Out of control
3 die in Queens bus crash
A charter-bus driver who was fired by the MTA over a DUI bust blew a red light at double the speed limit in Queens on Monday and got into a deadly collision with a city bus filled with earlymorning commuters.
The 6:20 a.m. crash at Northern Boulevard and Main Street in Flushing killed a passenger on the Q20, a pedestrian and the charter driver, while injuring 16 others, five critically.
Surveillance video shows the charter bus tearing through the intersection and smashing into the rear side of the Q20 bus.
The impact spun the city bus around, and the charter bus plowed into a Kennedy Fried Chicken, igniting a small blaze and raising concerns about structural damage to the building.
The speed limit in the area is 25 mph, but a photo taken after the scene shows the charter bus’ speedometer stuck at 60 mph.
Mayor de Blasio said the wreck was “hard to compare to anything I’ve ever seen — the sheer destruction from the impact of the collision.”
The charter bus is owned by Dahlia Group Inc. of Flushing, which, federal records show, has an abysmal safety record, including a crash that killed a passenger last year when a bus flipped on its side on a snow-covered highway in Connecticut.
Dozens of people were injured in that wreck, which took place on northbound I-95 during a Feb. 8, 2016, trip to the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville.
Monday’s incident unfolded as the Q20, carrying 15 passengers, was making a right turn from northbound Main Street onto eastbound Northern Boulevard.
The MTA bus was nearly all the way into the intersection when the Dahlia coach — empty except for driver Raymond Mong, 49 — slammed into it.
“I didn’t hear any brakes or anything,” said a witness, Mark Ramos, who works nearby and was in his truck across the street.
Ramos, 42, said he ran to the crash site and “saw a woman pinned in the back of the city bus.”
“She was screaming and crying, ‘Help me, help me,’ ” he said.
“One leg was twisted. It was dark. She was behind the city bus, on the ground.”
“I saw a guy with his skull cracked open and lots of blood. I saw cuts and bruises all over the place,” he added.
In addition to Mong, the crash killed Q20 rider Gregory Liljefors, 55, and pedestrian Henry Wdowiak, 68, both of Queens.
Liljefors, a security guard, was commuting home from work, his shocked wife told The Post.
“He was a good man. He was a good husband for 27 years. He was a good father to his two stepsons,” Audris Liljefors said outside their Flushing home.
One of his stepsons, Marcin Kurpiewski, said he was driving on Monday when cops called with the tragic news.
“I pulled over, got out of the car
and just fell to my knees,” Kurpiewski, 37, told the New York Times.
Before coming to the US, Liljefors was a pilot in Poland. He once worked in the ticket booth at the Queens Zoo.
“It still feels like he’s coming home,” said Kurpiewski.
Wdowiak, who lived about three blocks away, was found crushed under the wreckage.
A maintenance worker at his apartment building said he had known Wdowiak, who worked for the same management company, for about eight years.
“He’s a really nice guy. I have nothing but positive things to say about him. He was a hard worker who took care of his family,” his colleague said.
Mong worked as a MTA bus driver for several years before being fired in 2015 over a DUI bust in New Haven, sources said.
Police records show Mong was behind the wheel of a 2002 Honda on April 10, 2015, when he caused a three-car chain collision on the Exit 51 off-ramp from southbound 1-95 and fled.
He pleaded guilty to operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs and was given a suspended six-month jail sentence on Oct. 20, 2015, and put on probation for 18 months.
Mong was also ordered to pay a $500 fine and $83 in fees.
He was making $30 a hour at the time he got canned, and he earned $70,161 during fiscal 2014, payroll records show.
He was later hired by Dhalia, which owns five buses and employs six drivers, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Dhalia has been slapped with seven violations for unsafe driving over the past two years — including two tied to the fatal Connecticut crash — the safety administration’s records show.
The company also racked up violations in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland for speeding, failure to obey a traffic device and illegal parking and/or leaving a bus in the roadway, records show.
Dahlia’s safety record puts it in the bottom fifth of carriers nationwide and has led the feds to flag it for potential “intervention action and roadside inspection” during each of the past 26 months, records show.
Dahlia is fighting at least three lawsuits filed by a dozen people injured in the Connecticut crash, and another by a passenger who was left disabled when a disturbed man began slashing people with a boxcutter on a bus in that state in 2014.
That passenger, Randy Chan, who had tried to subdue the psycho, alleges that the bus driver did nothing but open the door during the violence, leading both Chan and the attacker to tumble out, where a state trooper killed the assailant and accidentally shot Chan in the leg, said his lawyer, Brittany Cates.
Dahlia and lawyers who represent the company didn’t return repeated requests for comment.
Defense lawyer Justin Smith, who represented Mong, said about Monday’s crash: “My heart goes out to his family and to the families of all the victims. It’s a terrible tragedy.”