Limo service operator charged
Crash on Saturday in Schoharie killed 20 people, including Ulster County man and his son-in-law
A limousine service operator was charged Wednesday with criminally negligent homicide for the weekend crash that killed 20 people, including an Ulster County resident, while police continued investigating what caused the wreck and whether anyone else will face charges.
Nauman Hussain’s lawyer said his client wasn’t guilty and that police were rushing to judgment.
The company, Saratoga Countybased Prestige Limousine, has come under intense scrutiny since Saturday’s crash in Schoharie, west of Albany, killed 18 people in a super-stretch limo, as well as two pedestrians.
One of the pedestrians who died was James Schnurr, 70, of Kerhonkson. Killed alongside him was his son-in-law, Brian Hough,
46, who lived upstate and was an assistant professor at SUNY Oswego.
Hussain hired a driver who shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of such a car, and the vehicle shouldn’t have been driven after state inspectors deemed it “unserviceable” last month, state police Superintendent George Beach said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
“The sole responsibility for that motor vehicle being on the road on Saturday rests with Nauman Hussain,” Beach said, though he noted investigators continued to look into whether anyone else should be held accountable.
As Hussain, 28, awaited arraignment, his lawyer, Lee Kindlon, said his client handled only marketing duties and phone calls, while his father ran the company, though police called the younger Hussain its operator.
“My client is not guilty,” Kindlon said. “The police jumped the gun in charging him with any crime.”
Under New York law, criminally negligent homicide involves not perceiving a substantial, unjustifiable risk that leads to someone’s death. It’s punishable by up to four years in prison.
Police charged Hussain with a single count of the crime involving all 20 victims. He was arrested Wednesday during a traffic stop on a highway near Albany.
Hussain has had a brush with law enforcement before. State police accused him and his brother of claiming each other’s names after a 2014 traffic stop, which happened while the brother was driving without a valid license.
Their father, Prestige Limousine owner Shahed Hussain, also has a history with law enforcement — as a government informant in terror plot investigations after the Sept. 11 attacks. One of those investigations snared four Newburgh-area men for plotting to blow up New York City synagogues and shoot down airplanes.
In Saturday’s crash, a 19-seater Prestige limo ran a stop sign and plowed into a parked SUV at the bottom of a long hill in Schoharie, about 70 miles northwest of Kingston. The crash appeared to be the nation’s deadliest traffic accident since a bus full of Texas nursing home patients caught fire while fleeing 2005’s Hurricane Rita, killing 23.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday that the limo driver didn’t have the required commercial license and that Prestige Limousine “had no business putting a failed vehicle
on the road.”
The limo had been written up Sept. 4 for code violations, including a problem with the anti-lock brakes’ malfunction indicator system.
A sticker was placed on the vehicle declaring it “unserviceable,” said state Department of Transportation spokesman Joseph Morrissey.
It was the latest in a series of inspection knocks for Prestige, which is located in Gansevoort, just outside of Saratoga Springs. Four of its limos were cited this year with a total of 22 maintenance violations, though none was deemed critical.
Kindlon told CBS News on Tuesday the “safety issues had been addressed and corrected,” saying many were minor. But Morrissey said any assertion that the limo involved in the crash had been cleared for service was “categorically false.”
Kindlon said he didn’t think the infractions contributed to the crash. He suggested the driver, who died in the crash, might have misjudged his momentum on the hill.
The T-intersection at the bottom was a known danger spot, Kindlon noted. It was rebuilt after a deadly 2008 wreck, but there since have been other accidents at the junction.
“I think, frankly, the Department of Transportation and the state of New York is doing a great job in saying, ‘Look over there! It’s not our fault!’” Kindlon said, suggesting the state “faces an incredible amount of liability if they’re found to be at fault.”
The limo’s driver, Scott Lisinicchia, had been told he didn’t have the proper license to drive it during an Aug. 25 traffic stop, state police said Wednesday. They said a trooper issued violations, advised
that Lisinicchia couldn’t drive the limo and “took steps to ensure that the vehicle was taken off the road.”
Lisinicchia’s family, meanwhile, said he was unwittingly put in an unsafe vehicle.
Kim Lisinicchia told CBS in an interview broadcast Wednesday that her husband repeatedly said he wouldn’t drive the car the way it was. But then “he trusted in what the limo company said, that the cars were all right,” she said.
She said her husband was an excellent, veteran driver with over 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, ‘cause nobody else will.”