Another preventable tragedy is forcing Americans to confront an uncomfortable question: how did a commercial driver who allegedly could not read or speak English obtain a CDL in the first place?
According to reporting on a devastating Virginia bus crash that killed five people, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy noted the driver had been licensed in New York despite an apparent inability to meet the federal English-language requirement for commercial drivers.
Five people were killed and 44 others were hospitalized when a Staten Island bus driver, who didn’t speak English, smashed into stopped traffic along I-95 in Virginia, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.Jing S. Dong, a Chinese native who obtained US citizenship, was allegedly driving the motorcoach from New York City to Charlotte, North Carolina, when it struck a Chevrolet Suburban in Stafford County, near Quantico, just after 2:30 a.m. Friday morning.The crash sparked a chain reaction involving at least 6 vehicles, officials said. Traffic had slowed down for a work zone on the highway at the time of the crash.“The preliminary investigation indicates that traffic was slowing southbound for an upcoming work zone,” [according to] state police. “A bus failed to slow for traffic and struck six vehicles.”
The requirement to be fluent in English is not a racist, bureaucratic technicality, but a core safety standard embedded in federal regulations to ensure drivers can read road signs, understand hazard warnings, and communicate with officials in emergencies.
The result of having an unqualified driver in that bus is five dead Americans, and at least thirty-four who were injured.
Just after 2:30 a.m. local time on Friday, May 29, a bus “failed to slow for traffic” on Interstate 95 in Stafford County, striking six other vehicles, Virginia State Police (VSP) said in a news release previously obtained by PEOPLE. The five people killed in the crash were in cars hit by the bus, while at least 34 others were hospitalized following the incident.Jing S. Dong, who was allegedly driving the bus at the time, also suffered injuries from the crash. He was arrested on Saturday by the Virginia State Police and served with felony warrants in the hospital, the BBC reported, citing Virginia prosecutor Eric Olsen.According to the outlet, Olsen said there is enough evidence to suggest that Dong, 48, of Staten Island, New York, was driving in a “criminally negligent manner” at the time of the crash.
Dong was clearly a menace, as he was scheduled to appear in court this week for a speeding ticket.
Driver Jing S. Dong got a ticket for driving 72 mph in a 50 mph zone on March 6. According to Maryland State Police, a trooper conducted a traffic stop on a coach charter bus in the area of southbound Route 3 at Charles Hall Road in Anne Arundel County at about 1:20 a.m.Dong, 48, of New York, received a ticket for exceeding the speed limit. There were passengers on the bus at the time.Dong was scheduled to go to court on Tuesday, June 2, at 9 a.m. for the ticket.
As I have previously documented in my analysis of CDL issuance practices in New York, there are longstanding questions about how rigorously these federal standards are being enforced at the state level. In particular, gaps in testing integrity, language accommodation practices, and oversight have raised red flags about whether compliance is being treated as optional rather than mandatory.
As a reminder, I recently reported that New York lost more than $73.5 million in federal money because the Transportation Department determined that the state had refused to revoke nearly 33,000 questionable commercial driver’s licenses for immigrants since an audit uncovered problems last year.
Meanwhile, as Hot Air’s Beege Welborne notes, families are now bearing the tragic consequences of failing to strictly adhere to basic rules related to safety.
A lovely young woman and an entire young family, immigrants pursuing their own American dream, are now gone, most likely because a Chinese national could not read the caution signs for the road construction that came up in the middle of the night.
If the details of this case are confirmed, it would represent not just an individual failure, but a systemic one with deadly consequences.
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