anyone actually demands proof is after an audit gets opened or a complaint lands, which means by definition the system is always reacting to damage that’s already been done.
Think about what that means in practice. A “classroom” that’s really a school bus in a trailer park isn’t some clever scheme that slipped past careful scrutiny. Anyone who walked in the door would’ve caught it instantly. It didn’t get caught, though. It sat there, presumably certifying students, until enough complaints or enough failed roadside inspections finally forced someone to look. And even the more mundane version of this failure is telling: nearly 3,000 providers got purged from the registry in late 2025 for the simple reason that they’d stopped filing their required paperwork. Nobody had checked in on them. For years, as far as the federal government was concerned, they may as well not have existed — good or bad, nobody knew, because nobody was required to ask.
A registry that runs on self-certification, where real verification is the exception instead of the rule, isn’t quality control. It’s a filing cabinet. It will always be years behind the fraud it’s supposed to be catching, because it was never designed to screen anyone out before they got behind the wheel — only to clean up, eventually, once enough evidence piled up that something had gone wrong.
Common Sense and Basics Matter
None of this training-system stuff excuses anyone from the fundamentals, and I don’t want it to read that way:
- The shoulder is for emergencies. Blown tires. Derates. An engine light. A medical event. Not straps, not your GPS, not a bathroom break, not grabbing a soda.
- If you have to stop, get all the way off the travel lane, and place your warning triangles according to 49 CFR §392.22
- Build your speed on the shoulder before you merge back in. Coming back into traffic below the minimum speed limit — which is what NSP says allegedly happened here — is close enough to stopping in a live lane to make no real difference.
- The drivers already in that lane have a job to do too. Most states require due care around a stopped vehicle, and a lane change when it’s safe to make one. That doesn’t take anything off the merging driver’s plate. It’s just true at the same time.
That’s just this particular issue — the shoulder, the merge, the six or seven decisions wrapped up in this one crash. It’s a drop in the ocean. Drivers are making calls like these, on this scale of consequence, dozens of times a day, every day, all over this country’s highways, and none of it makes the news until it goes wrong.
Where We Are Today
A charge against one driver isn’t going to stop the next one from pulling onto the shoulder for something that could’ve waited to the next exit.
A federal crackdown on bad training providers, as overdue as it is, won’t retroactively fix the judgment of everyone who’s already got a CDL in their wallet — whatever form that judgment gap takes, whether it’s a shoulder merge or a following distance or a decision to keep driving past the point of being fit to. Both of these stories are pointing at the same rot: an industry, and a regulatory system built to oversee it, that has let “good enough” stand in for “safe” for way too long.
Freeway shoulders are for emergencies. That’s not a complicated sentence. It shouldn’t need repeating, and yet here we are, again. This crash is one symptom of something bigger — a training and certification system that was built to trust first and check later, if ever — and until that changes, this won’t be the last time we’re having this conversation.
This is an opinion piece based on preliminary reporting from the Nebraska State Patrol, The North Platte Bulletin, and trucking industry press coverage of FMCSA/USDOT enforcement actions. Charges are allegations; all individuals are presumed innocent unless and until convicted.
