A Supreme Court ruling reopened the door to broker-negligence claims nationwide. The freight giant says the carrier behind the wheel that day was never approved to haul its loads.
St. Lucie County, Fla.June 16, 2026
A new wrongful-death lawsuit filed in St. Lucie County, Florida, has put freight brokerage C.H. Robinson at the center of a legal fight over last summer’s triple-fatal crash on the Florida Turnpike. The suit, brought by Yaniel Cantelar on behalf of the estate of Faniola Joseph, also names truck driver Harjinder Singh, his now-shuttered employer White Hawk Carriers, and the carrier’s manager, Harpreet Singh, as defendants.
The case traces back to August 12, 2025, when Singh attempted a U-turn through a Turnpike median crossover near mile marker 171 — a crossover marked for official use only, according to the complaint. The maneuver swung his 53-foot trailer across every northbound lane, and a minivan driven by Herby Dufresne, carrying passengers Rodrigue Dor and Joseph, struck the side of the trailer in what the lawsuit describes as a classic underride collision. All three occupants of the minivan were killed.
The complaint leans heavily on a legal opening created last month, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a federal trucking statute does not automatically shield brokers from state negligent-hiring claims. That decision didn’t determine whether C.H. Robinson or any broker is actually liable in a given case — it simply allowed such claims to move forward in court and sent the underlying dispute back for further proceedings. Two justices, writing separately, cautioned against reading the ruling as implying that brokers are open to routine lawsuits.
Building on that opening, attorneys for the Joseph estate argue C.H. Robinson knew or should have known that White Hawk Carriers was unfit to haul freight safely. The complaint points to a string of red flags it says were visible in the carrier’s federal safety record before the crash: a prior reportable crash in December 2024, repeated roadside citations for unsafe driving that included speeding and distracted driving, hours-of-service violations allegedly involving falsified logs, and mechanical defects such as brake and air-leak issues. Reviewing that publicly available safety data, the suit contends, was both an industry norm and a standard to which C.H. Robinson held itself.
C.H. Robinson disputes the premise outright. In a statement issued this week, the company said White Hawk Carriers had not been an approved carrier in its network for years, with its last load for the brokerage dating to January 2024 — well over a year before the crash — and said it has no record of having brokered the shipment Singh was hauling that day.
“White Hawk Carriers is not an approved carrier for C.H. Robinson.”C.H. Robinson, company statement
The company added that its sympathies go out to the families affected by the crash and that safety remains foundational to its operations, even as it continues to push back on the claim that it had any role in dispatching the load.
The crash also exposed gaps in how states issue commercial licenses to non-citizen drivers. Singh, who is living in the U.S. under asylum status, had obtained a full-term Washington CDL that the state later acknowledged should have been a more restricted non-domiciled credential; California subsequently issued him the correct version based on his immigration status. Federal regulators cited the episode in finalizing a rule earlier this year ending non-domiciled CDL issuance to most non-citizens, and investigators determined Singh could not pass a revised English-proficiency assessment after the crash — even as footage from an earlier roadside inspection in New Mexico showed him communicating well enough to complete it.
The lawsuit, still in its early stages, seeks damages on behalf of Joseph’s estate and her surviving daughter, Angeline Daudin, covering losses that include funeral costs, lost companionship, and future earnings. With the broker-liability door now open nationwide, how this case unfolds could shape how aggressively shippers and brokers vet the carriers they hire — and how much exposure they carry when something goes wrong on the road.
The allegations described above are drawn from a civil complaint and have not been proven in court. C.H. Robinson denies brokering the load in question.
