The driver of the truck linked to a catastrophic collision in Minas Gerais surrendered to police on Monday afternoon, days after a crash on BR-116 near Teófilo Otoni killed 41 people. The report, in Portuguese and supplied through local media, says he had been on the run since the accident and turned himself in with lawyers. That surrender turned the case from a manhunt into a formal investigation with a suspect now speaking to police.
The collision happened in the early hours of Saturday, December 21, when the truck, a bus and a car were involved in the crash on the federal highway about 450 kilometers from Belo Horizonte. The report says the truck driver was already the subject of scrutiny because his license had been suspended since 2022 and because police were looking at whether the vehicle was carrying too much weight. In other words, investigators were already working with a possible combination of driver error, paperwork problems and cargo issues.
The source says the truck was carrying a block of granite and that one leading theory is that the load may have broken loose and struck the bus, starting the fire. But it also reports another version from witnesses: that a bus tire may have burst, causing the bus to hit the truck and ignite. Those two accounts show why investigators are still treating the reconstruction as preliminary rather than settled.
The driver was also found to have a suspended or expired license, depending on the point in the report being emphasized. The underlying message is the same: authorities believe he should not have been driving legally at the time. The report says the document had previously been seized during a traffic stop after he refused a breathalyzer test, which adds another layer to the inquiry into how the truck was operating that night.
The scale of the disaster is already clear. The article says six bodies had been released to families by the police by the time of the report, while three people remained hospitalized in Teófilo Otoni. It also calls the crash the largest on federal highways since 2008, underscoring how severe the impact was even in a country accustomed to dangerous long-haul transport conditions.
Police in Minas Gerais were also examining the cargo itself. The report quotes a police spokesman who said notes and invoices suggested, preliminarily, that the transport may have exceeded weight limits. If true, that would strengthen the case that the vehicle was operating unsafely even before the collision sequence began.
The article does not settle the cause. Instead, it makes clear that the investigation is moving along several tracks at once: driver conduct, vehicle condition, cargo weight and the precise sequence of the impact between truck, bus and car. What matters for now is that the suspect is no longer a fugitive. He has surrendered, legal counsel is present and police can begin testing the competing explanations against the physical evidence.
For the families of the dead, that is a grimly small step toward accountability. The central fact remains the same regardless of which version of the crash ultimately proves correct: 41 people died on a single stretch of highway, and the driver linked to the accident turned himself in only after days on the run.
