A 66-year-old Missouri truck driver was killed Wednesday afternoon when his semi rear-ended a stopped trailer on Interstate 55 near Turrell, Arkansas, sending his rig off the road and into a guardrail. Franklin Alan McArthur, of Hayti, Missouri, did not survive the crash, which happened just before 12:20 p.m. near mile marker 21 in Crittenden County.
McArthur was driving a 2012 Kenworth northbound on I-55 when it struck the back of a 2022 Peterbilt trailer that had stopped because traffic had backed up, according to neareport.com. The impact sent McArthur's Kenworth off the roadway and into a guardrail. As KAIT reported, the driver of the Peterbilt was not injured.
Arkansas State Police said the crash happened at 12:18 p.m. Wednesday, with clear skies and a dry roadway at the time, per the same neareport.com account. TFC J. G. Byrd investigated the crash, the outlet noted. It's worth remembering that a state police fatal crash summary like this one reflects only an investigating officer's initial findings rather than a final, official crash investigation report, according to the Arkansas Department of Public Safety.
A Stretch of I-55 With a Troubled History
This isn't the first time a rear-end collision between big rigs on this corridor has turned deadly. Just a year earlier, on September 30, 2025, a Michigan truck driver named Al-Zirij was killed in a fiery crash in rural Mississippi County after his truck left the roadway, struck a guardrail and a bridge, flipped into a ditch and caught fire, according to kait8.com's earlier reporting. That crash shut down the interstate for several hours while crews cleared the wreckage, the station reported.
Crittenden County has also seen other multi-truck tragedies along I-55. In a separate incident reported by The Trucker, a 2019 Freightliner driven by Zivco Josipovic, 57, of Hudsonville, Michigan, struck the rear of a semi driven by Ronnie Black as Black merged from a rest area. The impact sent Josipovic's truck across cable barriers into the southbound lane, where it struck a 2006 Honda Accord head-on, killing 43-year-old Matthew Coles of Marion, Arkansas; a minor passenger in Coles' vehicle suffered undisclosed injuries, per the outlet.
Crash Numbers Trending Upward Statewide
McArthur's death adds to a broader pattern state transportation officials have flagged in recent years. The number of crashes on Arkansas roadways has climbed 18 percent since 2015, according to the Arkansas Department of Transportation. The preliminary details describe the crash sequence: McArthur's truck struck a stopped trailer, left the roadway and hit a guardrail, and no further information on the incident has been made public.
