>Deaths from NYC bus crash rise to 15

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NEW YORK — A 70-year-old man yesterday became the 15th fatality from the gruesome weekend crash of a tour bus returning to New York’s Chinatown from a Connecticut casino.
The driver, Ophadell Williams of Brooklyn, 40, survived the crash and was released from St. Barnabas Hospital on Sunday. He has not been charged.
Williams told police that his bus was clipped by a tractor-trailer just as it crossed the New York City line on Interstate 95 early Saturday. But survivors and other witnesses have told investigators that Williams swerved to the right at times before the accident.
The state Department of Correctional Services said yesterday that Williams was convicted of manslaughter for his role in a 1990 stabbing and served just more than two years. He also served about three years for grand larceny.
The National Transportation Safety Board and State Police are investigating Saturday’s crash, studying a data recorder and looking into the drivers’ actions before the deadly trip.
Police said the latest victim died yesterday morning at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx.
The New York City medical examiner’s office said Sunday that the other fatalities — eight men and six women — all died of blunt force trauma. The bus scraped along a guardrail, toppled, and slid into a sign pole that sheared it end to end in a horrific scene of blood, jumbled bodies, and shattered glass. Some of the dead were tangled up with the living.
At City Hall yesterday, two Democratic politicians — Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Nydia Velazquez — asked the NTSB to go beyond its investigation and examine the regulations governing low-cost tour buses in general.