Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/506679
VOICES CHANNEL 19 10 | Overdrive | May 2015 Visit Senior Editor Todd Dills' CHANNEL 19 BLOG at OverdriveOnline.com/channel19 Write him at tdills@randallreilly.com. According to Philadelphia, Tenn.-based owner-oper- ator Kenny Capell, what ultimately became an ob- struction-of-justice charge all started with the deter- mination by an inspecting offi cer to issue a logs-not- current violation to a driver running electronic logs. His case has become fairly well-known follow- ing news of its dismissal, published in early March. The arrest followed two inspections within a couple of weeks from the same offi cer at the northbound scale on I-75 in Ringgold, Ga. Capell was awoken in the sleeper berth of his and wife Nikki's 2003 Freight- liner Columbia both times. In the fi rst case, Capell was told not to log his offi - cial return to duty with the inspection in spite of the fact that his name was on the inspection report. He logged it anyway, knowing that if he didn't, his name being on the inspection report would amount to falsifying his logs. (This interruption to his sleeper period later resulted in delaying his load and a service failure.) Considering that, and with a history of having been woken up in the sleeper with little to no cause, he refused to comply with the request for ID during the second inspec- tion, and was arrested. Capell explains his rea- soning in a podcast you can hear in the March 23 post to the blog. Capell would like to see it become common practice in law enforcement that offi cers refrain from waking sleeping codrivers where there is no reasonable sus- picion of wrongdoing. As for the logs-not-cur- rent violation, the company the Capells were leased to at the time, Nikki says, chose not to challenge it; it still sits on her PSP report and contributes points to the carrier's CSA profi le. Regular readers will recall the custom project 2000 Peterbilt 379 christened Long Haul Survivor. Its builder and small fl eet owner-operator Eldon Jaeger toured the country through 2013-14. He raffl ed the Pete and gifted more than $100,000 to the American Cancer Society's "Relay for Life" project. The curtain is off Jaeger's latest work in progress. Like the Survivor, it comes in part in memory of his daughter Brenda, lost to cancer in 2012. "Destination Unknown is getting under way," says Mike Heiderscheit, Jaeger's son-in-law and partner on the build. This one's a Peterbilt 359 day- cab with an 84-inch "extra-extended" hood, a Detroit V-12 and an Allison automatic. "We are going to sell raffl e tickets at diff erent truck pulls in the Midwest for a chance to drive it at that pull," Heiderscheit says. "Also, we are sell- ing tribute decals to put on the truck in memory of cancer survivors or those who passed from cancer." The truck was set to make its debut May 1 at Jaeger & Co.'s Midwest Pride in Your Ride Truck Show in Earlville, Iowa. Charges dismissed in owner-operator's logs case Custom Pete raffl e to fund cancer fi ght Destination Unknown's mirrored stainless grille design was created by positioning small cutouts of ribbons all around. See more details in a video in the March 16 post on the Channel 19 blog. Scan the QR or visit the March 23 post on the Channel 19 blog to hear a podcast interview with Kenny Capell (pictured here with his wife, Nikki) about his case. Other recent Overdrive Radio podcasts on Channel 19: March 24: ChampTruck update with racer/Mack tech '88 Mike' Morgan March 21: Listen-back to Watermelon Slim's trucking blues live in Nashville and Tuscaloosa March 19: Meet owner-operator Bryan Spoon, driver-training rulemaking committee member March 7: Listen-back with musician Tony Justice live in-cab March 3: Mailbag – Should minimum interstate operator age be 18? Feb. 27: The entry-level training rule's 'data problem'