Face of Nation : 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 Lancaster, 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.
