Schoharie limousine crash — A Company Sent Out a Vehicle It Knew Should Not Move

On 6 October 2018, at about 1:55 p.m., a stretch limousine carrying 17 passengers and a driver lost its brakes descending a long grade on New York State Route 30 near Schoharie, ran through the T-intersection at Route 30A, and crashed beside the Apple Barrel Country Store, killing all 18 occupants and two pedestrians in the parking lot. Twenty people died. It was the deadliest transportation accident in the United States since 2009. The limousine — a 2001 Ford Excursion that had been cut apart and stretched into an 18-seat livery vehicle — was on a charter run carrying a group celebrating a birthday from Amsterdam, New York, toward a brewery in Cooperstown.

The descent on Route 30 is roughly 1.8 miles long and steep. The vehicle’s hydraulic brake system, found afterward to be severely corroded and inadequately repaired, failed under the demand of the grade. The limousine accelerated out of control, and at the bottom it entered the intersection at an estimated 101 to 118 miles per hour, struck a parked sport-utility vehicle and the two people standing near it, and came to rest in a ravine. The crash forces were not survivable; no occupant lived.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigated under case number HWY19MH001 and adopted its findings on 29 September 2020, publishing Highway Accident Report HAR-20-03. Its probable cause was organizational, not mechanical in origin: “Prestige Limousine and Chauffeur Service’s egregious disregard for safety, in dispatching a stretch limousine with an out-of-service order for a passenger charter trip, resulting in the failure of its brake system while descending the steep grade of New York State Route 30.” The Board found two contributing oversight failures — the New York State Department of Transportation’s ineffective supervision of a carrier it knew was operating with out-of-service violations and no operating authority, and the Department of Motor Vehicles’ inadequate oversight of licensed inspection stations and its failure to register the vehicle correctly, which let the operator slip past the stricter inspection regime that should have applied.

The operator’s manager, Nauman Hussain, faced criminal prosecution. A 2021 plea agreement that would have spared him prison was later rejected by the trial judge as fundamentally flawed; at trial in 2023 a jury convicted him of 20 counts of second-degree manslaughter and 20 counts of criminally negligent homicide, and on 31 May 2023 he was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in state prison. The conviction was upheld on appeal. The crash drove a wave of state and federal scrutiny of the stretch-limousine industry — a class of modified vehicles that, by 2018, had fallen into a regulatory gap between the car they began as and the bus-grade safety standard their passenger load demanded.