Baker: RMV’s failure to terminate NH crash suspect’s license ‘completely unacceptable’

BOSTON (WHDH) - The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles failed to terminate the commercial driving license of a man whose collision with a group of motorcyclists on a rural New Hampshire road left seven bikers dead because a backlog of 365 notices reflecting serious offenses went overlooked, MassDOT announced.

RMV head Erin Deveney resigned and a review of state-to-state data sharing was launched when it became known that the RMV didn’t act on information provided by the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles about a drunken driving arrest involving 23-year-old Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, who was allegedly driving erratically when the flatbed trailer he was towing collided with the motorcyclists in Randolph last month.

“No RMV personnel appear to have been assigned the task of reviewing the ATLAS-generated queue for unprocessed CDLIS and state-to-state notices. A queue was found of 365 notices reflecting serious offenses requiring manual review, which included the notice from Connecticut about Zhukovskyy,” MassDOT said in a report summarizing the review.

Gov. Charlie Baker called the lack of action taken by the RMV “deeply troubling and completely unacceptable.”

“The fact that the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles failed to act on information related to the driver responsible for this is deeply troubling and completely unacceptable,” he said.

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Connecticut prosecutors said Zhukovskyy was arrested in May in a Walmart parking lot after failing a sobriety test. Police in Texas said Zhukovskyy also crashed a tractor-trailer in suburban Houston in June. He was also arrested on a drunken driving charge in 2013 in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Zhukovskyy’s recent drunken driving arrest should have triggered an automatic license suspension, according to MassDOT.

Zhukovskyy has pleaded not guilty to seven counts of negligent homicide. He was placed in preventive detention, with a judge saying his driving record poses a potential danger to the public and himself.

The review also found the RMV’s Merit Rating Board had stopped processing out-of-state notifications in March 2018 and instead started sorting them into mail bins and storing them in a records room in Quincy.

“More than 53 bins containing tens of thousands of individual notices were discovered in bins, sorted by month of arrival, as part of this investigation into the handling of the Zhukovskyy matter,” MassDOT said.

An investigation into the sudden change in practice is ongoing.

“This failure is completely unacceptable to me and to the residents of the Commonwealth who expect the RMV to do its job and track driving records,” Baker added.

A review of the records in the past five days resulted in license suspensions against more than 500 drivers.

MassDOT says the RMV has set a new goal to process all out-of-state paper notifications on the day they are received or within one business day thereafter.

An investigation is ongoing.

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