How the worst of trucking failed Athena Strand

What happened?

Horner was delivering a package to the Strand family home on the evening of Nov. 30, 2022. The package contained Barbie dolls. A Christmas present for a 7-year-old girl. He reportedly backed his delivery van into Athena’s driveway. By his own account, she was not seriously injured. What happened next has no rational explanation and no redemption. Horner put her in the back of the van, drove to a private road and strangled her. He then misled investigators for hours, making up a detailed story about a green Astro van he claimed to have seen leaving the scene, sending law enforcement chasing a ghost while Athena’s family, neighbors, sheriff’s deputies, Texas Rangers, game wardens and roughly 300 citizens searched shoulder to shoulder across Wise County for a little girl who was already dead.

Investigators used delivery records, cell tower data and digital evidence from the van to identify and arrest Horner the same evening. Two days later, after he finally led investigators to where he left her, Athena’s body was found approximately 10 miles from her home.

This week’s testimony has added layers to this case that go well beyond what the public knew at the time of the arrest. Investigators testified that throughout interrogations, Horner repeatedly referenced an alternate persona he called “Zero,” describing his actions as feeling like a dream or an out-of-body experience he said he had felt his entire life. When investigators addressed “Zero” directly, his demeanor changed. His head tilted. His eyes rolled back. He used that persona to deflect and manipulate through multiple interview sessions, claiming at one point that if he said too much, Zero would hurt him. Surveillance footage from inside the delivery van was played for jurors, showing Athena alive and uninjured in the back of the truck after he took her. Prosecutors confirmed DNA evidence of sexual assault. The Wise County District Attorney’s opening statement included a detail that should stay with every parent and every person who has ever ordered a package for home delivery. The first thing Horner said to Athena after he placed her in that truck was: “Don’t scream or I’ll hurt you.” He said it twice.

He was also charged shortly after his arrest with three unrelated counts of child sexual assault in Tarrant County stemming from incidents alleged to have occurred in 2013. Those charges were not separately prosecuted, given the capital murder case. A woman also came forward to police after his arrest and alleged he had sexually assaulted her when she was 16. That allegation is documented in arrest affidavit records that surfaced during this week’s testimony.

The defense is asking the jury for a life sentence without parole, citing a claimed autism diagnosis and suggesting brain damage and mental illness as factors. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Who actually hired and employed Tanner Horner?

Tanner Horner was not a FedEx employee. He was not hired by FedEx. FedEx Ground operates through a network of more than 6,000 independent service providers, contractors who hire their own employees, own or lease their own vehicles and operate under FedEx branding. The company that hired Tanner Horner was Big Topspin Inc., a Fort Worth-based independent contractor that held the delivery routes covering Wise County, including Springtown, Paradise, Poolville, Bridgeport and Runaway Bay. Paradise is where Athena Strand lived. Big Topspin was delivered to her door.

Big Topspin Inc. was incorporated in the state of Texas on April 29, 2022. Tanner Horner killed Athena Strand on November 30, 2022. The company that put him on that route was seven months old when he murdered her.

The man who owned it, according to state corporate filings and his own professional profile, was Richard G. Davis. His work history before Big Topspin includes two years as a residential mortgage loan officer, six years running an Urban Air trampoline park franchise in Waco and several years in franchise sales for restaurant brands. He holds a marketing degree. He lists no trucking experience anywhere in his background. No fleet operations history. No driver safety program experience. No prior role involving driver management, DOT compliance or commercial vehicle operations of any kind. He went from franchising and mortgage lending directly into running a commercial delivery operation with 18 drivers, 13 vehicles and 10 active routes, dispatching out of FedEx’s largest hub at Alliance Airport in Fort Worth. By his own account, that operation generated $2.5 million in gross annual revenue.

No further communication from the company followed despite ongoing media requests. Big Topspin Inc. voluntarily dissolved on December 29, 2025. Three months before Tanner Horner went to trial.

The family of Athena Strand sued both FedEx and Big Topspin, alleging they failed to properly investigate Horner’s criminal background, mental history and prior employment, failed to properly train and supervise him and failed to implement and enforce adequate safety policies. The suit accused FedEx of negligence in contracting with Big Topspin by failing to supervise the contractor and investigate its hiring practices. FedEx publicly stated that its service providers conduct criminal background checks as a condition of driver eligibility and that these checks are standard industry practice, administered by a third party. The company declined to discuss specifics of Horner’s employment or its oversight of Big Topspin.

A major carrier brand builds a network of 6,000 independent contractors. Some of those contractors are experienced, well-run operations with people at the helm who understand fleet safety and have built real driver qualification programs. Some of them are seven-month-old companies owned by people with no trucking background, no understanding of driver risk, no safety culture and no frame of reference for what it means to put someone in a branded van and send them to residential addresses. FedEx cannot personally oversee every hire at every contractor. It can set contractual screening requirements that go beyond a third-party background check checkbox and it can verify that its contractors are actually applying them. 

The background check on Horner came back clean because the 2013 sexual assault allegations in Tarrant County had not produced a conviction. Tarrant County. The county directly adjacent to the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, where Big Topspin was based and dispatched. The box said he passed. The box was checked. He was hired. He was dispatched to Wise County residential routes. A 7-year-old girl came outside when she heard the van pull up.

Fit to drive is not the same as fit for purpose

Every fleet safety director, every owner of a last-mile contractor operation, every carrier whose drivers go to homes, schools, hospitals, apartment complexes, anywhere with a front-facing residential presence, needs to understand that checking a box does not mean risk and exposure-free. 

FMCSA compliance tells you whether a driver can legally operate a commercial motor vehicle. It does not tell you whether that driver should be going to people’s homes. Those are two different questions and the industry has been treating them as one for a long time.

The driver qualification file requirements under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations are built around the driving function. Drug and alcohol history. MVR. Road test. Medical certificate. Previous employment verification for the past 3 years. These are driving screens. None of them is designed to identify whether someone is a predator. None of them assesses fitness for a role that puts a person on private property in unsupervised contact with the public, including children.

For any carrier whose drivers interact directly with the public, parcel delivery, household goods, passenger transport, school bus operations, medical transport, fuel delivery, or any route-based service that puts a driver at someone’s door on a regular basis, the hiring standard has to go beyond what FMCSA requires. It has to include a criminal history policy that is written down, applied consistently and actually built for the mode of operation the carrier is running. Not a generic background check policy pulled from a compliance template. A matrix that addresses specific questions. What offense categories are disqualifying and for what period? What factors require a closer look? What the combination of employment gaps, failed reference checks and behavioral indicators during the hiring process tells you, and what the company does with that information.

The industry largely lacks that. It has a background check. It has a box. When the box comes back empty, it hires the person and puts them in a truck. Most in the industry do not conduct criminal background checks. Yet another reason TWIC cards should be required industry-wide. You’re either eligible for one according to TSA or you’re not. Leaves out all subjectivity. 

Big Topspin checked the box. The box said Tanner Horner was clean. Nobody appears to have asked whether a person with prior allegations known to local law enforcement, who had no conviction but carried a documented history of concern, should be dispatched to residential routes in a branded van covering a county full of families. There is no Clearinghouse for accused pedatros with no convictions but there are services that review candidates and their social media histories, etc. 

Richard Davis came from the trampoline park and mortgage lending industries. Running a trampoline park franchise requires keeping kids safe on equipment inside a controlled facility with staff on the floor. That is a legitimate business. It has nothing to do with building a driver qualification program, understanding DOT compliance at a meaningful level or developing the professional judgment to determine whether a specific individual is fit to be sent to private residences. These are not the same skill sets. The distance between them is where Athena Strand’s case lives.

This problem is not new, nor is it isolated 

Tanner Horner is not an isolated case. He is the most recent case to reach a national audience. The data behind that pattern is something I have been reporting on and discussing with federal investigators for years.

In January of this year, I published a piece on the FBI Highway Serial Killings Initiative that reached 1.5 million views on X. The headline was direct. 850 women are dead. The FBI says truckers did it. The response made clear what I already knew. People outside this industry have no idea this problem exists. People inside this industry have been looking away from it for decades.

The FBI launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative in 2004 after an analyst at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation noticed a pattern in female bodies turning up along highway corridors across multiple states. The cases shared a signature. Victims were last seen at or near truck stops, rest areas and interstate locations. Bodies recovered in a second or third jurisdiction, miles from where the crime occurred. No connection between the victim and where she was found. Local departments have no way of knowing their case matched cases in four other states.

The FBI built the ViCAP database to connect those dots. What the initiative found over the next two decades is something this industry has never fully confronted. More than 850 murders have been linked to long-haul truckers. Approximately 200 of those cases remain active and unsolved. The FBI has identified around 450 active suspects. At least 25 long-haul truckers are currently in prison for multiple homicides. The FBI’s own public position is that right now, today, there are multiple active serial killers operating commercial trucks on American highways.

The FBI has stated publicly that long-haul trucking may be among the most structurally useful professions for a serial killer. Mobility. Anonymity. No supervision. Access to vulnerable people at truck stops along every major corridor in the country. A driver can pick up a victim in Georgia, commit a crime in Alabama and leave a body in Florida. Three jurisdictions. Three separate investigative agencies with no shared database and no mechanism to connect the cases unless someone feeds the information into ViCAP. Most local departments do not have the capacity or training to do that and many have never heard of the Highway Serial Killings Initiative.

The names we know are a fraction of the total. Robert Ben Rhoades built a functioning torture chamber in his sleeper cab, chains and restraints bolted to the walls. He held victims for days. He photographed them. He is suspected of killing at least 50 women and drove commercially for years before his arrest. Dellmus Colvin confessed to 52 murders. He once took a phone call from his mother mid-crime. Bruce Mendenhall was caught when a detective noticed blood on his cab. Investigators found DNA from 10 different women inside his truck. He was just convicted of his third murder. The FBI believes there are at least eight more victims. These are the ones we caught. The 450 active suspects are the ones we do not have.

I have spoken directly with federal investigators who work these cases. The enforcement community is not surprised by the data. What they tell me surprises them is how consistently the industry treats this as a law enforcement problem rather than a hiring problem. Law enforcement catches these men after they kill. Carriers can screen them before they ever get the keys.

The unauthorized passengers

There is a related issue I have raised repeatedly with federal investigators that almost never makes it into public policy or compliance conversations. Unauthorized passengers. In short, unless you’re a passenger carrier or running teams, your driver should be the only person in your truck. 

Federal regulations require that a commercial motor vehicle carry only the driver unless the carrier specifically authorizes additional riders. In practice, enforcement of that provision is inconsistent. When it is cited at a roadside inspection, it is typically treated as a minor administrative note rather than examined for what it sometimes actually represents.

There is a documented correlation between unauthorized passengers in commercial trucks and human trafficking. This is not a theory. Investigators who work trafficking cases know it and I have had those direct conversations with federal law enforcement. The cab of a commercial truck is a private, enclosed, mobile space. Long-haul routes take the vehicle away from any fixed accountability structure for extended periods. When a person is being moved against their will across state lines, commercial trucks provide cover, capacity and geographic range that other transportation cannot match as easily.

Enforcement officers who write the unauthorized passenger violation and move on are missing a potential intervention point. Not every unauthorized passenger is a trafficking victim, but some of them are and we will not find them if we treat the violation as a paperwork item. Roadside enforcement needs to start treating unauthorized passengers as a potential trafficking indicator, not a footnote to a logbook inspection. I’ve built these datasets into my own website. I’ve advised federal investigators about data like this that can serve as indicators. 

Truckers Against Trafficking provides free training to drivers to recognize and report trafficking indicators. The program has produced real results. Documented rescues. Real cases closed. A driver who had completed the training saw a hand appear in an RV window at a truck stop, then be pulled back inside. He made the call. Six people were rescued. Free training. A few hours of time. Six lives. Every carrier operating long-haul routes should include this training in onboarding. There is no legitimate reason not to.

The trucking profession has two very different populations when it comes to crimes against persons. The overwhelming majority of drivers are exactly who they have always been. People who stop when someone needs help, call it in when something looks wrong and take seriously the responsibility that comes with operating a commercial vehicle on public roads. They are the people who built the professional reputation that made a 7-year-old girl come outside to greet a delivery van without a second thought.

There is a smaller population that exploits the profession specifically because of the access, the isolation and the anonymity it provides. Those two populations share a credential and a truck. Only one of them should be behind the wheel. Knowing which is which starts before the hire, not after the crash or the arrest.

What Athena’s Family did with their grief

Maitlyn Gandy did not disappear into her loss. She turned it into something meaningful. 

When Athena went missing on the evening of November 30, 2022, her mother was at the property begging law enforcement to issue an AMBER Alert from the moment she arrived. She kept asking. She kept getting the same answer. The case did not meet the criteria. An AMBER Alert in Texas at the time could only be issued once a child was confirmed to have been abducted, a legal threshold that had not yet been met while Athena was still unaccounted for. The alert was not issued until the following afternoon, approximately 24 hours after Athena disappeared. By then her body had already been in a field outside Boyd for most of a day.

“I begged from the moment that I got to her father’s property,” Gandy testified before the Texas House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee in April 2023. “I asked and I continued to ask and unfortunately, I kept getting met with the same response. It wasn’t until about 17:04 that it was sent out and I will never forget that time.”

What followed was one of the more meaningful pieces of child-safety legislation to emerge from a recent tragedy in Texas. House Bill 3556, the Athena Alert bill, sponsored by State Rep. Lynn Stucky of Sanger, who represents Wise County, created a new category of localized missing child alert. Unlike the AMBER Alert, which requires confirmation of abduction and broadcasts statewide, the Athena Alert allows the chief law enforcement officer in a jurisdiction to issue a localized alert within a 100-mile radius and contiguous counties when a child goes missing, even if the abduction threshold has not yet been met. It costs nothing. It uses infrastructure already in place. It simply gives local law enforcement the discretion to act in the critical early window before the formal criteria for an AMBER Alert are met.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Athena Alert into law on June 13, 2023. It went into effect immediately.

Gandy also joined the civil lawsuit her daughter’s father had already filed against Horner, Big Topspin Inc. and FedEx Ground Package System Inc. Her plea in intervention, filed in February 2023 in Wise County District Court, describes Athena as a child who could have been any of theirs. It lays out in plain language what the lawsuit is actually about. Better hiring. Better training. Better supervision. And accountability for billion-dollar organizations that insulate themselves from liability by using contractors nobody has ever heard of while putting their logo, their uniform and their brand recognition on every van that pulls into a residential driveway across the country.

This was not the first crime of violence committed by a FedEx contractor. The filing includes headlines documenting a FedEx contract driver charged with raping a woman in his van, a former FedEx driver arraigned for murdering an elderly woman, a FedEx driver accused of murder in Fulton County, a FedEx employee charged with attempted murder after shooting a coworker. These are not anomalies being cited for shock value. They are a pattern being submitted to a court as evidence of what happens when a hiring and supervision system is not built to catch dangerous people before they are handed access to the public.

The civil lawsuit alleges negligent hiring, failure to investigate Horner’s criminal and mental history, failure to train, failure to supervise, negligent entrustment and gross negligence. It alleges that FedEx retained significant control over the specific manner in which Big Topspin and its employees operated and that this control creates liability that does not disappear because the driver’s paycheck came from a subcontractor rather than from FedEx directly.

Tanner Horner stood up in a Tarrant County courtroom this week and said he did it. The jury will now decide what that costs him. The civil case will eventually determine what it costs the organizations whose infrastructure put him on Athena’s driveway.

Maitlyn Gandy went from a mother begging for an AMBER Alert in a rural Texas driveway to a witness before the Texas Legislature to a named plaintiff in a federal civil case to the person whose daughter’s name is now attached to a law designed to save other children. She did all of that while grieving. She did all of that because the system failed her child and she decided that was not going to be the end of the story.

What the standard should look like

FMCSA requires a drug test, an MVR, medical certification, employment verification and a road test. For carriers whose drivers go to people’s homes, that is a starting point, not a finished product.

A driver qualification program built for front-facing residential operations needs a criminal history policy with specific disqualification criteria, not just the presence or absence of a conviction on a background check report. Violent crime history. Sexual offense history. Crimes involving minors. Conduct documented in prior employment records that did not result in charges but would be visible in a thorough reference check process. Employment gaps that were never explained and went unaddressed. Behavioral indicators during the hiring process that go beyond collecting a signature.

None of this is beyond reach for any carrier that takes it seriously. It requires that someone in the organization accept the fact that the person they are putting in a vehicle is not just a driver. They are representatives of the company going to someone’s front door. They are going to be alone on a driveway with whoever comes outside. In some cases, that will be a child.

For contracted operations specifically, the brand on the vehicle carries a trust obligation that does not disappear because the hire happened two corporate layers removed. A familiar carrier’s name was on that van. The Strand family did not know what Big Topspin Inc. was. They knew the carrier. They trusted the carrier. Their daughter came outside when a familiar-branded van pulled into the driveway. The decentralized contractor model is a legitimate business structure.

Athena’s teacher, Lindsey Thompson, testified this week that her career is now divided into two parts. Before Athena and after Athena. A classroom of 6 and 7-year-olds had to be taught how to process grief because they lost their classmate. She was fighting back tears on the stand describing it.

The standard we need

This industry was built on the backs of drivers who stopped to help when someone needed it. Who called it in when something looked wrong. Who understood that the truck came with a responsibility and that the person behind the wheel was trusted by everyone they passed and everyone they pulled up to. That is the tradition. That is who the professional driver was and still is for the vast majority of people in this profession.

The profession has also attracted, for reasons the FBI has now documented over two decades, a small number of people who see the cab’s access and anonymity as an opportunity rather than a responsibility. The body count in the FBI’s database is over 850. The active suspect count is 450. That is a federal database, not a media narrative.

We cannot protect the tradition or protect the public if we keep treating driver hiring as a compliance checkbox rather than a professional responsibility. The box was checked on Tanner Horner. The box said he was clean. A 7-year-old girl was in her own driveway waiting for her Christmas present when his van pulled up. Filling a seat got Athena Strand killed.

That is the cost of not doing this right and it is a cost this industry, society and humanity shouldn’t keep paying.