Limo company owner’s son charged in deadly N.Y. crash
ALBANY, N.Y. — A limousine service operator was charged Wednesday with criminally negligent homicide in a crash that killed 20 people, while police continued investigating what caused the wreck and whether anyone else will face charges.
Nauman Hussain, 28, was taken into custody following a traffic stop on a highway near Albany, the New York State Police said.
New York State Police Superintendent George Beach said Hussain is solely responsible for the troubled limo being on the road.
Beach said Hussain hired a driver who wasn’t properly licensed for the limo, and that it shouldn’t have been on the road after being declared “unserviceable” last month.
Hussain’s lawyer, Lee Kindlon, said that his client isn’t guilty and that police “jumped the gun in charging him.”
Kindlon said Hussain, the son of the company’s owner, handled marketing and phone calls while his father ran Prestige Limousine. The father, Shahed Hussain, is a former FBI informant. He is in Pakistan.
State police and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the cause of the crash, the nation’s deadliest transportation accident since an air crash outside Buffalo in February 2009 killed 50 people.
The limousine ran off the road Saturday at the bottom of a long hill in Schoharie, 25 miles west of Albany. The crash killed two pedestrians and all 18 people in the limo. The driver, Scott Lisinicchia, was among the dead.
Prestige Limousine has been criticized for maintaining vehicles rife with Nauman Hussain is brought into Cobleskill Town, N.Y., court for arraignment on Wednesday. violations and for employing a driver lacking a commercial license.
Kindlon has said that safety issues were corrected. He said the driver might have misjudged his ability to stop at the bottom of a hill.
The driver’s widow said her husband had expressed concerns about the company’s vehicles.
Kim Lisinicchia told CBS in an interview broadcast on Wednesday that there were several times she heard her husband state: “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.”
“He was in excellent health. He was an excellent driver. For over 20-plus years he drove a tractortrailer,” Kim Lisinicchia said.
“I feel for these victims,” she 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.”
The limousine that ran the stop sign was cited for code violations Sept. 4, in- cluding a problem with the antilock brakes’ malfunction indicator system. Four of the Gansevoort, N.Y.based company’s limos were cited for 22 maintenance violations this year, though none was deemed critical.
“Those safety issues had been addressed and corrected,” Kindlon told CBS News in a segment Tuesday. “Not all infractions are major. A lot of these things are minor and were fixed.”
State Department of Transportation spokesman Joseph Morrissey said a sticker was placed on the vehicle after the September inspection declaring it “unserviceable.”
He said Kindlon’s assertion that the code violations had been corrected and the vehicle cleared for service was “categorically false.”
Even if the repairs were made, the limo would have needed to be re-inspected and the owner would need approval again to transport passengers, a state transportation department spokesman said.
Kindlon said he doesn’t think those infractions contributed to the crash.