Child Left With Half a Skull After Illegal Trucker Accident!

A 7-year-old California girl is living with half a skull, and the man accused of causing it never should have been behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound truck in the first place.

Story Snapshot

An eight-vehicle crash on a Southern California freeway killed three people and sent four others to the hospital, including a child who lost part of her skull.
The driver, 21-year-old Jashanpreet Singh, is an Indian national who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2022 and was released into the country pending an immigration hearing.
Toxicology tests confirmed Singh was impaired at the time of the crash, and police say he never hit the brakes before slamming into stopped traffic.
Federal officials charged Singh with driving under the influence of drugs causing bodily injury and gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated.
The crash reignited a fierce debate over how undocumented immigrants obtained commercial truck driving licenses in California and who bears responsibility.

A Child Pays the Price for a System Nobody Fixed

The little girl’s name has not been widely published, but her story has not stayed quiet. She met with top federal officials in what news coverage described as a touching moment. She is alive, but she is missing a piece of her skull. Her family is left to deal with the wreckage of a crash that investigators say was entirely preventable. Three other people did not survive at all. This is not a story about politics. It started as a story about a child.

The crash happened on the 10 Freeway near Ontario, California. Singh was driving a commercial semi-truck when he plowed into a traffic backup. Police say he never braked. Toxicology tests confirmed he was impaired by drugs. The collision involved eight vehicles, four of them commercial trucks. Three people died. Four others were hospitalized. Singh was arrested and held on $250,000 bail at San Bernardino County jail. He faces charges of driving under the influence of drugs causing bodily injury and gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. ^[1]

Who Was Behind the Wheel and How He Got There

Immigration and Customs Enforcement told CBS News that Singh is an Indian national who entered the United States by crossing the southern border in 2022. Federal sources say Border Patrol first encountered him in El Centro that March and released him into the country pending an immigration hearing. ^[2] He was never ordered to leave. He stayed. And at some point, he got behind the wheel of a commercial truck. The Department of Homeland Security was blunt about what that means, saying the crash follows “a concerning trend of criminal illegal aliens operating commercial vehicles on American roads.” ^[4]

The License Question Is Real and Messy

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office pushed back on the immigration framing. His team argued that the federal government had granted Singh multiple employment approvals, which allowed him to get a commercial driver’s license through then-existing rules. ^[4] That defense deserves a fair hearing, but it also raises an uncomfortable question: if the federal government approved him and California licensed him, who exactly is watching the road? The licensing dispute is real. But it does not change what happened on that freeway. The criminal case turns on impairment and failure to brake, not paperwork. ^[1]

Two Separate Crashes, One Bigger Pattern

Reporters covering this story also found a second, similar case near Lodi, California, involving a different Indian national named Manvir Singh, who faces vehicular manslaughter charges in a separate fatal hit-and-run crash. ^[5] The two cases are distinct, but their timing is not a coincidence. Immigration and Customs Enforcement filed detainer requests in both. Federal officials are using both cases to argue that California’s licensing practices and sanctuary-style policies create a dangerous gap in public safety enforcement. That argument has real weight when the body count is this high.

The honest takeaway from all of this is that the immigration status debate and the criminal case are two separate things, and both matter. Singh’s alleged impairment caused the crash. That is the legal core of the case. But the fact that he was in the country illegally, released after a border encounter, and operating a commercial vehicle on a major freeway is a policy failure that deserves its own accounting. A 7-year-old girl is missing part of her skull. Three families are burying someone. The system that put that driver on that road owes all of them a straight answer.