DANVERS, MASS. (WHDH) - Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton introduced a new bill on Tuesday that would support the interstate sharing of driving records after a highway wreck in June claimed the lives of seven motorcyclists in New Hampshire.
Moulton, while speaking in Danvers, explained that his SAFE DRIVERS Act is geared toward keeping individuals like 23-year-old Volodymyr Zhukovskyy off the road.
“You know instantaneously when your son or daughter needs something because they text you,” Moulton said. “States should know instantaneously if there is a driver who is a danger to our country out on our highways. They should make sure that we get him or her off the road.”
Zhukovskyy, of West Springfield, Massachusetts, was under the influence of an unspecified drug that made him incapable of driving safely when his pickup truck crossed the center yellow line and crashed into motorcyclists in Randolph, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced over the summer.
In the days and weeks after the crash, it became known that Zhukovskyy had multiple run-ins with the law.
In May, Connecticut prosecutors said Zhukovskyy was arrested in a Walmart parking lot after failing a sobriety test. Officials twice alerted Massachusetts about the earlier drunken driving arrest.
Zhukovskyy was also arrested on a drunken driving charge in 2013 in Westfield, Massachusetts, state records show. He was placed on probation for one year and had his license suspended for 210 days, The Westfield News reported.
Massachusetts investigators later determined the Registry of Motor Vehicles hadn’t been acting on thousands of out-of-state notifications about serious driving violations.
A firm hired to investigate found that an RMV employee briefly reviewed the notification from Connecticut but did not change Zhukovskyy’s record. It says the worker wasn’t trained to add convictions and didn’t bring the case to anyone else’s attention.
Moulton’s bill would appropriate about $50 million in its first year to support new data sharing and management programs.
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