Horrible bus accident

Last Saturday morning there was a terrible bus accident on the Interstate north of New York City in which 15 passengers, most of them Chinese immigrants, were killed. The bus was returning from an Indian-owned gambling casino in Connecticut when, according to survivors, it began swerving repeatedly onto the shoulder of the highway. Then the bus collided with a guardrail, flipped on its side, and skidded 480 feet until it collided with a sign post that sliced the bus in two and caused the deaths and terrible injuries, including a double amputation. If you’re wondering how a bus could skid on its side at high speed for 500 feet, I was wondering that too, and the New York Times reporters won’t help you make sense of it; they never do. Their job, as always, is not to provide an intelligible account of an event but to talk in a vague, high-minded fashion around the event.

In the linked article, and in another article about the impact of the accident on the Chinatown community. the Times mentioned that the driver of the bus, Ophadell Williams, had served two years for manslaughter in the early 1990s. What the Times neglected to mention, but was brought out by the Mail, several thousand miles away across the Atlantic, was that Williams was not legally allowed to drive in New York:

Ophadell%20Williams.jpg
Ophadell Williams

He was ticketed in 1995 for speeding and twice for driving without a licence, giving police the alias of Erik Williams.

His driving privileges were suspended—meaning he was not legally allowed to drive in the state—after he failed to address the charges.

The revelations prompted New York state governor Andrew Cuomo to launch an investigation into how he was able to hold a valid commercial driver’s licence at the time of the crash.

Investigators are now piecing together Mr Williams’s trail by matching Social Security numbers of traffic stops under different names, according to officials.

- end of initial entry -

John N. writes:

Your use of his first name Ophadell is racist. It would have sufficed to write his name as O. Williams. You deliberately used his first name to underscore a racist point.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 16, 2011 05:28 PM | Send
    

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