A Lancaster County jury convicted a Philadelphia commercial truck driver of killing a father and his two children in an early morning crash along the Pennsylvania Turnpike while he was distracted by his phone behind the wheel following a three-day trial.

The jury found Santos M. Valentin, 31, guilty on July 10 of three counts of homicide by vehicle and three counts of involuntary manslaughter. Judge Todd Brown, who presided over the trial, also found Valentin guilty of six summary traffic offenses.

Assistant District Attorney Kyle Linardo, who prosecuted the case alongside Assistant District Attorney Daniel Lingousky, told the jury that Valentin recklessly turned the 47,000-pound double-tractor trailer he was driving into a “missile” that careened down the highway when he created a “blindspot of his own making in his hands” by paying attention to his phone instead of the road.

“He might as well have been driving with his eyes closed,” Linardo told the jury.

The crash killed 43-year-old Donnell Hickson, of Baldwin, N.Y., his 18-year-old son Decir Hickson and his 11-year-old daughter.

Testifying in his own defense during the trial, Valentin admitted that he never saw the Hicksons’ vehicle before he struck them, claiming he was using a navigational app on his phone to search for a gas station.

An attorney representing Valentin argued that he lacked the time to safely avoid the collision, but in his closing argument Linardo played a series of videos and still images from inside the cabin of the tractor-trailer in which Valentin appeared to be scrolling through social media and applications on his phone for five minutes before the crash. 

“He never had a chance to do anything because he wasn’t paying attention,” Linardo told the jury.

Pennsylvania State Police obtained more than eight hours of inward and outward-facing dash camera footage from Valentin’s vehicle. In one still image taken from the inward-facing camera Linardo pointed out a keyboard visible on Valentins’ phone, indicating that he may have been texting in the moments before the collision. 

Valentin’s FedEx tractor-trailer rear-ended the Hicksons’ vehicle before pushing it into a drainage culvert near mile marker 268.7 in Penn Township, about three miles east of the Lancaster-Lebanon interchange, in July 2024. 

The momentum carried the tractor and the first of its two trailers over the top of the Hicksons’ vehicle. Both vehicles came to a final rest with the second trailer on top of the car in a tree line about 60 feet from the turnpike’s eastbound lanes.

Troopers attempted to inspect the Hicksons’ vehicle and its computer’s crash date, but the car sustained too much damage in the collision to be evaluated. 

In an initial interview with police Valentin claimed the Hicksons’ car had “come out of nowhere.”

The jury returned a guilty verdict after about an hour of deliberation.

Brown is scheduled to sentence Valentin at a later date.

Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Adam Shutter filed the charges.