Louisiana State Police are still heading the investigation into the deadly crash on I-10 near LaPlace last week, but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is now leading a federal inquiry into the bus company and the undocumented immigrant who was behind the wheel.
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Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Louisiana Senators David Vitter and Bill Cassidy say they want the information by September 12. All are also from Moss Point.
The driver, who was unauthorized to drive a commercial vehicle, was in custody and would be booked on suspicion of negligent homicide, reckless driving and driving without a license, Matey said.
“The Nissan Titan was driving too fast for the road conditions, it was wet”, said State Police spokeswoman Trooper Melissa Matey. “If not, why not?”
Amaya Rodriguez was not charged with murder.
St. John the Baptist Parish President Natalie Robottom posted a statement on Facebook praising Chauvin, and calling the incident “heartbreaking”.
The 7:17 a.m. crash on Interstate 10 westbound in St. John the Baptist Parish threw three firefighters over a guardrail, sending them plummeting 30 to 40 feet into water below, state police said.
The letter to Secretary Jeh Johnson asks for a wide variety of information, including how and when 37-year-old Denis Yasmir Amaya Rodriguez entered the United States, and every date on which a law enforcement agency encountered him.
The senators asked for the information by September 12. They were planning to apply for flood-remediation jobs with a company partly owned by an Arkansas legislator, an attorney for the company said Tuesday.
The company that hired the workers on board the bus, Wallace Rush, Schmidt Inc., confirmed that Amaya had received at least five citations between September 2012 and August 5 of this year, little more than three weeks before the fatal crash.
Sunday’s crash marked the sixth time since September 2012 that Amaya Rodriguez had been ticketed for driving without a license, The New Orleans Advocate reported (http://bit.ly/2bOIYzt).
That lawyer also says his clients have no affiliation with the bus company and do not know why that company was selected to transport the workers.
She says it’s owned by a company with two names: AM Party Bus and Kristina’s Transportation LLC.
The injured were taken to hospitals in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Hammond and LaPlace, she said. The crash is still under investigation with Homeland Security Investigations assisting the state police.
Messages left by The Associated Press with the party bus reservations agent were not returned.
The firetruck was blocking the scene of an earlier crash involving a single pickup truck at the time of the wreck Sunday.
The bus hit the fire truck, then hit a vehicle, and then veered behind the fire truck and into the pickup truck, knocking three firefighters who were standing near the guard rail into the water below, Matey said.
The other person killed, Jermaine Starr, 21, of Moss Point, Mississippi, was in the backseat of the Camry, police said. It says a fireman’s memorial procession will go from the civic center to St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Edgard, where a funeral Mass will begin at 2:30 p.m.
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The funeral home obituary says Chauvin’s father and grandfather were volunteer firefighters, and he began working with a fire department in St. John the Baptist Parish as a teenager.
