Bus Company Owner Gets 12-Month Sentence
McALLEN, Texas _ A South Texas bus company owner was sentenced Wednesday to six months in a halfway house and six months of home confinement for failing to maintain his buses in the months before one of them burst into flames outside Dallas, killing 23 nursing home patients during the Hurricane Rita evacuation.
Jim Maples, a former NFL player who ran Global Limo, will be allowed to work during that time and the rest of his five years’ probation. But he must quit his job with a bus company and can’t work in the transportation business without approval from the court, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Hinojosa ruled.
“It is no way to run a business to endanger the individuals who are placing trust in a carrier,” the judge said in imposing his sentence. “When someone says `I’ll ride your bus or airplane or taxicab,’ we all say when we do this, `I’m entrusting my life to your good conscience.’”
Maples wrote in a letter to the court that he accepts full responsibility for the violations but believes that his safety consultant did not do an adequate job ensuring that he complied with federal regulations.
He declined to speak on his own behalf during the hearing because he had been told by his civil lawyer that it could affect pending lawsuits, said his criminal defense attorney, Charles Banker.
Maples’ involvement with a new bus company, Universal Tours, was discussed at length during the sentencing hearing. The tour business is run out of Global’s old office and is using one of the Global buses that was temporarily ordered off the road by federal regulators after the September 2005 fire.
Federal prosecutor Juan Alanis noted that Universal Tours also plans to employ some of Global’s old drivers and has hired the same safety consultant that Maples expressed dissatisfaction with in his letter to the court.
“He has shown a callous disregard for the safety regulations,” Alanis said. “He’s putting himself in the same situation where this could happen again.”
Alanis said that Maples was going to drive buses in addition to being a sales manager for Universal Tours. But in what Judge Hinojosa called “a Perry Mason moment,” Universal Tours owner Manfred Wallner shouted from the back of the court, “That is not true!”
“He made it very clear he could have nothing to do with the buses,” Wallner said after being called to testify.
Still, Judge Hinojosa struggled with what sentence to give Maples because the government provided no other case in which someone was criminally prosecuted for failing to maintain a bus.
And he appeared to doubt the prosecutor’s motivations _ to promote respect for bus safety laws and to protect the public from future neglect by Maples _ for recommending the maximum of two years in prison.
“Is that really the reason?” Judge Hinojosa asked Alanis.
“Were it not for that accident, the prosecution would not have occurred,” he said at another point.
In addition to having to live in a halfway house and wear an electronic leg monitor during his home confinement, Mr. Maples must pay a $10,000 fine. Global was fined $100,000. He and his company could have been fined up to $1.1 million.
Federal investigators have blamed the bus fire on a lack of lubrication of the wheel bearings, caused by poor maintenance by Global and the failure of drivers to inspect the bus.
The bearings overheated as the bus sat in 15 hours of traffic from Houston to Dallas and eventually ignited the tire on Interstate 45 outside Wilmer, Texas. The fire then spread to the cabin, which contained several oxygen canisters and 37 elderly patients, many of them frail and unable to walk.
After the accident, federal regulators inspected Global’s operations and shut it down after finding 168 violations of bus safety laws.
The bus fire was the deadliest incident tied to Hurricane Rita. It has spawned numerous lawsuits, a revamp of nursing home evacuation procedures and a congressional inquiry into how well the U.S. Department of Transportation monitors bus companies.
The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to release its final ruling and recommendations about the bus fire early this year.
Government prosecutors were prohibited from mentioning the bus fire to the jury during the trial in early October because their indictment failed to tie the poor maintenance to the accident. The prosecutors said they thought they couldn’t include violations that led to the bus fire because some regulations had been waived for the evacuations related to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.
Maples was found guilty only on misdemeanors of failing to maintain his buses and not filling out required inspection reports. He was acquitted on a more serious charge of conspiring with drivers to falsify logbooks, which are required by regulators to ensure that drivers don’t fall asleep at the wheel. A conviction on that charge would have meant a sentence of up to five years in prison.
On Wednesday, Banker again sought to portray his client as a hardworking businessman being made into a scapegoat for a tragedy that could have happened to the most responsible bus companies.
“The common factor you see in Mr. Maples’ life has been three things: church, family, work,” he said.
Maples has offered brief comments on the bus fire, expressing his remorse for the victims and his reliance on God to guide him through the fallout.
Confronted by several TV cameras as he left the courthouse, Maples appeared more nervous than the casual demeanor he presented during the trial. But he revealed his signature charm when he quipped, “Y’all take good shots so I look good.”
He then dropped off a folder in his Lincoln Town Car with the bumper sticker “It’s all about Jesus” and got into a Chevrolet Suburban with his wife, daughter and friends who came to support him.
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