A trucker, bad traffic, and a tragedy

Spring in Colorado is a whimsical season that may, depending on its mood, disguise itself as winter one day and summer the next. On any given day, a drive through the Rocky Mountains in the spring can range from uneventful on dry roads to nerve-racking in a downpour to harrowing during a whiteout.

Fortunately for Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, the roads were dry on Thursday, April 25, 2019, in Fort Collins, Colorado. The sun rose just after six in the morning, and soon after that, a periwinkle sky streaked with orange and pink gave way to blue sky interspersed with white puffy cotton-ball clouds. The forecast promised a partly sunny day with highs in the lower sixties, perfect weather for a drive.

Rogel had spent the night in the sleeping berth of the semi tractor-trailer he had driven from Texas the day before. Located behind the driver’s seat, the sleeping berth was a small area outfitted with a mattress, a microwave, and a mini fridge.

He woke up at nine thirty, dressed in a pair of camouflage pants and a black t-shirt, and prepared for another long day on the road. Then 23 years old, Rogel could have passed for a high school senior. His short dark hair waved like heat off a paved highway, and his brown eyes looked bright under bushy caterpillar brows. Standing five feet six inches tall, Rogel was just under the average height for a man in his native Cuba.

Back then, before everything changed, before Rogel’s entire life turned upside down, his future looked like the open road – inviting, expansive, and full of possibility.

He had gotten a job with Castellano 03 Trucking just two weeks earlier, and though he was barely old enough to drive a regular car, he was willing to take on the challenge of driving a 35,000-pound tractor-trailer – up to 80,000 pounds when fully loaded – through unfamiliar terrain. Armed with a commercial driver’s license (CDL) and relatively little experience, he had driven the 18-wheeler from his home base in Houston to Fort Collins on his way to his eventual destination: Saratoga, Wyoming, where he was scheduled to pick up a load of lumber.

Rogel climbed out of the cab using two hand grips and a step the way he had been taught less than a year earlier. He inspected the truck, paying particular attention to the brakes. After determining that everything was in proper working condition, Rogel climbed back into the cab. He started the engine and headed north on Interstate 25 toward Cheyenne, a stretch of highway that runs parallel to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. With the bright morning sun hovering over his right shoulder and a panoramic view of the foothills out the windshield, Rogel had a scenic one-hour drive. Once he reached Cheyenne, he jumped on I-80 and headed west toward Saratoga, arriving about two and a half hours later.

In Saratoga, Rogel found his way to the local lumberyard, where a crew loaded his flatbed truck down with two-by-fours. All Rogel had to do from that point was drive the tractor-trailer to Pueblo, Colorado, where he would rest. The first step was to decide which route to take. He could retrace his earlier route and drive east on I-80 to I-25, or he could head south to I-70 and then east to Denver.

Rogel said he chose the I-70 route because he knew he’d need gas in about an hour and thought there would be a number of gas stations along that route. Also, gas prices along that route were said to be lower than those on the alternative ones. It was early afternoon by the time Rogel started the engine and headed east on Highway 230 to the Colorado border, where he got on Highway 125 and continued south.

The first sign of trouble came less than an hour later, when Rogel was driving through the remote northern Colorado county of Jackson, whose population sits at less than one person per square mile. The highway winds through valleys where rivers and streams meander among the chaparral and disappear into the forest. In the distance are snow-covered mountains against a backdrop of endless blue sky.

Rogel had driven just fifty miles into this spectacular landscape when he nearly ran a couple off the road. According to the couple, Rogel passed them in a no-passing zone just before the road curved. The speed limit was forty-five miles per hour and Rogel was going at least seventy, they estimated.

“That guy’s gonna die someplace today,” one of the witnesses remembered saying at the time.

About thirty minutes later, in Grandby, Colorado, a gas station’s surveillance camera caught images of Rogel tailgating an SUV on the highway. Soon after that, Rogel jumped on U.S. Highway 40 and took it east toward I-70. Before reaching I-70, however, Rogel would have to traverse Berthoud Pass.

            Located in the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of more than 11,000 feet above sea level, Berthoud Pass is a four-lane road that winds like a snake along the Continental Divide, a north-south ridge that sends rivers to the west toward the Pacific Ocean, and those to the east to the Atlantic Ocean.

            From this point on, Rogel’s drive was going to be downhill, first to Denver, at 5,280 feet and eventually to Houston, at just 79 feet. Before starting the descent, Rogel pulled onto the shoulder of the highway for a routine check of the brakes. He called his boss, Rafael.

            “I explained what the brakes looked like to Rafael, because he had more experience,” Rogel would later say. He also told Rafael that the brakes felt lukewarm to the touch. Rafael assured Rogel that it was safe for him to continue the journey.

Rogel was near Floyd Hill, just twenty miles from the Denver metropolitan area, when he realized his brakes were failing. “It takes a matter of two, three, four seconds, and the truck starts gaining speed and speed and speed,” he said. It was now about four o’clock in the afternoon.

Meanwhile, down in the Denver metropolitan area, traffic on I-70 was moderate in both directions. Perhaps some of the drivers were heading home from an extended Easter vacation in the Rocky Mountains. Others were heading to or from work, running errands, delivering goods, or passing through the state on their way to more distant destinations.

Among the vehicles traveling east on I-70 that day was a yellow school bus full of students from Stober Elementary, a school in the Denver suburb of Lakewood. The kids were on their way to Skate City for an afternoon party.

Anyone who has accompanied kids to a skating party knows how excited they get with anticipation. The strobe lighting, the loud music, the limbo, the snack bar, the arcade games. This is all to say that the energy and noise levels on the Stober Elementary bus were undoubtedly high that afternoon. But that didn’t bother the bus driver, who could ignore the distractions as he drove the speed limit and stayed in his lane. What he couldn’t ignore was the 18-wheel semi that slammed like a goliath into the back of the left side of his bus and sent it sailing off the side of the road.

The resulting scene was one of chaos. The semi jackknifed in the middle of the interstate. The bus aslant, three tires on the pavement, one on the median. A red Nissan Sentra on the far edge of the opposite median. And emergency vehicles. A lot of emergency vehicles. At one point, five ambulances, two police cars and a fire engine were on the scene, with at least a dozen emergency personnel, many wearing bumblebee yellow reflective jackets, on hand to help the wounded.

The events that led to the accident started minutes earlier with the red Nissan Sentra. According to a Wheat Ridge Police Department officer’s written report, the Sentra’s driver “was weaving in and out of traffic via witnesses. (She) cut off a semi and slammed on the brakes. Semi tried to stop, ended up rear-ending (the Nissan Sentra) and clipping side of the school bus.”

One of the first steps emergency personnel took after the accident was to shut down the eastbound lanes on I-70. About forty-five minutes later, they opened one eastbound lane, the farthest left, to filter the growing lines of traffic through.

Fortunately, the accident caused no fatalities. Of the ten people who were injured, six were taken to hospitals, while four were treated on the scene.

On a normal day, this accident would be a big news story. But April 25, 2019, was not a normal day, as people all over the world were about to find out.

By definition, coincidences are two or more events that happen at the same time but that have different causes. Religious-minded people tend to see coincidences as spiritually significant, whereas others would argue that they’re nothing more than mathematical probabilities.

So referring to two bad accidents, both involving 18-wheelers, both happening on almost the same stretch of interstate at almost the same time on the same day, as a coincidence is saying one of two things: The first accident was an omen of what was to come. Or the two accidents had nothing whatsoever to do with each other; their concurrence was nothing more than a chance event.

Though the two accidents were caused by two completely different series of events, they did have one connection. After the first accident, the eastbound lanes of I-70 were closed for about forty-five minutes. Eventually, the far left lane was opened, and traffic began to pass like beer through a bottleneck. But the going was slow, and a lot of cars were at a standstill. From a bird’s-eye view, that portion of I-70 probably looked like a parking lot.

It was about this time that a driver and passenger heading east on I-70 watched as Rogel’s semi sped past them near the Lookout Mountain exit. They followed the truck and used a phone to record its progress. A trail of fluid spilled from the rear of the semi, making a snaky pattern on the pavement, as the truck swerved from one lane to another to another.

Rogel passed two yellow signs that warned of what was to come: “Trucks – Steep grades, sharps curves next 5 miles, use low gear” and “Trucks – Don’t be fooled. 4 more miles of steep grades and sharp curves.”

From this point, I-70 plunges downhill toward the city at such a steep grade that a runaway truck ramp was built along the shoulder. The steep ramp runs down the side of a mountain and can stop a 40-ton truck by sinking it in three feet of sand and gravel.

Rogel bypassed the runaway truck ramp. He also passed under a prominent yellow sign: “Truckers, you are not down yet. Another ½ mile of steep grade and sharp curves to go.”

Yet another driver, who was traveling eighty-four miles per hour, watched Rogel’s semi pass him with a wide-eyed look of terror on his face.

            By now, Rogel was barreling down I-70 at eighty-five miles an hour toward rush-hour traffic in Lakewood, Colorado. His brakes were completely out of commission, and his truck was completely out of control.

This downward slope from the mountains into Denver, with its tight turns and steep descents, is well known among truckers as a particularly treacherous section of I-70. More experienced truckers would have known not to overuse their brakes on it, because that can lead to brake failure, as it did for Rogel.

At 4:51, an off-duty Colorado State Patrol trooper spotted Rogel’s semi speeding down I-70 and immediately called 9-1-1 to report that a crash was about to happen. That, as it turned out, was one of the first of the hundreds of calls that were about to flood the 9-1-1 system.

Once Rogel spotted the stopped traffic at the edge of the city, he thought he had several choices. He could have driven onto the grass median between the eastbound and westbound lanes of the interstate, but he was afraid the truck would tip and collide with westbound traffic. “I also thought about crashing the truck on top of the bridge, but that would cause an explosion,” he said.

            He considered pulling onto the shoulder of the interstate. “But there was another 18-wheeler that was parked there underneath the bridge,” he said. “So what I did was to hit the trailer, which is something that is bigger, so that the truck would slow in speed, but once I hit it I was not able to control anything. The only thing I remember here is that I thought I was going to die.”

            At about this point, an on-duty Colorado State Patrol trooper spotted Rogel’s out-of-control truck. “The semi tractor-trailer was not activating its city horn or its air horn,” the trooper said. “It did not activate any hazard lights as well.”

            Perhaps Rogel did not activate his hazard alerts because he was in a deep panic. “I was going like a snake because I was trying to avoid hitting this car and that car and driving like this, like this, like this,” he said, his hand undulating. “A few seconds before (the crash) I said, ‘Dear God, don’t let anything bad happen.’”

            At about the same time, Joshua McCutheon, a YouTuber with a receding strawberry blonde hairline, a matching beard and mustache, and gold-rimmed glasses, was driving eastbound on I-70, inching his way along. With his phone fastened to his rearview mirror and facing him, McCutcheon was filming a piece for his YouTube channel. As he spoke about the day’s topic – anxiety – Rogel’s truck came up from behind in the lane next to McCutcheon’s and sped past his car.

            “Oh my God!” McCutcheon screamed. “Jesus Christ! We almost f---ing died! Somebody pull that son-of-a-bitch over!”

Seconds later, when Rogel slammed into stopped traffic just before the Colorado Mills Parkway bridge, he was doing the only thing he could. “At the moment of impact I closed my eyes and I held the wheel,” he said.

A thundering explosion accompanied the impact. The resulting scene was gruesomely dramatic: angry orange and yellow flames bursting out the back of the cab and over the top of the trailer. Thousands of two-by-fours scattered like matches all over the highway. Thick, angry black smoke billowing into the blue sky. And cars. A lot of cars, some crushed and engulfed in flames, others stopped on either side of the highway. Gasoline spilling out of damaged cars and helping feed the flames.

A Jeep landed partially on a smaller car, forcing the driver of the smaller car to crawl out his window. Nearby, another driver heard the loud explosion and immediately looked into his rearview mirror, where he saw fire. Soon after that, he realized that his own car was on fire. In a panic, he tried to open the car door while in Drive. The door wouldn’t budge. It took him a few frenzied tries, but he eventually put his car in Park, unlocked the doors and escaped.

The frantic calls to 9-1-1 began at 4:52 and continued for hours.

“He had no brakes,” said one caller. “It’s right in front of us. There’s a huge explosion. Just send anybody you can. Oh God. There’s black smoke everywhere. Oh Jesus.”

“Oh my God,” said another caller. “Oh my God. I was following the guy down the hill. He was all over the place.”

And the calls kept coming. More witnesses called to report the accident, survivors called to report injuries, and people who had heard of the crash called to report missing loved ones, hoping beyond hope that they weren’t among the victims.

“Stanley said, ‘I love you and I’ll be there in a minute,’” said Cathi Politano of her husband. “And I turned on the news and saw the accident, and I knew that was his way home every night.” So Cathi called Stanley to warn him to take another route. “And my call went right to voicemail,” she said. “That never happens.”

As onlookers began to gather on the grassy slope overlooking the highway, several people ran into the smoke and pulled people out of their cars. One rescuer, Darin Barton, described what he saw to McCutcheon. “I took off under the bridge, started helping people,” Barton said. “Lotta, lotta blood.”

            As smoke continued to billow toward the sky, a noise, like corn popping, one kernel at a time, rang out from the crushed vehicles. “It sounds like a war zone,” said McCutcheon. “Things exploding right and left.”

            The shrill whine of sirens and the muffled whirr of a helicopter soon joined the macabre scene. “If you believe in prayer,” said McCutcheon, “now’s the time to say one.” On site now were uniformed police officers and firefighters, whose dull gray coats would have blended into the smoky background if not for their bright yellow reflective stripes.

Soon after the emergency crews arrived, local reporters and photographers began to park along the periphery of the scene. One videographer, a bulky camera perched on his shoulder, filmed the smoky spectacle while a reporter mentioned initial reports about the damage. There are only two injuries, the reporter said to no one in particular, and no fatalities.

According to psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s widely-accepted theory on grief, people react to death in stages, the first one being denial. Perhaps the reporter who said there were no fatalities was simply handling the shock and horror of death by dismissing it altogether.

Standing on the ground next to the billowing smoke, now twenty or thirty stories high, the firefighters looked like tiny townspeople facing Godzilla. They sprayed the flames with water and foam through long snaky hoses and watched the black smoke diffuse to a dark slate gray and then to a light dove gray. And finally, about forty minutes after the crash, the smoke was nothing more than a cloudy white funnel that no longer obstructed the view of the crash site.

Soon to be labeled a crime scene, that portion of highway looked like a makeshift junkyard: Burned trucks, SUVs and cars, some smashed up against each other, some resting on top of another, stood among heaps of smoldering ash. One silver car, crushed but not burned, looked like a ball of crumpled aluminum foil. Dozens of tires, their rubber melted off, were nothing but wavy strands of steel cables.

Police officers began to patrol the growing crowd of onlookers and calmly order people to step back away from the scene. Nevertheless, bystanders could easily see the singed metal, melting tires, and warped windows among the wreckage.

The emergency personnel and survivors on the scene didn’t have the luxury of banishing thoughts of death, like the news reporter, given that they were looking it in the face. Adding to the horror they must have felt was the fact that some of them thought they were watching people burn to death in their cars. Only days later, after autopsies were concluded, would they learn that there were four victims, and each had died of blunt force injuries before the explosion and never even knew of the fire.

Tragically, Cathi Politano’s worst fears were confirmed the next day. Stanley, her husband of nearly fifty years, was killed in the crash. The three other victims were Miguel Angel Lamas Arellano, 24; William Bailey, 67; and Doyle Harrison, 61. All of the victims lived in the Denver metropolitan area.

Six more people were seriously injured, while some people made it out with minor injuries or completely unscathed.

Walking with a slight limp through the wreckage, Rogel looked like an insomniac. His tight face registered confusion and a sense of despair that only intensified as the reality of the situation sank in.

Whenever a tragedy of this magnitude occurs, rumors of the event spread like the seeds of a dandelion, just one or two at a time until hundreds of them are drifting on the wind. The initial rumors, like those the reporter mentioned, are often incorrect and help inform the early narrative.

The driver was drunk or on drugs. He fell asleep at the wheel. He fled the scene right after crashing into stopped traffic. He had no regard for human life.

Thanks partly to social media, the crash quickly became national and international news, and many of the false rumors were put to rest.

Rogel consented to a voluntary blood draw and DRE (drug recognition expert) evaluation; no drugs or alcohol were found in his system soon after the crash. He most definitely did not fall asleep at the wheel. He did not flee the scene right after the crash; rather, he approached an onlooker and asked to borrow her phone. Afraid that he was going to run away with her phone, she refused. Then, as Rogel asked to borrow other drivers’ phones, the same woman told them not to comply.

And finally, he very much valued human life.

“I feel very badly,” Rogel would later say about the victims through tears. “I wished it had been me.”

While emergency personnel continued to work the crash site, three Lakewood Police Department officers interrogated Rogel. Dressed in a loose-fitting green V-neck smock and matching pants, Rogel walked into the interrogation room looking like a medical assistant. He sat down with two investigators and a translator and spent the next two and a half hours answering their questions.

A Jefferson County judge determined on Saturday, April 27, that there was enough evidence to hold Rogel in jail on $400,000 bond.

On Friday, May 3, a judge charged Rogel with 36 felonies, including four counts of vehicular homicide, six counts of first-degree assault, and 24 counts of attempted first-degree assault.