ELOY, Ariz.—For more than a decade, Daniel Lawson has driven big rigs up and down the West Coast. With his experience and commercial license, he is well-versed in the rules of the road.
Above all, he knows that making a U-turn on a bustling highway is a risk no driver should ever take.
“You find an off-ramp. You find an overpass—an underpass,” Lawson said after filling the gas tank of his tractor-trailer at Love’s Travel Stop in Eloy, Arizona.
“Whatever you do, you never try to turn around on a street,” he said.
So when Lawson learned that a foreign-born truck driver made an illegal U-turn on a Florida highway on Aug. 12, claiming three lives, he was unsurprised….