Limousine operator charged in deadly crash
LATHAM, N.Y. • Police charged a limousine service operator Wednesday with criminally negligent homicide in a crash that killed 20 people, while the man’s lawyer said he wasn’t guilty and that police were rushing to judgment.
Prestige Limousine operator Nauman Hussain was taken into custody Wednesday in a traffic stop on a highway near Albany, N.Y., police said. The company, which Hussain’s father owns, has come under intense scrutiny since Saturday’s crash outside Albany killed two pedestrians and 18 people in a super-stretch limo. It was taking a group to a 30th birthday party.
Prestige’s vehicles have been cited with a roster of safety violations, and state officials have said the limo failed an inspection and was declared “unserviceable” Sept. 4.
The company’s lawyer, Lee Kindlon, has said safety problems were fixed, though the state says that’s not so.
Kindlon said the 28-yearold Hussain just handled marketing duties and phone calls while his father ran the company, though police call Hussain its operator.
“My client is not guilty,” Kindlon told reporters outside a state police headquarters in Latham. “The police jumped the gun in charging him with any crime.”
In Saturday’s crash, a 19-seater Prestige limo ran off the road and plowed into a parked SUV at the bottom of a long hill in Schoharie, just west of Albany.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday that the limo driver didn’t have the required commercial licence, that the limo had failed a September inspection and that the company “had no business putting a failed vehicle on the road.”
Kindlon suggested the driver, who died in the crash, might have misjudged his momentum on a hill.
Driver Scott Lisinicchia’s family, meanwhile, said he was unwittingly put in an unsafe vehicle.
Kim Lisinicchia told CBS in an interview broadcast Wednesday that she heard her husband repeatedly say: “I’m not going to drive this, like this. You need to get me another car.”
But then “he trusted in what the limo company said, that the cars were all right.”
She said her husband was an excellent, veteran driver with more than 20 years of experience in tractor-trailers and was in fine health.
“I feel for these victims,” the widow said.
“I am in no way trying to make it seem like it’s about me or my husband. I just want my husband to be vindicated. I have to stand for him, because nobody else will.”