’Run it anyway’
The load was oilfield equipment, stacked beyond the rig’s legal permit, with machinery hanging off the right side of the trailer. The truck pusher saw it and did what the rules exist for: he called Tornado Trucking’s executives and told them. The answer that came back was two words long — run it anyway.
The man behind the wheel was Robert Lee Bernal — a convicted felon whose commercial license had been revoked, and who had cocaine in his system that morning. Tornado put him in the truck anyway, in a convoy running north on Highway 59.
On the shoulder ahead — pulled far off the road, partly into the grass, with tire trouble — a mother waited with her four-year-old daughter and her two-year-old son. The overhanging equipment struck their vehicle and dragged it nearly two football fields. The little boy was killed at the scene. His mother and sister were badly injured.
The paperwork war
Companies like this survive on paper, and the paper is where the case was won. Tornado produced the driver’s logs in discovery. We obtained the police report — which contained the driver’s original, unedited logs — and proved the company’s produced version had been doctored.
Tornado disclosed $1 million in insurance and called it everything. We found the excess coverage they hadn’t mentioned. When the company started erasing complaints from its own website, we had already preserved them. And when Brian Beckcom deposed the driver, the man invoked the Fifth Amendment more than ten times rather than answer for what he did on that highway. Vuk Vujasinovic took the executives’ depositions himself.
A local preacher who witnessed the crash said what the physical evidence already showed: the wreck was one hundred percent the truck’s fault.
Rules are promises
Every federal trucking regulation Tornado broke that morning — the permit limits, the load securement rules, the driver-qualification file, the drug rules, the hours-of-service logs — exists because an 80,000-pound rig in the wrong hands is a public danger. Those rules are promises made to every family on the highway. This case was built on the exact promises Tornado broke, one document at a time.
The case resolved for $10 Million. Nothing replaces a two-year-old boy. What a result like this does is narrower, and it matters: it makes the family’s future secure, and it makes running it anyway the most expensive sentence in that company’s history.
What the evidence showed
Every fact below came from Tornado Trucking’s own records — and the records it tried to bury.
- The truck pusher warned Tornado executives the load exceeded the permit. Management said to run it anyway.
- The driver’s commercial license had been revoked, and he had cocaine in his system the morning of the crash.
- The police report preserved the driver’s original logs — proving the logs Tornado produced in discovery were doctored.
- Tornado disclosed $1 million in insurance; the excess coverage surfaced only after we went looking.
- The driver invoked the Fifth Amendment more than ten times at deposition.
- The company attempted to erase customer complaints from its website after the crash. We had preserved them.
What they disclosed, and what the case was worth
Ten times the coverage the company wanted the family to believe existed. Finding the rest of the money is part of the job.
More from the record
Every case is different. Prior results depend on the facts of the individual case and do not guarantee a similar outcome.