A truck driver whose speeding big rig triggered a deadly chain-reaction crash on Interstate 10 in Ontario last October was sentenced this week to four years and eight months in state prison.
The crash
Jashanpreet Singh pleaded guilty to three felony counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence for the October 2025 collision. According to the California Highway Patrol, Singh drove his semi-truck at a high rate of speed into stopped traffic on the 10 Freeway and failed to brake in time, setting off a violent eight-vehicle pileup that killed three people and injured four others. Eyewitness accounts and dashcam footage documented the speed of the impact.
Singh was arrested at the scene on suspicion of driving under the influence, but toxicology tests came back negative for drugs and alcohol, and he was not convicted of impaired driving. The case instead turned on gross negligence behind the wheel.
The sentence
At sentencing this week, the judge weighed factors that cut in Singh's favor: he was young enough to qualify for youthful-offender consideration under California law, had no prior criminal record, and the crash was not believed to be intentional. Those considerations shaped a term, four years and eight months, that some coverage rounded to "nearly five years." Prosecutors had described the crash as a preventable tragedy, one that took three lives because a driver did not slow for traffic ahead.
Why it matters
Fatal crashes involving big rigs on Southern California's crowded freeways are a persistent public-safety concern, and cases like this one test how the courts balance accountability against mitigating factors when a driver's negligence, rather than intent or intoxication, causes multiple deaths. For the families of the three people killed, the sentence closes one chapter of a case that began with a routine afternoon of traffic on one of the region's busiest freeways. The names of all three victims had not been fully released by authorities.
