Gresham v. FEC Highway Services, LLC · No. 5D2024-2555 (Fla. 5th DCA) · Decided September 25, 2026
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A semi-truck driver who could not read the English warning signs he passed moments before killing two people on Interstate 95 will not face punitive damages, a divided Fifth District Court of Appeal has ruled — over a dissent arguing the evidence was more than enough to let a jury decide.
The Crash
The per curiam majority opinion affirmed on the governing legal standard without reciting the facts in detail. The narrative below comes from the claimants’ proffer, as summarized in Chief Judge Jay’s dissent.
Leonid Voyevodskiy was driving a semi-truck south on I-95 approaching Jacksonville in the rain when he passed multiple signs warning of an upcoming lane closure, road work, uneven lanes, and construction barrels. Several hundred feet ahead, a Kia Optima carrying Hannah Whitney Krajewski, 21, and DeVaughn Jarvis Gresham, 23, had safely slowed for stopped traffic. Voyevodskiy did not. He veered sharply left, struck the concrete median wall, and ricocheted back across two lanes into the Kia, dragging it roughly 160 feet. Both occupants were killed.
A trucking-safety expert retained by the victims’ families opined that Voyevodskiy was driving 20 miles per hour too fast for the conditions, basing a one-third wet-road speed reduction on both the Code of Federal Regulations and Florida’s Commercial Driver’s License manual. The families catalogued what he drove past without slowing: three electronic message boards, five construction-warning signs, two uneven-lane signs, two closed-shoulder signs, and dozens of orange barrels — all while on cruise control in the fast lane.
The Language Gap
At his deposition, Voyevodskiy testified through a Russian interpreter that Russian is the only language he can read. Raised in Kazakhstan, he spoke no English until moving to the United States, became a citizen at 51, and by his own account never received any American education and could not manage to learn English despite trying. He obtained his commercial driver’s license in North Carolina, which did not require a written test at the time, then carried it into Florida under state reciprocity rules that do not require an out-of-state CDL holder to pass Florida’s own sign, rules, or driving tests. He passed Florida’s hazardous-materials endorsement test only on his sixth attempt.
Asked at deposition whether he understood the English highway signs and signals on the day of the crash, Voyevodskiy repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege on his lawyer’s advice, including when shown a still frame from his own dash camera of a specific warning sign he had just passed.
What the Court Held
The families sought leave to add a claim for punitive damages, which Florida law allows only where the record shows a reasonable evidentiary basis for finding “intentional misconduct” or “gross negligence.” The trial court denied the motion, and a Fifth District panel affirmed per curiam, holding the trial court’s order “thorough” and correctly reasoned under the governing standard.
Chief Judge Jay dissented. Applying the same standard — record evidence viewed in the light most favorable to the claimants — he concluded a reasonable person could find Voyevodskiy’s conduct so reckless as to constitute a conscious disregard for the lives of everyone he shared the road with: ignoring a wall of warnings he could not read, at excessive speed, on cruise control, in the rain. “For all these reasons,” he wrote, “it’s clear to me that the trial court should have granted claimants’ motion to pursue a claim for punitive damages.”
Why It Matters
The ruling turns on Florida’s demanding standard for pleading punitive damages. Whether Voyevodskiy was actually at fault was not resolved by either opinion — that’s part of what the dissent argued a jury should get to weigh, not a settled fact. The underlying facts point to a wider question the opinion does not resolve: a commercial driver who cannot read English road signs was legally licensed to operate an 18-wheeler in Florida, through a state-to-state reciprocity system that does not re-test out-of-state CDL holders on signage, rules, or driving skill. Two people are dead, and the appellate panel that reviewed the case could not agree on whether that was enough to let a jury weigh punishing it.
| Court | Fifth District Court of Appeal |
| Case No. | 5D2024-2555 |
| Lower Court | Circuit Court, Duval County |
| Decided | September 25, 2026 |
| Vote | 2–1, Chief Judge Jay dissenting |