Jon Burgess wasn’t even the one behind the wheel. He was just riding. Thirty-eight years old, a Manteca man who climbed into a green 2026 Porsche coupe with a 57-year-old driver from Modesto sometime Saturday night — and what happened next would change everything for him, for the people who love him, and for a cluster of families who had no idea that night would end the way it did.
Around 9:30 p.m., that Porsche was flying westbound on Ladd Road near Tully Road in San Joaquin County. The California Highway Patrol said the driver was going at a high rate of speed — and investigators are now looking seriously at whether alcohol played a role. The Porsche came up on a Ram pickup truck from behind and slammed into it with serious force. The pickup driver, a 27-year-old, never had a chance to react. He lost control immediately, the truck veered off the road, and it flipped over.
That should have been it. But the Porsche kept going. It didn’t stop. It didn’t slow down. It pushed westbound down that same stretch of Ladd Road until it crossed into oncoming traffic and hit an eastbound Mercedes SUV head-on. The Mercedes was carrying Diana Ybarra, 52, and her husband Manuel Ybarra, 53, both from Oakdale, California. That collision was devastating. Both of them ended up seriously injured.
The Porsche came to rest right there in the roadway. And then it caught fire.
The driver — the 57-year-old Modesto man whose name hasn’t been released — was pronounced dead at the scene. Jon Burgess, who was sitting in that same car as a passenger, walked away from the fire with major injuries. Emergency crews got him out and rushed him to a local hospital, where he’s been fighting to recover ever since.
What makes this wreck stand out even beyond the violence of it is how many people were in that pickup truck. It wasn’t just a driver. There was a 42-year-old woman, two teenage girls aged 14 and 16, a 26-year-old woman, and a 2-year-old little girl. Six people in that truck. The CHP reported that the driver had minor injuries and the passengers had minor injuries or came out without a scratch. Every single person in every vehicle was wearing a seatbelt, according to investigators — and in a crash this catastrophic, that detail very likely saved multiple lives.
Back in Manteca, the calls and messages haven’t stopped since the news spread. Friends who know Jon Burgess have been flooding social media with prayers and words of encouragement. People who know his family have been checking in and showing up. The kind of response that small California communities are known for when one of their own gets hurt. His road to recovery is going to take time, and the people who love him aren’t going anywhere.
The California Highway Patrol is still deep in this investigation. They’re working to nail down exactly how fast that Porsche was moving, what the driver’s condition was before the crash, and what set off this entire chain of destruction on a Saturday night stretch of road that should have just been quiet. Anyone with information about what happened on Ladd Road that night is being asked to contact the CHP directly. As details come in, authorities say they’ll make them public. For now, Jon Burgess and his people are just taking it one day at a time.
