Sebastian Stone was 24 years old. On June 24, he pulled over on I-80 near Torrence Avenue in suburban Chicago to change a flat tire. A semi-truck drifted onto the shoulder and struck him. The driver never stopped.
He didn't call 911. He didn't pull over. When his bosses called him, he hung up without speaking to them.
The driver, 34-year-old Kuljeet Kang, was arrested by 9 a.m. the same day, according to Breitbart. Investigators confirmed that Kang "was looking at his cell phone during the accident." Witnesses provided vehicle details that led police to dash cam footage and phone records. He now faces charges of reckless homicide and leaving the scene of a fatal accident.
Judge Rivanda Doss Beal granted the state's detention requests, keeping Kang behind bars. The facts weren't complicated. A man was changing a tire on the shoulder. A truck driver was looking at his phone instead of the road. A man died. The driver kept going, and when his employer tried to reach him afterward, Kang "hung up on his bosses without speaking to them."
The Breitbart report places this in a broader context that most outlets won't touch. Sikh immigrants now make up roughly 40 percent of truck drivers on the West Coast and approximately 20 percent nationally — around 150,000 drivers total. That's not an indictment of an entire community. It is, however, a question about licensing standards, oversight, and what happens when a massive influx of drivers enters an industry with life-and-death consequences on American highways.
None of that will be the conversation in Chicago. The conversation in Chicago, if there is one, will be about distracted driving and phone use — things that apply to every driver on the road. And that's technically true. Distracted driving kills thousands of Americans every year regardless of who's behind the wheel.
But "regardless of who's behind the wheel" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It skips past the part where we ask whether the person behind this particular wheel had the proper licensing, training, and legal status to operate an 80,000-pound vehicle on an American interstate. Those are questions with specific answers, and the authorities investigating Kang's case either have those answers already or are choosing not to share them.
Sebastian Stone was doing something every driver has done — pulling over to fix a flat. He was on the shoulder, out of the travel lanes, doing exactly what you're supposed to do. The truck that killed him wasn't in the travel lanes either, because the driver wasn't watching the road.
A 24-year-old is dead. The man who killed him tried to disappear. The phone records and dash cam said otherwise.
That's not a policy debate. That's a man who never came home from a flat tire.
