Jody Lynn Heglar of Norwood, NC, was driving a Ford F-250 pickup owned by a logging company east over the Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge on Church Street when he crossed into the west-bound lanes at about 5 a.m. and ran head-on into an ambulance that was responding to a medical call, said Maj. Carlos Raines, Florence Police Department.

Finn said he is working with the city’s lawyer to file a lawsuit against Navistar International, the company that created the MaxxForce engines inside some of the department’s vehicles.

“There’s 47 lawsuits across the country attributed to this engine and a number of class-action lawsuits and we’re going to be joining that,” Finn said 
last night.

“They make up about 35 percent of our fleet and they’re taking up about 80 percent of our service and maintenance time,” he said.

“We are going to be filing our own single-action lawsuit and we’re working with the city’s attorney on how we can best approach that.”

Finn’s comments came on the heels of a 77-page National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report that found inadequate wind-driven fire training, subpar staffing and poor tactical decisions contributed to Walsh and Kennedy’s deaths.