It’s a moment that changed Jeremey Pinson’s life forever. "The truck, I can't even look at it. That's, like, the most haunting thing to look at of everything." His four-door pickup truck was destroyed after slamming into a tractor trailer on the last day of 2020. It was still dark out and shortly before sunrise when the crash occurred. "My son says the truck just all of a sudden was there, and he didn't even have enough time to say 'dad,' and we didn't have enough time to react." He and his 16-year-old son were driving from Florida to Alabama when they hit the back of a semi-truck trailer. The physical toll was devastating. "My right foot, the reason it's so messed up is because the motor, it was crumpled up inside the engine," Pinson said. "My sister went to the accident and she was able to find my shoes. They were in a ball stuck inside the engine block. She could reach up in there and she pulled them out." He and his son are also still dealing with the emotional toll. According to his lawsuit, the tractor trailer driver was attempting to reverse in a travel lane in the dark, without any lights or signals, after missing a turn. Pinson left the hospital months later, with doctors unsure if he would survive. "The day I left the hospital, five months, four days later, they told me that I would be going home to die." He says he's had so many surgeries he lost count, 17 just on his abdomen. "Eating is a challenge because I don't have the muscles in my abdomen, so my abdomen will just keep expanding and expanding and expanding, and it's just a skin graft that covers my organs." Pinson has since learned the truck involved in the crash was a new entrant carrier. According to the Department of Transportation, it had only been operating for six months. What is a New Entrant Carrier? "A new entrant motor carrier is a brand-new motor carrier that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has granted operating authority to. And that usually lasts 18 months or until their safety audit is passed," Attorney Joe Camerlengo said. He says there has been a surge in these companies. "There are hundreds of thousands of new entrant motor carriers out there without a corresponding increase in the amount of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration employees to conduct those audits and to regulate that or an increase in the budget to make that happen," Camerlengo said. "When a new entrant motor carrier comes into existence, there is no investigation into are they safe?" The FMCSA’s own data, presented at the 2024 Safety Research Forum, showed nearly 500 fatalities in 2022 alone involving new entrant carriers. It estimates the cost of those crashes at $5.5 billion.