Where’s Shahed Hussain?

Hallmark prides itself on producing “Greeting Cards for All Occasions,” but I challenge them or any other company to design a Father’s Day card appropriate for a parent who couldn’t be bothered to visit his children in the four and a half years in which one of them has faced 20 counts of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter.

Here’s one more twist: The charges facing your son are the direct result of your decision to hand off management of some of your wormier business assets, including a decrepit stretch limousine, when you moved out of the country.

I’m not sure if Nauman Hussain will spend too much time worried about hurting the feelings of his absent father, Shahed Hussain, who according to the available facts has remained in Pakistan since before the Oct. 6, 2018, limo crash in Schoharie County that killed 20 people. Nauman is far more likely to be concerned about his upcoming sentencing after a jury last week convicted him on the manslaughter counts for recklessly failing to keep the deadly 31-foot Ford Excursion in good repair and under proper regulation.

Throughout this regional trauma, Shahed has remained utterly silent — the enigma in the corner of the frame — except for second- or third-hand statements and a handful of facts tucked into legal filings. He has never responded to outreach from Times Union reporter Larry Rulison, who has spent years trying to answer some of the riddles surrounding Shahed’s overlapping careers as an alleged participant in a fake driver’s license scam; an FBI counter-terrorism asset; a beneficiary of completely bizarre real estate transactions (the family bought a house in Loudonville for $90,000 in 1998 and after it was gutted by fire in 2003 sold it half-repaired for $450,000); and finally as the proprietor of Wilton’s Crest Inn Suites & Cottages and Prestige Limousine.

Nauman’s defense attorney Lee Kindlon called Shahed after Wednesday’s verdict came in; Kindlon said the older man sobbed at the news that his son faced between five and 15 years in prison. If he has ever shed a tear for the dead or their families, it has never been reported.

I asked Kindlon on Thursday why Shahed has never returned to the U.S. “Early on we knew that the police had picked their bad guy,” the attorney said, reiterating the defense’s argument that law enforcement had engaged in a rush to judgment that had ignored the culpability of Mavis Discount Tire, the auto repair chain whose Saratoga Springs outlet had fraudulently failed to perform requested repairs on the vehicle and given it a state DMV inspection sticker it never should have received.

Having Shahed back in town wouldn’t have benefited his son in the court of public opinion, Kindlon said.

I told him my question wasn’t about the impact of his absence as a legal strategy, but rather as a father not being with his son.

Kindlon said the initial explanation was concern over Shahed’s health — he had undergone heart surgery several months before the crash and moved overseas to recover — and then the perils of traveling during COVID. “And then, and then,” the attorney said in a resigned tone that suggested the specifics didn’t matter all that much.

So why hasn’t he make the trip since then? “That, I don’t know,” Kindlon said.

The attorney was planning to meet with the Capital Region contingent of the Hussain family later in the day. I asked him to pass along the question to them and to Shahed as well. I’ve heard nothing from any of them.

There are numerous reasons why Shahed might not want to return to the U.S. that have nothing to do with his relative uselessness as a supporting player in the courtroom. There is, for example, the fact that Shahed himself could potentially face charges related to his own richly documented failure to properly register the limo with the state after acquiring it.

It would also be far more difficult to avoid being deposed by the families in their civil suits that have been brought against Prestige and Mavis.

It is also quite likely that the FBI would rather not see Shahed back in the U.S., where his presence could cast a long shadow on the bureau’s decision to deploy him in stings in which a number of defendants — including right here in Albany — claim they were gulled into their alleged crimes not by animus against the West but solely by the undercover operative’s deceit.

After four years of silence, the FBI was finally compelled to conduct an internal investigation into its handling of Shahed, which it claims ended soon after he went overseas in the summer of 2018. So in a sense, his physical presence in his children’s lives and his undercover career ended around the same time.

This newspaper has abundantly covered the oceanic loss experienced by the families of those killed in the Schoharie crash. Many of those New Yorkers have devoted themselves to making the limousine industry safer, on the state and national level, for the next generation.

But it’s worth spending some time thinking about the kind of parent who would remain on the other side of the world for almost half a decade as your son faces justice for the dilemma you helped put him in.