FedEx truck driver sentenced in distracted-driving crash that killed Baldwin father, his 2 children

A FedEx tractor trailer driver from Philadelphia has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after being convicted of a 2024 distracted-driving crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike that killed a former All-American track star from Baldwin, his teenage son and his 11-year-old daughter.

The Lancaster District Attorney's Office said Santos M. Valentin, 31, was convicted in July on three counts of homicide by vehicle and three counts of involuntary manslaughter following a three-day jury trial. Valentin was sentenced earlier this month by Judge Todd Brown, who also found him guilty of six summary traffic offenses, the district attorney's office said.

Valentin was distracted by his cellphone when his 47,000-pound tandem tractor trailer rig crashed into the 2018 Honda Accord driven by Donnell Hickson, 43, killing him, his son Decir Hickson, 18, of Pittsburgh, and his daughter on the eastbound turnpike, the authorities said. The daughter's name has never been released by Pennsylvania authorities because she was a minor at the time of her death.

Decir Hickson was an incoming freshman at Cheyney University in Cheyney, Pennsylvania.  

Donnell Hickson, an employee at Costco in Oceanside, was a 1999 graduate of Lawrence High School, where he played football and was a track and field star.

According to the Pennsylvania State Police and other official records, Hickson and his two children were heading east on the turnpike about 4:25 a.m. on July 20, 2024, when the FedEx tractor trailer driven by Valentin rear-ended their car about 3 miles east of the turnpike's Lancaster-Lebanon interchange.

In a news release following Valentin's sentencing, the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office said: "The momentum carried the tractor and the first of its two trailers over the top of the Hicksons' vehicle," adding that both vehicles "came to rest with the second trailer on top of the Hicksons' car in a tree line about 60 feet from the turnpike's eastbound lanes."

In his testimony at trial, Valentin "admitted that he never saw the Hicksons' vehicle before he struck them" — and said he told state police during his initial interview that the Honda had "come out of nowhere," the district attorney's office said.

"Though Valentin claimed he was using a navigational app on his phone to search for a gas station," prosecutors said, "Pennsylvania State Police obtained more than eight hours of inward and outward-facing dash camera footage from inside the FedEx tractor trailer he was driving that showed him scrolling on his phone in the moments before the collision."

The district attorney's office said Brown imposed sentences for each offense "at the top of the guidelines" for each victim killed in the crash — and ordered Valentin to serve those prison terms consecutively.

  Donnell Hickson was a member of the 4x400-meter Lawrence team that took the gold medal at the National Scholastic Indoor Track Championships in Boston in February 1999, beating Campus-Magnet of New York City in a winning time of 3:20.61.

Hickson later attended York College in Jamaica, Queens, where he was an All-American triple jumper, representing the City University of New York Athletic Conference in the triple jump at the 2005 Division III National Track and Field Championships at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.

A tribute page on the official York College website appeared about a week after the crash, chronicling the All-America track and field achievements of Hickson there — and featuring tributes from friends, classmates, coaches and from the two women who were mothers to his children, both of whom praised him and the relationships he maintained with his son and daughter.

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a Newsday reporter since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press, Society of the Silurians and National Headliner Awards for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing. He is the author of “Swee'pea,” about New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. His debut crime novel, “For Nothing Is Hidden,” rooted in 1950s Long Island, was released in October 2025.