Two young men are dead. One was 16 years old. One was 20 years old. They were sitting in a Kia Forte in the far right lane of northbound Highway 99, south of Harney Lane, near Lodi, California, at approximately 12:20 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, slowing to a stop in traffic behind a Nissan Frontier and a Toyota Camry. A Freightliner Cascadia towing a fully loaded semitrailer came up behind them and did not stop.
The California Highway Patrol said the Freightliner crashed into the rear of the Kia Forte. The Kia was pushed into the Frontier. The Frontier was pushed into the Camry. A heavy-duty wrecker had to lift the big rig off one of the vehicles to access a rear passenger. Five other people were taken to hospitals, including two with major injuries. An open emergency line captured screaming in the background at the time of the initial report, consistent with CHP’s description of a catastrophic rear-end chain reaction involving four vehicles and an 80,000-pound truck.
The driver of the Freightliner was 24-year-old Manvir Singh. He ran. CHP said Singh fled the scene on foot after the crash. He was taken into custody nearby and booked into the San Joaquin County Jail at 6:35 p.m. on felony vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and hit and run resulting in death. His bail was set at $185,000. He appeared in court on Thursday. It is currently unknown whether drugs or alcohol were factors.
The truck was operated by Amritsar Trans Inc., DOT Number 3369665, registered at 1559 United Street in Manteca, California. Five power units. Nine drivers. Unrated by FMCSA. Insured by Southlake Specialty Insurance Company. The carrier’s listed officer is Baljeet Singh.
That is the surface. Below the surface is where it gets interesting, and where the data that FMCSA, the California DMV, Secretary Duffy, and Administrator Barrs have been fighting about for the last six months becomes uncomfortably relevant to the deaths of a 16-year-old and a 20-year-old on a Tuesday afternoon, 60 miles from Sacramento.
What’s in the carrier profile
By the numbers alone, this is not a carrier that screams red flag at first glance. That is part of the problem.
The violations that do exist are instructive. Six violations across 11 inspections in the 24-month window ending April 24, 2026. One speeding violation for 15 or more miles per hour over the posted speed limit, severity weight 10. One false record of duty status that concealed an hour of service limitation violation by improperly using the Personal Conveyance designation, severity weight 7, plus an out-of-service flag. One HOS property violation for driving more than 11 hours following 10 consecutive hours off duty. One ELD violation for failure to electronically transfer ELD records. One record of a general duty status violation. One vehicle maintenance violation for a flat tire with an audible air leak, also out of service. Two of those six violations resulted in out-of-service actions. The vehicle out-of-service rate is 20 percent. The driver out-of-service rate is 12.5 percent.
The false RODS violation is the one that matters most for understanding what kind of operation this is. A driver using Personal Conveyance to hide an hours-of-service violation is not a recordkeeping error. That is affirmative falsification. The driver had been driving for over hours and used the PC status to make it appear the truck was off duty when it was not. That is what 395.8E1PC-OOS means. FMCSA treats it as a severity weight 7 violation with an automatic out-of-service because it affects the integrity of the hours-of-service system itself. If your ELD shows Personal Conveyance when the truck is actually running a load, the entire compliance framework is corrupted.
That ELD transfer failure is also worth noting in context. The carrier’s ELD could not transmit records electronically to the roadside officer. That can mean the device does not support the transfer, the software is not updated, or the device itself is noncompliant. FMCSA has just pulled 79 ELDs from the registered list since January 2025 for failing to meet minimum technical requirements. The question of which ELD this carrier was running and whether it is still on the registered list is one that investigators no doubt review.
The officer web 29 carriers, one name
Most likely not the same guy, this is equivalent to John Doe in English and makes the investigative process difficult. Baljeet Singh is listed as the corporate officer on Amritsar Trans Inc. Baljeet Singh is also listed as a corporate officer on 28 other active FMCSA carrier registrations. Twenty-nine total officer connections across carriers registered in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Indiana. The names include Sran Transport in Laurel, Maryland. BM Express Corp in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. BBS Trucking in Castro Valley, California. BTL Inc. in Fresno. WMK Empire in Fresno. United Road Carriers in Ellicott City, Maryland. DST Truck Line in Bakersfield. Kaler Bros in Fresno. B Nijjar Trans in Tracy. Flying Sikh Trans Corp in Manteca. CS Truckline in Fresno. Balli Dabkheri Transport in Greenwood, Indiana. And a CDL training school.
AKM Truck Driving School, DOT 3388231, registered in Fresno, California, shares Baljeet Singh as a corporate officer with Amritsar Trans Inc. The person listed as the officer on the carrier that just killed two people on Highway 99 is also listed as an officer on an FMCSA-registered ELDT training provider. Is it the same Baljeet Singh? Again…we don’t know. We do know that the FMCSA just conducted 1,400 sting operations on CDL schools in February 2026, found 550 sham training providers in violation of federal standards, issued 448 notices of proposed removal, and watched 109 more schools voluntarily remove themselves from the Training Provider Registry when they heard investigators were coming, the connection between a carrier involved in a fatal crash and a CDL school sharing the same officer becomes a question worth asking out loud.
Administrator Barrs said at the time, “If a school isn’t using the right vehicles or if their instructors aren’t qualified, they have no business training the next generation of truckers or school bus drivers.” That was three months ago. I do not know whether AKM Truck Driving School was among the 550 schools found in violation. I do not know Manvir Singh’s training history or who certified his ELDT completion, but we do know there’s at least an officer commonality that may need to be looked into.
10 involuntary revocations on one docket
The authority action timeline for Amritsar Trans shows 12 actions across a single docket, MC 1080161. Ten of those actions are involuntary revocations. Two are grants. The carrier’s common authority has been involuntarily revoked and then reinstated repeatedly. The current disposition for each action shows as unavailable from FMCSA, meaning the agency’s public data systems do not surface the dates, reasons, or resolutions of each individual revocation event in a format that a broker, shipper, or insurer can easily parse.
That matters because a carrier that has been involuntarily revoked 10 times and is currently active does not look the same as a carrier that was granted authority once and has held it cleanly ever since. Both show active status today. Both show authority age. The difference is in the history, and the history is buried in docket data that most vetting systems do not query and most brokers do not know how to read. A carrier with 10 involuntary revocations on a single docket is not the same risk proposition as a carrier with zero, even if both currently show green on a SAFER snapshot.
The VIN web, drop and hook, power only operations make it complicated
Amritsar Trans shows a huge amount of VIN connections to other carriers. That would ordinarily be a significant chameleon or equipment sharing flag. In this case, it is more nuanced than that, and the nuance matters for understanding how to read carrier networks in the Central Valley.
The top VIN partner is Knight Transportation Inc., DOT 428823, with five shared VINs. The second is Swift Transportation Co. of Arizona, DOT 54283, with two shared VINs. Those are the two largest truckload carriers in North America, now operating under the same corporate parent. Amritsar Trans is running on power only, pulling drop-and-hook trailers for Knight and Swift. That means the VINs for the trailers showing up in inspection records are not Amritsar’s trailers. They are Knight, Swift, Ryder, and Utility trailers. The equipment is constantly being swapped at yards and drop lots across the I-5 and Highway 99 corridor. A Hyundai Translead trailer with Indiana plates showing up in multiple carrier inspection records does not necessarily mean those carriers are sharing equipment in the chameleon sense. It means they are all pulling from the same pool of intermodal and drop-and-hook trailers that Knight and Swift cycle through their Western networks.
Not all VIN connections are explainable by drop-and-hook. Carriers like Dzire Trans in SeaTac, Alpine Drive in Vancouver, Sam City Express in South Lebanon, Ohio, Zora Transport in Rancho Cucamonga, and ATI Carriers in Manteca also show VIN connections. Some of those may also be pulling from the same trailer pools. Some may not. The investigation engine flags the VIN web as medium risk. I would call it worth a closer look, particularly for carriers that share VINs and are geographically proximate to Manteca.
267 carriers in one ZIP code
This stops being a single-carrier story and becomes a structural story about how the motor carrier registration system works in the Central Valley of California.
The Investigative Field Reports tool at Tea Technologies ran a shared address cluster analysis for Manteca, California. It returned 47 address clusters containing 267 carriers. Two hundred sixty-seven active motor carriers are clustered across residential and commercial addresses in a single city of roughly 90,000 people in San Joaquin County. The largest single address cluster is 1820 Pennebaker Way, a residential address, with 33 carriers registered to it. Thirty-three separate FMCSA motor carrier authorities at one house.
The next clusters: 801 Atherton Drive, 16 carriers. 1360 Lakeside Avenue, 15 carriers. 1169 South Main Street, 14 carriers. 1405 Stonewood Avenue, 14 carriers. 1212 West Center Street, 13 carriers. And it keeps going. Address after address after address, each with three, four, five, ten, fifteen, thirty-three active motor carrier registrations. The phone numbers are all different. The carrier names are all different. The officers are sometimes the same and sometimes different. But the addresses repeat, and they’re houses.
I am not saying every carrier registered to a residential address in Manteca is a fraud. I am saying that when 33 active motor carrier authorities share a single residential address, the question of whether those are 33 genuinely independent trucking companies with 33 genuinely separate operations, 33 genuinely separate safety management systems, and 33 genuinely separate compliance infrastructures is not one the registration system is designed to ask. FMCSA’s carrier registration process does not require a commercial address. It does not limit the number of authorities that can be registered to a single location. It does not flag when the 34th carrier files for authority at the same house where 33 others already operate. The system accepts the application, processes the filing, and adds another DOT number to the database.
Same-day authority grant clusters
Three carriers in the Amritsar Trans connection network display authority cluster flags, indicating they were granted motor carrier authority on the same day, in the same state, with addresses in the same city. Kabir Transport Inc., DOT 3369728, Manteca. Basra Freight Lines Inc., DOT 3369841, Manteca. GSK Bros Inc., DOT 3369992, Manteca. All granted authority on or around the same date as Amritsar Trans, all in the same geography, all small operations.
Same-day authority grants from the same city are not proof of coordination. It is possible that four people in Manteca independently decided to apply for motor carrier authority on the same day and the timing is coincidental. It is also possible that a single formation agent, a single CDL school, a single insurance agent, or a single community network facilitated multiple applications simultaneously. The data does not prove which. But the data does show the pattern, and the pattern is the kind of thing that FMCSA’s carrier registration system does not flag, investigate, or ask about.
Secretary Duffy, Administrator Barrs, and California’s CDL problem
This crash happened in San Joaquin County, California, on Highway 99, the same corridor that runs through Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield, the spine of the Central Valley and the densest concentration of small carrier registrations in the western United States. It happened 60 miles from Sacramento, where the California DMV administers the CDL testing program that has been the subject of a six-month war between Secretary Sean Duffy and Governor Gavin Newsom over non-domiciled CDL licensing standards.
In August 2025, FMCSA’s Annual Program Review found that California had been issuing CDLs with expiration dates years beyond drivers’ lawful presence documentation, in violation of federal regulations that predated Duffy’s tenure. California agreed in November 2025 to revoke all 17,000 improperly issued non-domiciled CDLs by January 5, 2026. Then, on December 30, the California DMV unilaterally announced a 60-day extension to March 6 without federal approval. Duffy responded by pulling $160 million in federal highway funding. Barrs called the extension unauthorized. On January 24, 2026, Duffy went on television and said that if California did not come into compliance, “we will eventually pull their ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses to anybody in California.” Not just the 17,000. Every CDL in the state.
On March 6, approximately 13,000 non-domiciled CDLs were canceled. On February 18, the FMCSA mobilized 300 investigators for the 1,400 CDL school sting operations, which resulted in the identification of 550 sham schools. On May 18, two days before this crash, Duffy announced $217 million in grants, including $89.4 million for the CDLPI program specifically targeting CDL system modernization and integrity enforcement. The stated goal: one driver, one license, one record.
I do not know whether Manvir Singh held a non-domiciled CDL. I do not know whether his CDL was issued through the California DMV or another state. I do not know whether his ELDT certification was issued by AKM Truck Driving School or another provider. Those are questions for CHP, for FMCSA, and for whoever investigates the crash. What I do know is that a 24 year old driver working for a five truck carrier with 10 involuntary revocations on its authority history, a false RODS violation in its inspection record, a corporate officer connected to 28 other carriers and a CDL training school, registered in a city where 267 carriers share residential addresses, killed two young men on a highway 60 miles from the capital of a state that has spent six months being told by the federal government that its CDL licensing system is broken.
The connections are not always easy to see. They don’t always mean what you think they mean. The VIN sharing is masked by the drop-and-hook model. The officer web requires pulling FMCSA corporate data across dozens of DOT numbers. The address clusters require running a geographic analysis against the full carrier database. The authority cluster requires checking the docket timestamps. The ELDT school connection requires cross-referencing the Training Provider Registry against carrier officer records. None of that shows up on a SAFER snapshot. None of that shows up in a standard broker vetting check. None of that shows up unless you build the tools to find it, which the public and private sectors are both hard at work on.
This is not just California
The Central Valley carrier cluster pattern is concentrated in California, but it is not exclusive to California. I have documented similar patterns in Columbus, Ohio; the Chicago suburbs; Houston; northern New Jersey; and metro Atlanta. Everywhere that a combination of low barriers to entry, available CDL training infrastructure, community-based formation networks, and freight demand creates the conditions for rapid carrier proliferation, you get clusters. You get shared addresses. You get shared officers. You get same-day authority grants. You get CDL schools connected to carrier operations by officer ties that the registration system does not flag.
The question is not whether these clusters exist. The question is what happens when one of the carriers inside a cluster puts an 80,000-pound truck on a highway and a 16-year-old and a 20-year-old die. The question is whether the registration system, the CDL testing system, the ELDT certification system, and the carrier vetting system that brokers, shippers, and insurers rely on are capable of seeing what is in their own data. Right now, the answer is mostly no. The data is there. The connections are there. The patterns are there. The tools to surface them are what are missing from the standard workflow.
Where this goes from here
Duffy has the nuclear option, and he has shown he is willing to use it. Pulling California’s ability to issue CDLs entirely is on the table and has been since January. The $217 million in grant funding announced two days before this crash includes the largest single allocation to CDL program integrity in recent memory. Barrs has been pulling ELDs, raiding CDL schools, and enforcing carrier registration compliance at a pace that no prior FMCSA administrator has matched. The infrastructure for a systemic response to the kind of carrier ecosystem that produced this crash exists at the federal level. The question is whether the political will exists to apply it not just to the non-domiciled CDL issue but to the broader structural problem of carrier registration, formation, training, and oversight that the Manteca address clusters expose.
Two families in San Joaquin County are planning funerals for a 16-year-old and a 20-year-old. Manvir Singh is sitting in jail on $185,000 bail. Amritsar Trans Inc. is a five-truck carrier that, prior to May 19, had no crashes on its FMCSA record. It looked clean enough to pass most automated vetting checks. The flags were there, buried in the officer web, the authority history, the address cluster, the ELDT school connection, and the false RODS violation. They were there for anyone who knew where to look.
Meanwhile…The trucks are still rolling on Highway 99.
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