Nearly eight years ago, 20 people were killed when a limousine crashed into a Schoharie parking lot. In total, 17 passengers, the driver, and two bystanders died after the vehicle lost its brakes on a steep hill.
Nauman Hussain, the operator of the limo company involved, is in prison. And now, only one civil case is left to settle in a lengthy series of litigation.
Times Union reporter Larry Rulison has followed it all closer than any reporter. WAMC's Lucas Willard spoke with him about the tragedy and its legacy.
Click the play button to listen to the full conversation.
Read Larry Rulison's latest reporting here: Only one civil claim from Schoharie limo crash remains to be resolved
See the full interview transcript below.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Rulison: After the crash, those families hired lawyers. They started filing lawsuits against a lot of different people that they thought were to blame. That's in addition to the courtroom drama maybe a month or two after the crash. This civil litigation process has been unfolding much more slowly than even the criminal part of it. That just has required a lot of keeping up on the cases. I mean, they were all sort of unified under one judge in Albany County, so it made it a lot easier for me to do that. But I've been following that. I've looked into that case file almost every week for the last seven, eight years.
Willard: So in the civil cases, some of the named parties include not only the operators of the limousine involved, New York State, also Mavis Discount Tire, which is the chain of tire shops, but there was one branch that had actually performed the inspections on the vehicle that was involved in the the limo crash.
Can we zoom in on Mavis Discount Tire and the company's involvement in this unfortunate incident?
Rulison: If you're a legitimate limousine company with New York State Operating Authority, which Hussain's company, Prestige Limousine, didn't have, you don't take your limousine to Mavis Discount Tire for service. You usually you have your own garage and
mechanics that service your limousine.
This was sort of a makeshift operation. They didn't have a garage. The Hussains' just stored their small fleet limousines in a parking lot in Saratoga Springs.
They would actually bring these limousines there for service, and getting a 31-foot stretch limousine up in the air at Mavis Discount Tire, you really can't do it. You need a lift that can pull that up. It's very unusual. There was a DMV hearing and the civil litigation is that they didn't properly service that vehicle. They sort of put a regular inspection sticker on it that a normal car would have. A limousine requires inspections every six months by the DOT in a DOT garage. And they're very stringent inspections. They're much harder to pass than say, when you bring your car, so there were a lot of allegations that Mavis didn't know what they were doing, or couldn't fix the the brakes, and so the families all sued Mavis in addition to the limousine owner and they pretty much had a good case. 19 out of the 20 families have settled with Mavis already for monetary amounts.
All the amounts have been kept secret, although I accidentally came upon one of the award amounts, but I've heard that the amounts vary, so I don't really know from family-to-family how much each got, but through the civil litigation that the families that have sued Mavis, that's where they've gotten most of their money.
Willard: The estate of the victim that's the last one standing is for Michael Ukaj. I remember in covering the trial, remembrance services and so much community organizing around this tragedy, there was a lot of attention paid to the victims and who they were, and who they were as part of the community and the Amsterdam, New York area.
What can you tell me about how eight years now, almost after this limousine crash, how the families have come together? Obviously filing a civil lawsuit and everyone following suit is one thing, but is there still a very strong connection between the families of the victims? Are they still working together to make sure that these tragedies never happen again? What can you tell me about the families of the victims?
Rulison: The families aren't as close as you would think, except for the fact that they did work together to get federal and state legislation passed. Kevin Cushing, the father of Patrick Cushing, he was their face in Washington DC and in Albany.
And he, with the support of the families and their attorneys, I know they worked really hard in the early years to get significant legislation passed, especially at the state and federal level, it was pretty amazing. And a lot of those new regulations and laws are very effective. For instance, before this, in New York State, you didn't have to wear a seatbelt in the backseat of a car. Today you do, and it's because of them.
There's other things about limousines. Basically the stretch limousine industry in New York is almost unviable at this point, and probably for good reason. I mean, those stretch limousines are cut in half and put back together and there's no regulation over that whatsoever and there never has been. I would never put my kids in a stretch limousine that's been cut in half and done like that.
There are some smaller limousines that have, in the past, been less like that. But honestly, most people just use those party buses now for things like weddings and stuff. But the families in terms of the law the litigation and other things, they're not one big unified group. I know, for instance, there were the people out of town at a wedding who were in the parking lot when the limousine crashed into the Apple Barrel parking lot, there were two people struck by the limousine who were from out of town. For instance, those families and some of their relatives are local here in Albany, they were never really close to the limo kids because you're not blaming them, but it's just hard. And then it took a long time for the families to reconcile with the the driver and whether he was at fault or not. I think the driver's family was never sort of close to the others. Although they did reconcile towards the end of the trial, if you remember, they all came together and they actually added the driver to the memorial — a mold of his foot — everyone's foot was molded and put at the memorial site, as part of the memorial. But they're a disparate group. There was one girl who was there but didn't know anyone and just was along for the ride that day. That family, I don't think, is very close to the others, either. There is a core group, but they all have different lawyers. Some are represented by the same because there was one large family where it was four daughters and two or three son-in-laws.
That was tough. The Kings' were represented by, I think, one attorney, but a lot of people had different attorneys and not all the attorneys always agreed on the same things. I think that's one of the reasons it took so long before it all settled. They're not like a big unified group as you might think.
Willard: I want to talk about the operator of Prestige Limousine, Nauman Hussain. He was convicted of 20 counts of second-degree manslaughter and is serving prison time. At first, he avoided jail time and then there was a prison time attached to the sentence.
Where is Nauman Hussain now? Where is he serving time, and I understand that he has sought to appeal, but what does that look like right now?
Rulison: He's at Attica out in Western New York, and he's serving five to 15 years. I think he's going to be up for parole in a couple of years, so a minimum of five years, maximum of 15.
I've reported that he's been ill, but we haven't totally verified all the details around that. I wrote a story where his father told me that he has lung cancer.
But he's out there and his appeals through the state have all failed. He's hired a new appeals attorney who's filed a motion to overturn the verdict directly with Schoharie County Court. It's called a 440 motion. Typically, you would do that after exhausting your other appeals through the higher courts. This is a very difficult task for his him and his attorneys. You basically have to prove that you had ineffective counsel and that there's new evidence in the case that wasn't presented at trial.
The bar is probably very high on that and he faces a really steep hurdle. The lawyer who filed the case has some very interesting arguments regarding the trial judge and his attorneys. I honestly do not know if that's gonna be successful. I don't know how long it takes for that to play out. And he's a few years into his sentence already.
Willard: I also want to ask you about, in doing your reporting on this very tragic story now eight years in, how it's affected you as well. As journalists, you try to separate yourself from the work, but this is such a high profile, such a tragic story that it has an effect on a lot of people, readers included. And I can only imagine it had a big effect on you too.
Rulison: It did. I'm a business writer. That's my beat at the Times Union and I've done business writing going back more than 20 years. So when this happened, I wasn't interviewing victims of tragedies. I mean, I'd done it, but not a lot.
At first, it was very tough. A lot of other reporters at the start had been working on those stories, like going to the funerals and the memorial services and talking to the families. But as the case wore, on I became the only reporter at the Times Union working on the story. And when our multimedia producer Jessica Marshall and I produced our multi-part podcast on the tragedy, we called every single family and asked to interview them, and so we sat through interviews with those families for hours on end. I mean what ended up in the podcast were only snippets and those stories and those times talking to those people really affected me, and it's still really tough for me to even think back on those interviews.
Those families, those people were so honest with us and it was really tough to hear that, especially as a father of two boys. It's been tough and the families, just wanna leave the area and just be with say their grandchildren because their children are gone. And they say the best thing for them, the best medicine is spend time with their grandchildren.
I think maybe they've used the money they've gotten or they're getting and gone to a warmer climate where they can sort of get away from it. It's interesting. I try not to bother them too much at this point unless something big happens. But I'm always thinking of them.
