Report: Limo wasn’t fixed
Former Mavis manager says shop falsified invoices, didn’t perform critical brake work
The former manager of a Mavis Discount Tire outlet told investigators last month that the Saratoga Springs auto shop had falsified invoices and failed to perform critical brake work on the stretch limousine that crashed in Schoharie last year, killing 20 people.
The alleged falsification of the records and the shop’s purported failure to perform work on the 2001 Ford Excursion were part of a systematic practice at the auto service outlet as it tried to meet corporate sales quotas, court records show.
Schoharie County District Attorney Susan J. Mallery disclosed the information in a letter this week to attorneys for Nauman Hussain, who operated the Wilton-based limousine company that owned the Excursion. Hussain was indicted in April on manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges — one count apiece for each of the 20 crash victims.
Hussain’s attorneys contend the revelations further undermine prosecutors’ argument that their client knew the vehicle was unsafe before the accident.
And in a statement late Wednesday, the state Department of Motor Vehicles said it would pursue the allegations “to the fullest extent of our authority.”
In a Sept. 17 interview with investigators, Virgil W. Park Sr., who no longer works at Mavis, told investigators he’d purchased a “Wearever brake master cylinder” from Advance Auto Parts on May 4, 2018, about a week before the auto shop worked on the limousine. (In her letter, Mallery misspelled Park’s name as “Parks.”)
Although a Mavis invoice dated a week later indicates the brake part had been installed on the stretch Excursion, Park said another employee, Chikezie Okoro, “told him that the part was not installed.”
“Instead, this part was returned to Advance Auto Parts on May 12, 2018,” Mallery wrote. “Mr. Parks (sic) stated that he learned this information from Mr. Okoro shortly before Mr. Parks was terminated by Mavis in February 2019.”
A brake master cylinder transfers the force from a driver’s foot on a brake pedal into hydraulic pressure to slow or stop a vehicle.
Park told investigators the shop had also falsified doing other brake labor on the limo, including f lushing brake lines and replacing it with clean f luid. Mallery said Park told investigators the “brakes were just bled.”
“Mr. Parks also informed us of a billing practice at Mavis in which certain ser vices were substituted on invoices for the ones actually performed, in order for the store to meet sales quotas established by the corporate office,” Mallery wrote.
The district attorney said Park also told investigators the limo “was occasionally listed on paperwork as a 2002 Excursion as well as an (Ford) F350,” although it ’s unclear why.
In a brief phone interview Wednesday morning, Park, a 46-year-old Middle Grove resident, declined to comment on his interview with investigators.
“They have lawyers handling this,” Park said. “I don’t know who you are. ... Have a great day, sir.”
The May 2018 repairs at Mavis weren’t the only time invoices listing repairs on the limo had been misstated, the letter alleged.
According to Mallery’s letter, Park told investigators that another invoice from January 2018 had indicated a power steering f lush was performed on the vehicle for $79.99, but that the work done that day was “associated with exhaust repairs” and that the documentation was changed “in order to meet sales quotas.”
Two other 2018 invoices, from June 8 and June 25, indicated “brake labor and a power steering f lush” were done on the vehicle, but Park told investigators no brake service was done, just power steering work.
“Again, the items listed on the invoice were substituted to meet sales quotas,” Mallery said.
In a response letter sent to Schoharie County Court Judge George R. Bartlett III on Tuesday, Joseph Tacopina and Chad D. Seigel, two of Hussain’s attorneys, said the information “further exonerates Mr. Hussain” and suggests the alleged fraud by the Mavis outlet “was the true legal cause of the accident.”
Tacopina’s letter also questions Mallery’s characterization that the evidence provided by Park “may or may not” qualify as information that is favorable to the defendant and that was required to be turned over before trial.
“In light of the people’s shocking inability to definitively characterize such material as favorable to the accused, we are concerned about their capability of identifying other such material, in order to discharge their obligations under the Constitution,” Tacopina wrote.
Tacopina told the judge the new information further buttresses the defense motion for dismissal and highlights “just how deficient the proof against Mr. Hussain is with respect to the critical elements of causation and foreseeability.”
“Unlike Mavis — which consciously failed to perform services on the limousine’s brake system, and which deceptively concealed that omission through false invoices — no such evidence exists as to Mr. Hussain,” he wrote.
Tacopina, co-counsel for the defense with Lee C. Kindlon, also pressed the court to alert the public about Mavis’ purported practices and the “potential ongoing jeopardy to the public at large.”
“In the event other customers are presently operating vehicles, under the sham disillusion that their brakes or other mechanical devices were properly serviced by Mavis, it is incumbent that they be alerted otherwise as soon as possible, so as to avoid any further and needless tragedies from occurring,” Tacopina wrote.
The Mavis Discount Tire’s South Broadway store has been a target in at least four civil lawsuits — including two filed last week in Saratoga County — brought by families of victims in the Oct. 6, 2018, crash. Late last month, the judge in the criminal case pending against Hussain approved a request by Mallery to release video footage and invoices from the Mavis shop to attorneys
for Hussain.
The stretch Excursion owned by Hussain’s father, Shahed Hussain, was transporting 17 friends from Amsterdam to Cooperstown for a birthday party when it passed a stop sign on Route 30 in Schoharie at a high rate of speed and collided with a vehicle parked outside the Apple Barrel Country Store, killing two pedestrians, before slamming head-on into a ditch.
A State Police report has blamed the crash on “catastrophic brake failure.”
Prosecutors have accused Hussain, 29, of putting the vehicle back into service despite knowing it was dangerous after it had failed two state Department of Transportation inspections in the months leading up to the disaster. The driver assigned to the job that day was not properly licensed.
Kindlon has countered that his client had the Excursion fixed before the crash — or now, apparently, believed he had done so — although he had not previously revealed where those repairs took place. Kindlon also has pointed to a Times Union report that the limo driver, Scott Lisinicchia, had marijuana in his system at the time of the crash, according to a toxicology report.
Mallery told Bartlett in a letter last month that the Mavis materials could be helpful to the defense. In a Sept. 13 letter to the judge, Mallery said the Mavis videos illustrate criminal intent or knowledge of wrongdoing, although Hussain’s legal team “may have other arguments regarding the videos and invoices.”
State DMV records obtained last year by the Times Union show the Saratoga Springs Mavis issued an inspection sticker for the Excursion May 11, 2018, despite the fact that DMV inspection stations in New York are not allowed
to inspect stretch limousines, which must instead get inspection stickers from the DOT every six months.
Mallery notes in her letter to Hussain’s lawyers that Park, the former Mavis manager, didn’t inspect the Excursion himself but handed a state DMV inspector certification card to someone else to do the inspection. Under DMV regulations, certified inspectors are not allowed to leave their cards unattended or give them to anyone else to use during an inspection.
Since the Times Union story about Mavis ran last November, the DMV has repeatedly declined to explain if it has taken any disciplinary steps against the Saratoga Springs Mavis store, which remains listed as an authorized DMV inspection station.
DMV spokeswoman Lisa Koumjian initially declined comment on the new developments concerning Mavis or on whether the shop’s inspection license would be suspended or revoked despite the “potential ongoing jeopardy to the public at large” asserted in Tacopina’s letter to the court.
Late Wednesday she said that the first the agency learned of the allegations was in media reports during the day. Claims will be pursued “to the fullest extent of our authority. If DMV needs additional powers to pursue potential bad actors, we will pursue that during the next legislative session,” the statement said.
The civil suits of relatives of the limo crash victims, which also name Hussain and his limo companies as defendants, accuse Mavis of having done shoddy work on the Excursion that made it unsafe — although none of them went so far as to allege that the work was never done.
The first suit that named Mavis as a defendant was filed in August by Paul Davenport, a Colonie attorney representing the estates of Erin and Shane Mcgowan, one of two newlywed couples in the limo that day.
“We knew there was something untoward that happened in May,” Davenport said Wednesday, referring to the May 11 visit Hussain made to Mavis. “Those types of behaviors are not something that turn up overnight. They are progressive.”
However, Davenport said he doesn’t believe Mallery’s letter exonerates Hussain since he was ultimately responsible for ensuring passenger safety.
Mavis has said that it “bears no legal responsibility for this tragedy and the events that led up to” the crash. The company has 500 locations in 13 states and is backed by Golden Gate Capital, a $15 billion private equity firm based in San Francisco.
On Wednesday, a company spokeswoman did not immediately have a response when informed of Mallery’s allegations of Mavis falsifying invoices and failing to make safety repairs.
Aside from the allegations about Mavis, the Excursion was not authorized by the state Department of Transportation to carry any passengers at the time of the crash. Hussain had failed to get state DOT “authority” to operate the limo business, and the Excursion was missing a required federal safety standards tag and a DOT inspection sticker.
State Department of Transportation Investigator Chad Smith had ordered the Excursion off the road on March 21, 2018, after he inspected the vehicle at the Weibel Avenue parking lot where Nauman Hussain kept three stretch limos between jobs. In addition to the 31-foot white Excursion, Hussain’s small business also operated two gold stretch Lincoln Town Cars.
Smith found that along with other safety violations, 25 percent of the Excursion’s brakes were defective; he slapped an “out-of-service” sticker on the Excursion. (One of the Town Cars, Smith noted, had a f lat tire and no registration.)
According to a deposition Smith gave to State Police in the wake of the crash, the DOT investigator was at the time under the impression that he was meeting with Shahed Hussain, Nauman Hussain’s father, who was the legal owner of the Excursion and the business, called Prestige Limousine. Nauman Hussain, who was operating the limo business while his father was in Pakistan after undergoing heart surgery in early 2018, didn’t correct him until much later.
Despite the fact that DMV inspection stations are required under state law to refuse to inspect stretch limos, Hussain was able to get the Mavis shop to affix a DMV inspection sticker on the Excursion on May 11.
Neither the DMV nor Mavis has explained how that inspection could have been done. Under state law, the Excursion was supposed to be inspected every six months by the state DOT’S bus safety program and was exempt from DMV inspections.
Smith, the DOT investigator, returned to the Weibel Avenue lot on June 20 for an unannounced “spot check.” He found that the rear left brake “appeared to be new” and that a vice grip that had been applied to it during his March inspection had been removed.
However, Smith noted that he was unable to inspect the vehicle further to see if additional work had been done to correct other mechanical safety issues.
“I then departed and due to no apparent usage of the vehicles, no further contact was made to the carrier,” Smith said in his deposition.
Smith didn’t check on the Excursion again until July 28, when he returned to the Weibel Avenue lot. Smith said that when he couldn’t locate the Excursion, he drove to the Mavis store on Broadway, where he spotted it.
“I then departed under the belief that it was undergoing mechanical work,” Smith said.
Brian Chase, a New Hampshire vehicle forensics expert hired by the State Police to determine the cause of the crash, found the Excursion had “severely corroded rear crossover brake tubing,” which he determined had burst “from brake f luid pressure by and through brake pedal application.”
Chase also found that the rear right brake was inoperable due to two seized disc brake caliper pistons.