by Warner Todd Huston
A migrant semi-truck driver was arrested and charged with five counts of manslaughter after reportedly falling asleep behind the wheel and plowing into a traffic jam of trucks and cars on a Texas highway on Sunday.
Officials say Alexis Osmani Gonzalez-Companioni, 27, was driving on I-20 near Wills Point, Texas — which is just east of Dallas — when he ran into a number of vehicles that had been stalled on the highway due to another accident farther up the road, according to KTVT-TV.
Gonzalez-Companioni’s truck initially collided with a pickup truck carrying five people. Four were killed by the collision and a fifth was airlifted to a hospital in critical condition. The collision also crumpled a number of other vehicles and caused one other semi-truck to jackknife, which ended up killing another car driver, making the fifth fatality in the accident.
Gonzalez-Companioni was booked at the Kaufman County Jail at 1:22 a.m. Sunday and charged with five manslaughter charges and one aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charge. His bond was set at $1.5 million.
According to Sarah Fields, Gonzalez-Companioni, a Cuban national, cannot speak English.
In March, another mass casualty accident occurred on I-35 near Austin in which five Americans died, including two children.
Solomun Weldekeal Araya, a native of Eritrea, was arrested and charged with the multiple deaths. It was revealed he mostly spoke Tigrinya, a language spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia.
The twin Texas accidents are part of a rising trend of fatalities on American roads caused by inadequately trained foreign-born semi-truck drivers. As Breitbart News reported in March, the influx of foreign-born truck drivers has been a rapidly growing trend as companies hire migrants over Americans in the field.