Police seize limo plates
After Schoharie crash, 2 state agencies asked for action against unauthorized vehicles
State Police began seizing license plates from unauthorized limousines following the Oct. 6 crash in Schoharie County in which 20 people were killed when a stretch limo that had been ordered taken off the road careened through an intersection and crashed head-on into a ditch.
The crash, involving a converted 2001 Ford Excursion that wasn’t certified to carry passengers, was the deadliest transportation accident in the United States in nearly a decade.
A few weeks after the crash, state officials told the Times Union that police and motor vehicle investigators had lacked the authority to seize the Ford’s license plates or to scrape its registration off the windshield last year when they had discovered — on multiple occasions — that it was being used to carry passengers.
But at some point, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Motor Vehicles instituted what appears to be a significant policy change, and asked the State Police to pull the license plates off dozens of limousines across the state that didn’t have proper authorization, sidelining them as a precaution
against similar accidents.
State Police spokesman Beau Duffy told the Times Union the DMV notified State Police to “seize the license plates of 59 vehicles owned by limousine companies with suspended registrations due to noncompliance with New York
State Department of Transportation regulations. Troopers subsequently seized the plates of all 59 vehicles.”
Duffy would not say when the license plates were pulled, although he acknowledged that it occurred after the Oct. 6 crash.
Under state transportation law, the
DOT can fine certain limousine companies $5,000 for driving passengers without first getting the proper state certification, known as “operating authority.”
State law also allows the DOT to ask the DMV to suspend the vehicle registrations of limo companies that violate the regulation.
Prestige Limousine, the Wilton company that owned the Excursion involved in the Schoharie County crash, did not have state operating authority, which is required for stretch limousines due to their size and the number of passengers they can carry.
Stretch limousines, which DOT regulates much like school buses, also have to go through rigorous inspections by the DOT every six months.
Prestige appears to have attempted to evade DOT oversight: Neither owner Shahed Hussain nor his son, Nauman Hussain, ever sought state operating authority.
But the DOT knew as early as a March 2018 roadside inspection that the Hussains were carrying passengers in the Excursion illegally.
Having ordered the limo off the road following the March inspection, state officials caught the Hussains driving it after dropping off passengers in August. In September, another roadside inspection found the Ford had been driven more than 1,000 miles in the previous six months.
Nothing in any of the resulting inspection reports suggests that the license plates on the Excursion were ordered to be seized. Spokespeople for DMV and DOT both declined to say whether the agency had ordered State Police to seize the Excursion’s plates before the Oct. 6 crash.
DMV officials refused to answer several questions posed by the Times Union — such as which limo companies had their license plates pulled by State Police, or why DMV hadn’t taken such drastic action on unlicensed limo companies in the past.
“In New York we have zero tolerance for any business that willfully puts its customers in danger,” DMV spokesman Tim O’brien said. “That is why, even as the investigation into the horrific Schoharie crash continues, we have taken immediate action, as we have done many times in the past, to do everything in our power to keep people safe.”
O’brien declined to say whether the agency had asked State Police to seize license plates in the past from any limo companies that didn’t have operating authority.
He claimed the DMV was limited in what it could say because of the ongoing criminal investigation by the State Police and the Schoharie County district attorney’s office. The crash is also being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, which has complained recently that its access to the limousine was being blocked by law enforcement. (The NTSB’S spokesman was not available for comment due to the ongoing federal shutdown.)
Nauman Hussain, who goes by Arslan and operated the limo company for his father, was charged days after the crash with one count of criminally negligent homicide. Shahed Hussain, a former
FBI informant, has remained in Pakistan since before the crash.
Joseph Morrissey, a DOT spokesman, declined to discuss details of the agency’s post-crash actions, citing the ongoing criminal investigation.
“As it has done previously in the wake of tragic incidents involving irresponsible businesses that flout the law, the state is acting affirmatively to crack down on bad actors who put innocent New Yorkers in danger,” he said in a statement.
It’s not clear whether seizing the license plates of the Hussains’ limos would have prevented the owners from using the vehicles to carry passengers:
The Excursion had different plates during its March DOT roadside inspection than it bore during the inspections that were done in August and September, when the Excursion was using the plate TOGALUX1.
Nauman Hussain also operated the family’s limo company under the name Saratoga Luxury Limousine, a name he registered with the Saratoga County Clerk’s Office shortly after he and his father bought the 2001 Excursion in 2016 from an Albany limo company.
DOT employee Chad Smith, who performed the March 21 roadside inspection of the 2001 Excursion, also found that the Hussains were using the wrong plates on a 2008 stretch Lincoln Town Car that was registered to Prestige Limousine.
“Vehicle has wrong plates,” the March 21 inspection by Smith states. “Vehicle registered with TOGALUX2 through NYS DMV. TOGALUX3 plates are displayed on vehicle.”