This week, STFBC’s Dax Bello and Marc Brumer of Brumer & Brumer filed a wrongful death lawsuit in St. Lucie County, placing a grieving family at the front of litigation that legal observers have anticipated since the Supreme Court rewrote the rules of liability for the freight industry one month ago. At the center of the case is Faniola Joseph, a 38-year-old Haitian immigrant killed last summer in one of the most heavily scrutinized highway crashes in recent memory.
For her 22-year-old daughter, Angeline Daudin, this was a devastating loss. Daudin described her mother as the person who did everything for her, and said the loss has left her without hope. She learned of the death three days after it happened, after a string of unanswered messages, when her stepfather finally reached her. Her mother, unable to get through in her last hours, had left a voicemail that became her final words. Faniola was buried at a cemetery in Naranja after a service Angeline could only watch online.
A Trucking Crash Drawing National Attention
Faniola was one of three Haitian immigrants killed on August 12, 2025, when the minivan they were riding in struck a 53-foot tractor-trailer on Florida's Turnpike. The driver, Herby Dufresne, 30, and front-seat passenger Rodrigue Dor, 54, also died; Faniola was seated in the back.
According to authorities, the truck's driver, Harjinder Singh, was attempting an illegal U-turn through an "official use only" cut in the Turnpike roughly 19 miles north of Fort Pierce when the minivan collided with his trailer and wedged beneath it. Our complaint alleges the rig blocked every northbound lane at Mile Marker 171, leaving oncoming traffic no way around it. Singh, an undocumented immigrant who held a Class A commercial license issued by California, now faces three counts of vehicular homicide.
The wreck landed in the middle of the national argument over immigration and commercial licensing, drawing scrutiny over Singh's status and his English proficiency, and it shook South Florida's Haitian community.
Who the Suit Names
Dax Bello and Marc Brumer filed the complaint on Thursday on behalf of Joseph's estate, with Yaniel Cantelar serving as personal representative. Brought under Florida's Wrongful Death Act, the defendants we named include Singh; his employer, the carrier White Hawk Carriers; the manager who hired him; and C.H. Robinson, one of the largest freight brokers in the country.
Our partner Dax Bello, who is leading the case, frames the death as the product of a chain of "cascading failures."
"A mother is gone because, as we allege, a series of companies put profit ahead of safety," Bello said to The Miami Herald. "An unqualified driver never should have been at the wheel of an 80,000-pound truck, the carrier never should have hired and dispatched him, and the broker never should have handed this load to a carrier like that."
Why the Broker Matters Now
Our decision to name C.H. Robinson is what places this case at a legal turning point. It is among the first wrongful death suits in Florida to lean on a Supreme Court ruling, handed down unanimously on May 14, 2026, that federal transportation law does not shield freight brokers from state-law negligence claims over the carriers they choose. For years, that federal preemption argument let brokers exit such cases early; the ruling reopened the courthouse door for families injured in catastrophic trucking crashes.
"For a long time, these claims against brokers were not possible," Bello said. "The Supreme Court understood exactly what negligent selection claims against brokers are about."
Quoting from the Court's opinion, he laid out the logic of holding brokers responsible for who they put on the road:
"Not all truck accidents can be prevented. But some can. Some carriers are known to be less safe; some truck drivers are known to be unfit," he read. "Freight brokers decide which motor carriers get put on the road. The moment they know they can be held accountable for choosing an unfit one, they'll stop handing loads to dangerous carriers just to save a buck, and those carriers will go out of business."
Bello reserved his sharpest words for the broker, arguing that while Singh "did something flatly illegal" and the carrier should never have put him behind the wheel, a company of C.H. Robinson's size should have known better than to entrust freight to a carrier like this one. "If a company that size is going to be handing over the nation's freight to unsafe carriers like this one, then shame on them," he said. "We're going to see them in court."