About six months before the five-year anniversary of the Schoharie limo crash, we started talking about creating a podcast.

The October 6, 2018, disaster — in which a runaway stretch limo with decrepit brakes rocketed down a steep country road and tore through the busy parking lot of a country store — left 20 people dead and a community shattered.

The criminal trial of Nauman Hussain, the operator of the company that owned the limousine, was about to commence. Hussain was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.

Times Union reporter Larry Rulison had covered the aftermath of the crash since it happened. He discovered the limo company had been owned by a former FBI informant, Nauman’s father, Shahed Hussain. Rulison’s reporting revealed that an outlet of the Mavis Discount Tire chain had performed an illegal inspection on the limo just months before the crash.

State agencies had missed opportunity after opportunity to get the limo off the road. Our reporter broke story after story, even after he was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in the fall of 2019.

In keeping with the demands of daily journalism, these stories came out in fits and starts as developments and revelations allowed. As the fifth anniversary approached, we were ready to take the long view on what had happened and why.

Taking it to the air

The Times Union had just wrapped up a highly successful seven-part true-crime podcast about the decades-old cold case of a missing child (Rainwalker: The Lost Boy). We saw a massive spike in public interest in that case after the show premiered, and measurable momentum in the investigation by law enforcement.

We had our own empirical evidence that the intimate audio storytelling format had tremendous power. So it made sense to apply it to one of the most important stories in recent regional memory — a complicated and convoluted tale that at its heart is a universal one: The safety nets we think will keep us safe may not be as durable as we think.

I was initially hesitant about the production because I knew making it would require an amount of emotional fortitude I wasn’t sure I could summon. A tragic crash similar to the one in Schoharie had killed someone in my family decades ago, and I grew up with the generational trauma that resulted.

I knew I was going to see and hear some graphic and disturbing things. I knew I was going to have to sit down with people who had endured the unimaginable loss of their children. I knew we were going to have to spend months of our lives immersed in all of this.

That was not new to Rulison, of course. When I asked him how he handled it, he shook his head. “It’s not easy.” 

We spent the full year after the trial — Nauman Hussain was found guilty in May 2023 of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to five to 15 years in prison — and interviewed every player in the story that we could find. Many of them spoke to us about their connection to the tragedy for the first time.

There were days when neither of us wanted to work on the series — when we were anxious at the prospect of picking up the phone or sending a message to a victim’s family for fear of re-traumatising them. Days when it seemed futile to chase down evasive representatives of state agencies or the FBI. And days when the enormity of the tragedy threatened to consume us.

We released the first episode of Catastrophic Failure in July 2024 and released a total of 13 episodes.

The weekly schedule was interrupted only once, after Shahed Hussain — the shadowy former FBI informant and the limo company’s patriarch — reached out to us. He had vanished in 2018 a few months before the crash. But in September 2024, he reached out and told us he’d been listening to the podcast and was finally ready to talk.

After we spoke to him on the record, we had to rewrite the remainder of the series to incorporate this major development.

An ending without closure

When we released the final episode, there should have been a feeling of finality. Nauman Hussain was in prison, his initial appeal denied. The families were settling their civil lawsuits against Mavis Discount Tire. They told us they were finally starting to move on with their lives.

It should have been a natural ending for this series.

But neither Rulison nor I felt any sense of closure. The same day the last episode was released, he filed a story with a major update in the ongoing civil litigation. New details may still emerge about the crash investigation that could change everything we thought we knew about it. We may not be done with our work.

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