Logan County, IL — May 30, 2025, two people were killed in a truck accident at about 1:20 p.m. on State Route 121 near County Road 1100 North.

Authorities said a semi-truck was involved in a crash with a parked car and another vehicle with two people in it.

Both people in the other vehicle died in the crash near Chestervale, according to authorities. Their names have not been made public yet.

The truck driver was not injured, authorities said.

Authorities have not released any additional information about the Logan County crash. The accident is still under investigation.

Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman

When people read that two lives were lost in a crash involving a semi-truck, a parked car and another vehicle, their first question is usually: How could something like this happen in the middle of the day? It's a fair question, and one we can’t answer yet because the available information leaves out some critical details.

For starters, authorities said the crash involved a parked vehicle and another vehicle carrying the victims, but we don’t know whether the parked car was on the roadway, the shoulder or completely off the travel lanes. That matters a lot when you're trying to understand how a large truck got tangled up in a crash that killed two people.

Another key question is whether the truck struck the parked car first and then hit the victims’ vehicle, or the other way around. That sequence tells us something about the truck’s movement, the driver's decisions and potentially even the road design or visibility at the scene. As of now, none of that has been made clear.

We also don’t know what the truck driver was doing at the time. Was he distracted? Did he fall asleep? Was there a mechanical failure? These aren't idle questions; they’re the kinds of things that a proper investigation would uncover by looking at the truck’s black box (engine control module), checking cell phone records and reviewing any dash cam footage if it exists.

Then there’s the matter of the trucking company. Did they hire a driver with a clean record and proper training? Or was this someone with a history of violations or crashes? I once handled a case where the trucking company’s entire driver vetting process boiled down to a 20-minute road test, and it showed. If something similar happened here, it’s important that investigators look beyond the crash scene and into company policies that may have set the stage for this wreck.

The truth is, crashes like this are rarely the result of one bad decision. More often, they're the outcome of a series of preventable failures; failures that only come to light when someone digs into the evidence.

Key Takeaways:

• It’s unclear how or why the semi-truck collided with both a parked car and a moving vehicle.
• Critical questions — like whether the truck was distracted, speeding or mechanically unsound — remain unanswered.
• The position and role of the parked vehicle in the crash haven’t been clarified.
• Investigators should examine the truck’s black box data, dash cam footage and the driver’s history to understand what went wrong.
• A full investigation must also look at the trucking company’s hiring and training practices to see if deeper failures contributed to the crash.