The driver of the bus that overturned crashed into a highway sign pole, killing 15 passengers, met with investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board and State Police today. Ophadell Williams, 40, left his home in Brooklyn with reporters swarming him (video) as his claims that he swerved to avoid a tractor trailer seem to be refuted by witnesses and as reports of his criminal past surface.
According to NBC New York, "Williams blew a .00 in a blood-alcohol test at the scene and voluntarily offered blood for a more precise blood alcohol test." He served time between 1992 and 1994 for manslaughter—he stabbed a man in 1990—and "also had past arrests for grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property in 1998 and went back to prison, documents show. He was released from parole in 2004."
The grand larceny arrest comes from forging a checks ad stealing over $80,000 from the Police Athletic League. His accomplice in the PAL scam told the Daily News that Williams convinced her to give him the blank checks by saying he was a cop, "I only know him for who he was at that time, a liar, a manipulator and impersonator; everything bad, nothing good." Williams also has a 2003 arrest for driving with a suspended license and an "intent to obtain transportation without paying" violation. Governor Andrew Cuomo said there would be an investigation to see how Williams obtained his commercial driver's license.
Williams had been working for World Wide Tours for six months, driving people from Chinatown to Mohegan Sun and back again, at night. He told investigators that he was trying to avoid a tractor trailer but the skid marks, as well as accounts from passengers, suggest that he may have fallen asleep because riders said the bus veered into the rumble strips off I-95 repeatedly. One man whose brother-in-law was killed said, "This is murder. [Bus drivers are] like pilots -- our lives [are] in their hands. I want to see him go to jail."
