Investigative documents were released last week in the case of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway bus accident last year that killed 15 people and injured several others. According to the documents, as reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, this wasn’t the first problem for the bus company or the driver.

The accident occurred on March 12, 2011 as a bus full of passengers was returning from the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. The bus flipped on the Expressway, hitting a post which sheared off the roof of the bus.

According to initial investigations, the driver said that a tractor-trailer veered into his lane and ran the bus off the road. But investigators said they couldn’t find any evidence of this claim.

The National Transportation Safety Board found in their investigation that the driver had his license suspended 18 times in past years and had been fired from two previous transportation jobs. At the time of the accident, he was shuttling passengers to and from casinos multiple times daily, catching sleep when he could. On the morning of the tragic accident, he reportedly slept on the bus from midnight to about 3:20 a.m.

The company behind the bus was given an “unsatisfactory” rating by the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration after the accident and has since shut down. Continue reading →