Crash study blasts state agencies
Limo owners found responsible for wreck; district attorney, state police taken to task
In a lengthy, detailed and scathing analysis, the National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday blamed the owners of Prestige Limousine for the deadly limousine crash that killed 20 people on Oct. 6, 2018, while also roundly criticizing two state agencies for their collective failure to keep the decrepit vehicle off the road.
The board's members voted Tuesday to affix primary responsibility for the crash to limo operator Nauman Hussain as well as on the poor oversight of the limousine industry by the state Department of Transportation and the Department of Motor Vehicles. Hussain currently faces 20 counts apiece of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter.
The board heard the welldocumented history of the limousine's flaws. The deadliest was summed up by one board member as “effective braking (that) likely did not exist.”
The limousine, on its way to the Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown on a clear autumn Saturday, barreled down the
steep incline of Route 30 in Schoharie, blew through the stop sign at the road's intersection with Route 30A and sped into the parking lot of the Apple Barrel County Store. It hit another vehicle that fatally caromed into two bystanders, then slammed into an earthen embankment. Almost everyone inside was killed on impact.
The NTSB said Tuesday the limo was going between 101 mph and 116 mph just before the crash.
The meeting began with board chairman Robert Sumwalt accusing the New York State Police and Schoharie County District Attorney Susan Mallery of impeding the federal agency's efforts to inspect the crash, which is NTSB'S core duty following transportation disasters.
The meeting's criticisms amounted to a startling rebuke of law enforcement and the state agencies that are supposed to keep New York's roads safe.
NTSB Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg said he was mystified how the DMV failed to realize that Hussain had misrepresented the Excursion in official documents to make it appear to be much smaller, which in turn allowed it to skirt the DOT'S bus safety program that covers stretch limousines capable of carrying more than 10 passengers.
"Do they have computers there?" Landsberg asked in reference to the DMV.
NTSB board member Michael Graham was even more forceful in his condemnation of the DOT in his opening remarks, saying he found "gaping holes" in the state agency's regulation of Prestige and the limo industry in general.
"Each layer of protection ... failed," Graham said. "There is more than one bad actor here."
Sumwalt, who led the meeting, agreed, along with the agency's four other board members, that the DOT had possessed the power to seize the Excursion's license plates. The state agency, he noted, argued that it lacked that power prior to the crash — but after the disaster, the agency proceeded to pull the plates of 59 other allegedly deficient limos across the state.
As detailed in a preliminary report issued in August, the DOT and DMV were accountable for allowing Hussain to keep the unsafe vehicle — which failed two DOT inspections — on the road.
"Yes, they did have the opportunity to do more," Sumwalt said, as the board debated whether to list the DOT'S actions in the report's "probable cause" section. "Unfortunately, they missed an opportunity — (although) this is not about fault or blame."
Sumwalt was blistering in his criticism of Mallery, the district attorney, for impeding the agency's investigation.
In the months after the crash, the NTSB complained publicly and to a judge that Mallery had blocked their access to information about the crash while the State Police were investigating the disaster for potential criminal prosecution.
Sumwalt noted that State Police made NTSB investigators remain 100 feet away from the crashed limo while State Police investigators examined the wreckage in a tent. "There was not a good deal of cooperation from the state," he said, noting the NTSB paid for the tent. The federal agency was eventually granted access to the vehicle.
Sumwalt said it was not unusual for a criminal investigation and an NTSB investigation to unfold at the same time. What was unusual was for the NTSB'S probe to be "impeded by a criminal investigation," he said.
The interference prevented the agency from offering safety recommendations and findings about the crash months sooner than it eventually did, the board said. Sumwalt said Mallery's actions delayed the completion of the final report by a year.
In a statement Tuesday, Mallery's office said that due to "legal and ethical restrictions, we are unable to answer questions until the case against Nauman Hussain is concluded. Without discussing this particular case, District Attorneys and NTSB have different obligations and responsibilities which we both must adhere to."
State Police spokesman Beau Duffy contended Tuesday that from the beginning the NTSB "has been fully aware that the criminal case is the priority" and that the State Police and Hussain's criminal defense team had to process the evidence before federal investigators could be granted access.
"State Police secured custody of the limousine as criminal case evidence pursuant to a search warrant issued by the Schoharie County Court, and under New York state criminal procedure law the limousine was considered property of the court," Duffy said. "We did not have the authority to allow the NTSB or anyone else to perform any action that would affect the integrity of evidence seized under the warrant."
It is unclear if the case against Hussain will ever go to trial. The trial of the 30-year-old son of FBI informant Shahed Hussain, who also owned a crumbling motel in Wilton along with the limo service, has been delayed by the COVID -19 pandemic. His attorney, Lee Kindlon, and Mallery have been in talks about a plea deal — a potential outcome that is opposed by many of the crash victims' families.
The DOT and DMV, which have stonewalled efforts by the Times Union and the victims' families to access agency records about their oversight of Prestige, issued a joint statement after the NTSB meeting concluded.
“The findings clearly demonstrate the shocking extremes to which the owners of Prestige went to break the law and falsify state and federal compliance records," it read. "We exercised the full authority granted to us under the law and ordered that vehicle off the road multiple times, but as NTSB’S own reports on this crash reaffirm, Prestige repeatedly violated New York state law and was never authorized at any time to operate forhire commercial passenger vehicle service in the state."
Ultimately, the NTSB levied its harshest judgment on Prestige and Nauman Hussain, who told authorities after the crash that he was managing the limo business on behalf of his father, who left the Albany area in early 2018 for his native Pakistan.
The father, Shahed Hussain, who came to the United States in the early 1990s, became an undercover informant for the FBI on anti-terrorism investigations after being caught in a federal sting related to driver's license fraud.
Sumwalt said in opening remarks Tuesday that "inadequate brake maintenance" by Nauman Hussain was mainly to blame for the crash.
The NTSB also said that in 2002, Ford issued new guidelines that said that its vehicles stretched into limos should not exceed 11,000 pounds and 15 passengers. The 2001 stretch Ford Excursion weighed 13,800 pounds and had seating for 18 passengers. The NTSB also said the limo was too long compared to the 2002 Ford recommendations, which were issued a year after the Excursion was stretched.
NTSB staffer Michael Laponte said that Hussain registered the Excursion incorrectly with the state DMV, and the DMV "did not check previous registrations or examine documents to discover inaccuracies in registration." DMV inspection stations, two of which illegally inspected the Excursion, need to have "more stringent oversight," he said.
Sal Ferlazzo, an attorney representing one of the victims' families, said the state has been trying to sidestep blame that it failed in its responsibility to ensure that commercial passenger vehicles are safe for the public.
"Rather than follow through on the state’s safety obligations, New York state tried to pivot away from its negligence by imposing all sorts of new regulations when, as the NTSB is finding, it had all the tools available to save all these lives," Ferlazzo told the Times Union. "It is a sad day, but transparency unusually wins out in the end, as it will here once we start deposing the state officials responsible for the failures."