After deadly NH biker crash, thousands of out-of-state traffic notices found untouched by Massachusetts RMV
BOSTON – Tens of thousands of paper notices detailing traffic infractions involving Massachusetts drivers in other states sat untouched in 53 bins at a state facility in Quincy, a preliminary review by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation found.
Among them: a May 11 report of a drunken-driving violation in Connecticut by Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, 23, a truck driver from West Springfield, Massachusetts.
Connecticut notified the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles about Zhukovskyy's incident electronically and through a mailed notice that would have gotten into one of the bins, the report released Monday says. Under state law, Zhukovskyy's commercial driver's license should have been immediately terminated and his right to drive a passenger vehicle suspended.
Instead, six weeks later – and still licensed by the state – Zhukovskyy struck a group of motorcyclists June 21 after crossing a double-yellow line on a rural highway in Randolph, New Hampshire, with his truck and trailer. Seven people died. He pleaded not guilty to seven counts of vehicular homicide.
The report, sparked by the crash in New Hampshire and outlined in a Monday memo, sheds light on a breakdown in Massachusetts' handling of out-of-state traffic violations. The head of the Massachusetts RMV, Erin Deveney, resigned last week amid the fallout.
“This failure is completely unacceptable to me, to the residents of the commonwealth who expect the RMV to do its job and track drivers’ records,” Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, said at a news conference Monday alongside Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack.
The bins were discovered last Wednesday. "For reasons that have not yet been determined," the report said, staff of the Merit Rating Board in Quincy in March 2018 stopped processing out-of-state violations and put them in the bins, which were sorted by month.
For the past five days, RMV officials have been looking up the drivers whose mailed out-of-state notifications hadn't been processed, the report says.
As of Monday, they had processed 655 new license suspensions – all related to alcohol-related violations – spanning 546 individuals. More are likely as the sorting continues.
Zhukovskyy has a record of drug- and traffic-related arrests in six states. The most recent before the New Hampshire crash occurred May 11, when he was arrested in a Walmart parking lot in East Windsor, Connecticut, after he refused a chemical test.
A disturbing record: Driver charged in 7 motorcycle deaths has arrest records in 6 states
In addition to the failures with notifications from other states, the Massachusetts RMV also had a more specific lapse with its handling of commercial driver's licenses, the review found.
Connecticut provided an electronic notice to Massachusetts on May 29 about Zhukovskyy's arrest, but it was not processed because of the way the Massachusetts RMV's system for commercial driver's licenses is programmed, according to the report.
Compounding the problem: Connecticut included a future effective date of the suspension rather than the date he refused the chemical test.
The failure for the violation to be electronically reported should have triggered RMV officials to manually report the incident May 11, the report says. But no personnel had been assigned the task of reviewing notifications that weren't processed electronically, including Zhukovskyy's.
MassDot and RMV officials worked through last weekend to identify unprocessed commercial driver's license notices that require manual reviews. They discovered 365 notices in the backlog, but they said 353 were duplicates. The report says only three were serious offenses, and only Zhukovskyy required an automatic suspension.
MassDot's memo says that Massachusetts officials have fixed the coding error so that a manual review will no longer be needed and is conducting an "end-to-end review" of all electronic processes for commercial driver's licenses.
Connecticut's written notification to Massachusetts about Zhukovskyy's May 11 arrest was collected May 30, the review found.
In September 2016, Massachusetts changed agencies responsible for handling out-of-state notifications, putting the Merit Rating Board in charge instead of the Driver Control Unit. An antiquated computer program for the handling of notifications was replaced with a new program in March 2018 – the same month the Merit Rating Board stopped processing notifications that were mailed in from other states.
MassDot intends to hire an audit firm to review the process for collecting out-of-state notifications, according to state officials. The department "out of an abundance of caution" also plans to compare Massachusetts' 5.2 million driver's license records against the National Driver Registry, which provides a database of driving and traffic infractions.
The seven victims of the crash June 21 were members of Marine Jarheads MC, a motorcycle club that includes Marines and their spouses. They were en route to a nearby veterans fundraiser. Memorial services for some of the victims took place over the weekend.
Contributing: The Associated Press
Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: After deadly NH biker crash, thousands of out-of-state traffic notices found untouched by Massachusetts RMV
