Matt Rocheleau, Vernal Coleman, Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen and Brendan McCarthy of The Boston Globe

This story was reported by Globe staff Vernal Coleman, Matt Rocheleau, Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen, and editor Brendan McCarthy. It was written by Coleman and Rocheleau.

Mustafa Lynch hit the brakes as his Dodge minivan slammed into the motorcycle, its rider disappearing beneath the vehicle in a shower of sparks and broken glass.

The van idled for a second, maybe two, as Christopher Lucero lay pinned to the pavement beneath the van’s frame. Then the driver sped away, witnesses said, blowing through red lights and stop signs and dragging the helpless 18-year-old more than a half mile through Providence before leaving his body in the street.

Lucero’s death in April of 2017 was brutal and shocking. But the outrage it caused should be compounded by this: Lynch could have been taken off the road long before the fatal collision. If only Massachusetts officials had opened the mail.

The 73-year-old Lynch, licensed in Massachusetts but living in Rhode Island, was such a bad driver that his license had already been suspended indefinitely by two other states. He should have lost his driving privileges here years earlier after Connecticut sent a letter warning that Lynch had skipped a court hearing on a moving violation. But that letter apparently was one of tens of thousands received and ignored by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

That negligence opened the door to Christopher Lucero’s death.

The failures by the Massachusetts Registry, and their deadly consequences, were on display again last summer when seven motorcyclists were killed in New Hampshire in a crash with a truck driven by a man with an appalling record of moving violations — and a still-valid drivers license. But the failures at registries here and across the nation run much broader and deeper than these horrific incidents, an 11-month Globe investigation found.

Despite nearly 50 years of warnings by federal road safety officials, the United States still has no effective national system to keep tabs on drivers who commit serious offenses in another state. Enforcement relies on state agencies to do their job, which they often don’t. It is a gap that puts everyone at risk every time we take to the road. Call it America’s blind spot.

The Globe identified seven people, in addition to the seven motorcyclists, killed in recent years by drivers with past violations that should have stripped them of their driving privileges. They mark just the visible edge of a vast problem. There are unquestionably many more, but restrictive state rules on access to driver data make compiling a true tally almost impossible.

Still, the cases the Globe has identified are chilling. Among them:

In Maine, a Tennessee truck driver with a dozen license suspensions to his name slammed his tractor-trailer loaded with lumber into several cars in 2016, killing two motorists in a fiery crash.

In Wisconsin, a drunk Illinois man whose license should have been suspended more than a decade earlier crashed into a family heading home last year from a church supper, killing three.

In California, a drunk former Marine from Massachusetts whose license should have been suspended in the Commonwealth, crashed head-on into a motorcyclist, killing a father of two.

These drivers, like Lynch, like the trucker who allegedly mowed down those seven motorcyclists, were driving with valid licenses, their state motor vehicle authorities unaware — often due to their own administrative negligence — that the drivers had racked up suspensions elsewhere.

“It’s incredible that something happens in one state, and then it’s forgotten or sits in a pile forever,” said Catherine Koessl, whose father, mother, and uncle were killed in the Kenosha County, Wis., crash. “If these two states can’t communicate, if they can’t manage it one way or another, it makes you wonder if anyone is managing it.

The common thread behind these tragedies — reckless motorists allowed to drive despite known offenses — indicates a much larger problem, and others who track this data agree.

A major company that collects and analyzes bulk driver data told the Globe it estimates more than one in 10 drivers across the nation has at least one offense — ranging from speeding to vehicular homicide — that isn’t reflected on the official record. Another data collection company reported a similar trend. In a nation of 227 million licensed drivers, that would add up to more than 22 million unaccounted-for offenders, among them, almost certainly, thousands, perhaps millions, who should have lost their licenses, temporarily or permanently.

The US government spends billions each year to decrease traffic deaths through campaigns about distracted driving, highway maintenance, and other safety measures. But closing this basic gap in information sharing has not been a priority — and all drivers are endangered as a result.

“If you have lost your license because you’re a dangerous driver in one state,” said Jim Moran, a former US congressman from Northern Virginia, “you’re not going to become a different person when you cross into another state. … Crossing a state line is not like coming out of the confessional booth.”

Moran proposed licensing reforms in 1998, and again in 2002, that would have created a national clearinghouse of driver records. Neither proposal made it out of committee.

Despite decades of highway tragedy and calls for reform like Moran’s, federal oversight of the licensing of passenger car operators is nearly nonexistent. The United States counts on 50 state motor vehicle agencies, plus the District of Columbia, to police themselves and alert each other when an out-of-state driver breaks the law. Often, the Globe found, states fail in this duty: Some neglect to send warnings about dangerous drivers; some receive notices but don’t bother to read and record them, as happened here.

Even in this era of instant communication, agencies nationwide still heavily rely on mailing paper documents to notify each other about out-of-state infractions — a slow, labor-intensive process that is prone to administrative failures. Seven states — including California, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island — have for years sent no mail notices at all, making them islands of irresponsibility in the world of highway safety.

The Globe reviewed thousands of pages of court records and driver histories across several states, analyzed federal and state level data, and interviewed safety advocates, state officials, and industry insiders. Reporters conducted a 50-state survey to determine the extent of state motor vehicle agency backlogs, as well as disparities in policies.

Problem cases surfaced quickly as this review proceeded, and when reporters alerted state officials with their findings, shock, and then action, followed.

Florida immediately revoked the licenses of 20 drivers with eye-popping records in Massachusetts. Maryland and Nevada officials rushed to update records and suspend licenses after learning that drivers licensed there had caused fatal accidents in other states.

Meanwhile, New Mexico launched a review into how its court system relays information about driver convictions. Officials there had failed to tell Nevada about a man who had served prison time for vehicular homicide in New Mexico but was still licensed in the nearby state.

“This is the first time something like this has been brought to my attention,” said Andrea Reeb, the New Mexico district attorney who prosecuted the fatal crash case. “I think that was just a mistake and hopefully it was just a one-time mistake.”

Federal and state privacy laws largely shield driver records from anyone outside the government and the insurance industry, making it difficult to determine how often these crashes occur.

But the Globe did analyze decades of Massachusetts driving data obtained through a records request. The findings relate to a tiny slice of the nation’s drivers but offer a clear window into the broad reach of the problem.

The review of 20 years of data found thousands of Massachusetts drivers committed traffic offenses that should have resulted in their licenses being suspended, but officials delayed posting the offenses — usually for years — to their official driving histories.

During the period of these delays, the drivers caused 766 serious crashes — on average, one every nine days. The crashes may have been prevented had officials not lagged in updating these drivers’ records.

Over 20 years, 3,182 traffic offenses were committed by these drivers before their past, suspension-triggering violations were added to their records.

The Massachusetts RMV is not the only such agency to misplace or ignore out-of-state violations, but it is the poster child for such negligence — and its consequences.

For years, RMV employees here treated sanction notices from other states as someone else’s problem.

Responsibility for processing the notices was transferred from department to department and manager to manager, according to auditing firm Grant Thornton, which was hired by the state to assess the agency’s operation. In 2018, processing ceased altogether, leaving stacks of out-of-state driving violations to molder in cardboard banker boxes stacked in an office, five high and as many as 15 across, arranged by date and state of origin.

Officials turned their full attention to the boxes only after last summer’s fatal New Hampshire motorcycle crash exposed the glut of unprocessed alerts. Former registrar Erin Deveney, who resigned days after the crash, told outside investigators that she was unaware the backlog could lead to such public safety issues.

“I cannot recall a time where an out-of-state notification, or a lack of processing, have resulted in a tragedy such as this,” she said. “It is not something that was necessarily a clear risk.”

The risk had, in fact, been there to see for years.

In 1989, for example, Lacey Packer, a 10-year-old Reading girl, was killed in New Hampshire by a drunk driver licensed in Massachusetts. The driver had previous out-of-state convictions that should have resulted in his license being suspended, but that went unrecorded by the Massachusetts Registry.

The case sparked a huge outcry and promises of reforms. But those promises were not kept.

Today, Massachusetts officials are remorseful that this gap in enforcement persisted so long.

“The first mistake we made is we simply did not put a high enough priority on the issue of problem drivers,” Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack said in an interview. “We were not focused enough on safety.”

Pollack acknowledged that violation notices regularly went unrecorded, outdated computer systems stalled progress, and a lax “do what you can” culture pervaded the agency.

Meanwhile, staffers scrambled to meet Governor Charlie Baker’s campaign promise to shorten the lines at RMV offices, records show. To do so, officials scrutinized daily wait time reports and employees rushed to keep paperwork moving. Public safety took a back seat.

Deveney, the former registrar, declined requests for comment.

Since last year’s crash in New Hampshire, Pollack has tried to upend the agency’s practices. Still, keeping the roads clear of dangerous drivers relies on whether 49 other states diligently record and share word of driver sanctions. Here, Pollack said, her hands are tied.

“Yes, we need to advocate for national change, but realistically, national change is years away,” she said.

“I can’t control what the other states are doing. My job … is to fix the parts of the system we can fix and to basically play the cards we’ve been dealt.”

What would it take for Pollack to feel safe behind the wheel?

“It would be knowledge that 50 states have accurate drivers’ records for all their drivers,” she said.

That day seems distant. Backlogs of records are common in the country’s motor vehicle agencies.

A national survey by the Globe found 13 states, and the District of Columbia, admitting they had accumulated records backlogs and delays in recent years, though several declined to provide details. Thirty-one said their records are up to date. Six states refused to respond.

“It’s not something states publicize,” said Karen Grim, deputy commissioner for operations for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, which, she said, did not have a backlog. “You just try to take care of it before it becomes a problem.”

There have been multiple attempts over the years to try to get state agencies to work together, to address this dangerous enforcement gap. All have come up short.

The first agreement of its kind, the Driver License Compact, debuted in 1961 with a basic premise: States should share information and match penalties when a driver incurs a violation elsewhere. But decades later, participation is mixed and there are no penalties for noncompliance. Five states, including Massachusetts, have resisted signing on to this agreement altogether.

In Massachusetts, the excuse has been this: We don’t have the staff and are already struggling to address the backlog of unprocessed violations.

“We don’t have the resources,” Steve Evans, Massachusetts Registry director of driver licensing, told auditors last year. “And we won’t sign up for something we can’t do, so we really didn’t have an obligation.”

A more stringent version of the Driver License Compact, called the Driver License Agreement, was established by a consortium of state motor vehicle agencies in the early 2000s. But not a single state signed on to that arrangement, and it now appears to be defunct.

The most comprehensive network in place today is the federal Problem Driver Pointer System (PDPS), which compiles driver sanction information in a national electronic database that state agencies are required under federal law to check before issuing and renewing licenses. But even this system, administered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has its flaws. Most states allow licenses to remain valid for four or more years, some even decades, without renewal — and thus without a check for out-of-state violations.

There is, too, a more basic problem: Several states, including California, which has 12 percent of the nation’s motorists, send no direct mail and lean solely on the PDPS system.

Until recently, Massachusetts was a member of this club.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to address several specific questions from the Globe, saying only that its “primary” role is to establish the database and provide technical assistance.

As long as gaping holes in the licensing system persist, dangerous drivers will plow right through.

Consider Timothy Vandervere, the Illinois motorist and killer of three.

Vandervere, 41, was stopped by police in Kenosha County, Wis., in 2005, cited for drunken driving, and had his license to drive in the state suspended indefinitely. Notice of the offense was duly sent to Illinois, which appears to have done nothing about it for years.

Fourteen years later, again in Kenosha County, driving about 100 miles per hour with a blood alcohol level nearly four times the legal limit, Vandervere crashed his pickup truck into a Jeep, crushing three members of Catherine Koessl’s family as they headed home from a Friday fish boil. The collision sent the Jeep careening into a field, where it turned over. Killed were 76-year-old Vincent Rizzo, his wife, Mary, 74, and his brother Michael, 67. Another brother, Gerald Rizzo, 72 at the time, survived with multiple rib fractures and other injuries.

In Vandervere’s pocket, investigators found his still current — and perfectly valid — Illinois license.

Months after the deadly crash, Wisconsin, as it had done a decade earlier, sent a revocation notice about Vandervere to Illinois.

“Little late,” said Vincent Rizzo Jr., the oldest son of Vincent and Mary.

Authorities later discovered Vandervere had renewed his Illinois license three times since his 2005 drunken driving arrest in Wisconsin, simply by telling his home state motor vehicle agency that he had no license sanctions elsewhere. Each time, Illinois authorities took him at his word instead of checking the PDPS system for records, as they should have under federal law. If they had, they would not have renewed his license.

Vandervere now sits in prison in Wisconsin, serving out a 32-year sentence for vehicular homicide. Illinois officials can’t, or won’t, say what went wrong.

Brenda Glahn, an attorney for the Illinois Secretary of State, which oversees licensing, confirmed her agency hadn’t checked Vandervere’s history when he applied to renew his license. Glahn said the agency’s computers were set to check the system only when issuing brand new licenses. The department refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

“We’re not gonna say Wisconsin is at fault, and we’re not going to say that we’re at fault in this particular case,” she said.

Illinois’ motor vehicle agency reconfigured its computer system after the Vandervere crash, and officials said the agency now checks records when renewing licenses.

For the Rizzo family, the change is no consolation.

“In today’s day and age, there’s no reason that [a lack of] technology should be used as an excuse for not being able to have this information flow seamlessly from state to state,” Vincent Rizzo Jr. said. “People are dying because of it.”

It was yet another needless highway killing that prompted Moran, then a Virginia congressman, to introduce a bill that would have given states financial incentives to help develop an extensive national electronic system for exchanging data about offending motorists.

In 1997, Benjamin Cooper, a high school student who lived in Moran’s district, was killed by a driver whose District of Columbia license should have been revoked due to out-of-state convictions.

Moran is still furious about the negligence that set the stage for Cooper’s death.

“Frankly, it’s [expletive],” he said. “This never should have happened.”

In the wake of the tragedy, Moran pitched what he considered a common sense fix: push states to share accurate information immediately so they can quickly sideline dangerous drivers. His proposal, however, never even got a floor vote in Congress.

Moran tried again in 2002 to persuade Congress to approve the creation of a real-time national database, with teeth. He thought his cause would be helped by the ease with which the 9/11 hijackers had obtained identification cards and exposed weaknesses in state licensing policies.

He was wrong. His proposal was defeated a second time, crushed, Moran said, by overblown concerns about privacy and government inertia.

Inertia is still in charge.

“I’m shocked,” said Moran, now an attorney in private practice, “that it’s 20 years later and the system still has not been fully fixed.”

In the absence of federal leadership, a private organization has developed a powerful sway over the way state motor vehicle agencies operate. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, led by a former state and federal transportation official, collects upwards of $43 million in annual revenue from states and federal agencies to help them streamline operations. Its membership comprising state officials, the trade group aims to create a uniform licensing system and national information-sharing platform.

When the Globe launched its national survey and requested public records from each state, regulators immediately turned to the association. Anne Ferro, the organization’s president, appeared to run interference for the states, issuing a memo advising members nationwide on ways they could try to withhold the data that the Globe was seeking.

Several states complied with her recommendations, a handful redacting without providing legal justification. Some states denied the Globe’s request altogether and suggested reporters seek the records directly from the association, which administers an electronic licensing system for commercial truckers. Only a handful of states ignored the suggestions and provided the full data.

Ferro said her group was not trying to prevent the public from knowing more about lapses in state licensing. She admitted in an interview that the vehicle regulatory system as it stands falls short of what the nation needs. She said agencies that are members of the association know dangerous drivers continue to slip through the cracks. They just haven’t come up with a comprehensive solution.

“There is no magic bullet to solve this problem,” she said. “If there was, we’d have found it by now.”

On a chilly morning last November, slightly more than two years after he was charged in the hit-and-run death of Christopher Lucero, Mustafa Lynch shuffled to the defense table in a Providence courtroom.

Police had conducted a lengthy investigation, and prosecutors had prepared their criminal case.

But even then, evidence of Lynch’s full driving history was incomplete — because Massachusetts Registry records were deficient or missing. The system that enabled him was still trying to figure him out.

For the Lucero family, of Providence, the feelings of anger, and loss, remain raw. “It’s a human under a vehicle,” Ryan Lucero, Christopher’s brother, told the Globe. “Words can’t describe it. … The pain will never go away.”

As for Lynch, who along with his lawyers repeatedly declined to comment for this story, it was hard to tell.

That day in court, the 73-year-old stood hunched as he listened to the deal prosecutors were offering: In exchange for a guilty plea, he could serve one to five years on house arrest and surrender his driver’s license for good.

The judge read the offer aloud and Lynch shook his head. Whispers spread through the courtroom’s gallery.

His decision was a gamble. If he were to be convicted at trial, Lynch would face up to five years in prison.

The judge asked again. “Do you understand the plea offer?”

Lynch nodded. No deal.

He left court that morning leaning heavily on his cane, a trial date set for later this year.

After trudging slowly down the courthouse steps, he hopped into the driver’s seat of a Dodge minivan, turned the key, and pulled into traffic.

No one seemed to notice that the man with a suspended license and a fatal hit-and-run case pending was back on the road again.

Saurabh Datar contributed to this report.

By Matt Rocheleau

Before the Globe published a word of its “Blind Spot” investigation, state officials suspended the licenses of dozens of troubled drivers across the country. At least four motor vehicle agencies and court systems launched investigations into their failure to flag thousands of dangerous drivers. And officials reached into their files to update the records of convicted killers.

Globe reporters had scoured driving records and crash data to find that drivers across the country were escaping punishment — and remaining on the road — due to bureaucratic neglect. The failures put the public at risk, sometimes with deadly consequences.

When reporters shared their findings, state motor vehicle officials from Florida to California rushed to take action.

And in Washington, D.C., the city’s Department of Motor Vehicles realized only after repeated Globe inquiries that it had failed to notify states about drivers from those localities convicted of driving offenses in the nation’s capital. In 2019 alone, there were 569 convictions of drivers licensed outside of D.C.

The agency acknowledged in a statement that it had no idea how long it had failed to send those alerts: “The questions we received from the Boston Globe earlier this year brought this matter to our attention. As a result, we took immediate steps to resolve the issue.”

The agency should have known better. In 2000, a damning report by the district’s inspector general uncovered a backlog of about 15,000 unprocessed license suspensions. The audit cited a pair of fatal crashes in the late 1990s that may have been prevented had D.C. DMV acted properly in suspending two drivers.

The frequency of failure by state agencies to pull troubled drivers from the road is difficult to measure. Across the country, motor vehicle officials have the information to find out at their fingertips, but driver histories are often restricted, if not entirely off limits, to the public. The Globe had to cross-reference several databases and largely focused on drivers from the few states with relatively transparent public records laws.

Take Florida. And consider just 2017.

The Globe identified 27 Florida residents who had been charged and convicted of serious traffic violations in Massachusetts, based of a review of records here. Reporters shared their findings with Florida officials. Within days, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles revoked the licenses of 20 drivers. Two others had violations added to their records.

Among the Florida cases were:

■ John C. Clefstad, 57, was found guilty in November 2017 in Bourne of operating without a license, reckless driving, and DUI (his third offense). Following Globe e-mails, Florida uncovered a series of other convictions. Officials found a 1994 DUI in New Hampshire, and two DUIs in New York in 1986. Clefstad had had an absolutely clean record — as far as Florida could tell. Now, his license is permanently revoked.

■ Until the Globe called, Florida officials didn’t know Michael J. Sullivan, 38, had a 2006 DUI in Missouri, a 2015 DUI in Massachusetts, or a 2018 DUI in Massachusetts — his fourth offense, according to records. Florida revoked his license.

■ Duane C. Boone, 54, was convicted of driving under the influence in November 2017 in Nantucket. He had 33 previous Florida violations dating back to 2001 – two other DUIs, as well as convictions for speeding, driving on a suspended license, and more. But Florida had no idea about his Massachusetts conviction. Florida revoked his license days after the Globe contacted the state.

Boone said in an interview that he struggled for years with alcoholism and repeatedly “slipped up” and got behind the wheel. “I was wrong,” he said, and lucky he didn’t injure anyone.

State agencies should “talk to each other” and better communicate information about violations, he added. “Someone could go out and kill somebody.”

A spokesperson for Florida’s licensing agency laid blame on other states for failing to send timely alerts about offenders.

The Globe’s investigation also prompted a review inside New Mexico’s court system.

A reporter contacted authorities in mid-November to advise them of Kyle Kent Mawhorter’s past convictions. Licensed in Nevada, Mawhorter, 32, led New Mexico police in 2016 on a high-speed chase, crashed a stolen pickup truck, and killed a 27-year-old woman.

New Mexico court spokeswoman Beth Wojahn acknowledged that her state’s courts had never notified New Mexico’s motor vehicle agency, which thus never notified Nevada. “We thank you for bringing this to our attention,” she said in an e-mail.

Even so — and despite having 10 weeks to correct Mawhorter’s record — his file remained untouched. Mawhorter left prison in late January and obtained a New Mexico identification card. He told the Globe that state officials said he could obtain a new license, but he chose not to because of financial concerns.

Mawhorter said he was surprised. He figured past violations would have prevented him from getting a license.

“That’s insane,” he said upon learning how the states failed to communicate about his case. “How do they not know what they are doing?”

After repeated Globe inquiries, the state agencies sorted out the matter weeks later and suspended Mawhorter’s license in late February.

New Mexico court officials then launched a statewide review of this and other felony cases, including more than 100 convictions of reckless driving that killed or severely injured people. That review found widespread problems. The state’s court system is now developing new statewide procedures.

“It’s not that hard for states to communicate,” Mawhorter said. “I still want the system to work because I have kids and I have family I care about.”

This story was reported by Globe staff Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen, Matt Rocheleau, and Vernal Coleman. It was written by Allen and Crimaldi.

The Gasanov brothers pitched their little trucking company in a gravel lot next to a lumber yard, storing Dodge pickups and trailers between a graffiti-covered brick warehouse and a ring of weeds and scrub in West Springfield. They hired a ragtag crew of drivers — criminals and drug users among them, men who drove too fast and partied too hard — and sent them out onto the open road.
When the trailers broke down, Dartanyan Gasanov patched them up himself and hustled them back into service. When the drivers were too slow, his older brother, Dunyadar Gasanov, called to berate them: “Get there now!”

The drivers of Westfield Transport Inc. racked up more than 60 violations in just 18 months, for speeding, driving unsafe vehicles, and hauling huge loads they weren’t licensed for. But no one from the federal agency charged with keeping the industry safe ever stopped them. According to the agency’s standards, Westfield simply didn’t rate as “high risk” and so it went unchecked.

Instead, as is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s way with many of the more than half a million trucking companies operating on American roads, Westfield’s failures were cataloged on forms with boxes marked “unsafe driving” or “controlled substances and alcohol” and filed away.

In June 2019, the Gasanovs hired their last trucker, Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, a skinny, fidgety 23-year-old with a penchant for gold chains, fast cars, heroin, and Hennessy. Driving was his family trade. His father headquartered a livery company out of a ramshackle church office near their home. But Zhukovskyy had been a wrecking machine behind the wheel since he started driving at an early age, leaving a long trail of crashes behind him. He had survived a bad one just a few weeks before.

But the Gasanovs gave him the keys, and there was no regulator to take them away.

The questions about Zhukovskyy wouldn’t draw notice for a few more days, when it was already too late and seven people lay dying on a lonely mountain road in New Hampshire amid twisted metal and flames.

They are everywhere on American freeways, but to most drivers, they are almost unseen — a shadowy figure high up in the cab of the speeding behemoth one lane over, a flash of a face above the Mack truck grille bearing down in the rearview mirror. They are the truck drivers who move nearly three-quarters of the nation’s freight, powering an $800 billion industry.

Three and a half million truckers traverse about 300 billion miles every year — a population the size of Connecticut’s covering a distance equivalent to more than one million trips to the moon. If they all stopped hauling tomorrow, hospitals would run out of syringes in hours, grocery stores would shortly run out of food, and service stations out of gas.

Trucking is an enormous and essential sector of our economy. It is also increasingly deadly.

After more than a decade of declines, the frequency of fatal crashes involving trucks shot up by 41 percent between 2009 and 2017.

In 2017, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 4,761 people died in crashes involving large trucks on American roads. That’s one person every two hours. That’s a Boeing 737 plane crash every two weeks.

The federal agency responsible for protecting American drivers from dangerous truckers, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, meanwhile, has allowed whole swaths of the industry — most strikingly, small upstarts such as Westfield — to operate with minimal oversight, a Globe investigation has found.

To understand the causes of truck crashes and the feeble regulatory efforts to prevent them, the Globe reviewed National Transportation Safety Board crash investigations dating back to 1971, police reports on truck crashes, and the driving records of truckers involved in fatal crashes across the country. It also reviewed congressional testimony of regulators and victims, inspector general reports, and federal and state data on highway and trucking safety. What emerged is a maddening picture of repeated regulatory failures punctuated by gruesome crashes and unanswered calls for change.

Among the findings: The FMCSA simply lacks the firepower to wrangle a sprawling industry with a fierce independent streak, which some safety advocates liken to the Wild West. The agency employs only about 1,200 people to oversee a sector with half a million companies that is growing by more than 30,000 businesses every year.

Oversight of dangerous truckers and the companies that employ them is scattershot. The FMCSA has no centralized way to check the backgrounds of drivers, and drug testing requirements are inadequate; recent research commissioned by trucking companies themselves suggests that 300,000 undetected drug users are currently piloting trucks.

And vehicles are often poorly maintained to the point of peril. Federal statistics show that, on average, one in five of the more than 4 million trucks regulated by the FMCSA is in such disrepair that if it were stopped by safety inspectors, it would immediately be taken out of service.

A spokesman for the FMCSA declined to answer a list of detailed questions about these issues. Instead, the agency provided a statement defending its performance, detailing successful safety initiatives and partnerships. It is responsible for regulating all commercial motor vehicles that cross state lines or haul hazardous materials, as well as all commercial driver’s license holders.

“FMCSA’s top priority is to reduce crashes involving commercial motor vehicles,” the statement read. “FMCSA’s focus is always on road safety.”

The statement makes it clear that the agency has more resources than its small size suggests: Every year, the FMCSA gives about $370 million in grants to state authorities, who conduct inspections and enforcement. And it targets the use of its workforce, prioritizing companies with crash rates four times the national average.

The statement also noted several successes, including a program that has dramatically reduced instances of drivers working dangerously long hours. It has also launched a national database that logs positive substance abuse tests for commercial drivers to keep them from lying about failed tests on job applications.

“While there is not a single solution that will prevent all crashes, FMCSA believes these key initiatives will improve road safety and result in a reduction of crashes,” the statement said.

Many crashes involving trucks are caused by careless passenger car drivers. But too many are caused by truck drivers like Zhukovskyy, working for companies like Westfield: obvious threats that the FMCSA failed to see or stop. There was the Kentucky methamphetamine addict who crashed three trucks and four cars in five years; the mentally ill Texas man who spoke openly of smoking synthetic marijuana; the 78-year-old from Ohio who had already mowed down one person with his semi. All three were allowed to keep driving, with fatal results.

“This is not, as we say, rocket science,” said Jim Hall, who from 1994 to 2001 headed the National Transportation Safety Board, the independent federal agency that investigates transportation calamities including truck crashes but does not regulate the industry. “Common sense would dictate that anyone who has a bad record should not be behind the wheel of these vehicles.”

The NTSB, which sees itself as “the conscience and the compass of the transportation industry,” has been sounding that alarm for decades. Since 1971, when a truck driver with an amphetamine habit, a suspended license, and a record of crashes lost control of his semi in small-town Pennsylvania and incinerated a family of four, the NTSB has been issuing and reissuing the same plaintive warning: The regulatory system that is supposed to keep trucking safe is full of loopholes that cost lives.

The plea seemed to get traction in 1999, when the trucking industry’s federal regulator at the time, the Office of Motor Carriers, was dismantled for being too slow, too toothless, and too beholden to the industry. It was replaced by the FMCSA.

But history repeats.

The agency has never been funded, or staffed, to execute the mission it was given.

And in time the NTSB was again on the scene of a horrific crash.

The Greyhound driver had just enough time to plead, “Oh, God, no,” before the windshield exploded. The sun had not yet risen on the morning of June 9, 2002, and most of his 37 passengers were still asleep, when the semitrailer appeared out of the darkness crawling from an on-ramp onto the wide flat stretch of Texas highway ahead. There was no time to stop.

The impact collapsed the front of the bus and drove the back of the semi into the bus driver compartment. Three passengers were crushed to death, 29 were injured, and the bus driver was pinned to his seat. As he waited for first responders to amputate his leg to free him, his mind could conjure just one shocked and disbelieving thought:

“Who parked a truck on the freeway with no lights on?”

A driver with just a learner’s permit; a driver high on cocaine; a driver working for a company that answered to nobody.

Word of the crash reached the National Transportation Safety Board the same day, and investigators streamed toward the tiny Texas town of Loraine from Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, Texas, to interview witnesses and pore over the wreckage. To the NTSB, the crash was no shock at all. It was, instead, emblematic of crashes they’d seen again and again: a fly-by-night company, unscrutinized, sent a deadly driver out onto the road. But the NTSB had a plan.

“What we’ll do,” an agency spokeswoman told The Dallas Morning News, “is use this accident to highlight safety issues that exist.”

David Rayburn, who headed the Loraine investigation for the NTSB and still works for the agency, remembers it clearly: The company that owned the truck was less than 2 years old, run by a man on probation for drugs who had lied to the FMCSA about his criminal background and about his brother and business partner, a felon. They didn’t bother to conduct required background checks or drug tests on their drivers, who notched violation after violation on roadside inspections. Twice, the FMCSA had almost shut them down for losing their insurance coverage.

As they sifted through the evidence, Rayburn and the other investigators realized there was a common-sense solution that might have kept the driver and the company that employed him off the road.

New trucking companies are required by the FMCSA to file reams of paperwork before they can open up shop, promising that they understand and will comply with regulations, but no one from the agency makes them prove it. No one checks whether they’re telling the truth about their background. There’s no vehicle inspection, test, or in-person safety audit before a new company is allowed to put vehicles 20 times the size of passenger cars out on the highway.

This means that companies like the one in the Loraine crash operate unproven during their early, formative months in business, the very time when they are most in need of oversight. Federal statistics from 2015 show that new companies have a crash rate almost 60 percent higher than established ones.

So the NTSB made what seemed like a simple and powerful recommendation to the FMCSA: Before granting a company permission to operate, make its owners pass a test on safety regulations; inspect their vehicles; and conduct a safety audit, reviewing their safety data and conducting an interview to identify deficiencies. The Department of Defense established such a system for companies that wanted to transport military personnel in 1992, the NTSB wrote, and over the next decade did not have a single fatality.

The FMCSA resisted.

More than 30,000 companies enter the market every year, the FMCSA said. An agency with a staff of a little more than 1,000 could not possibly test, audit, and inspect every single one without creating a massive backlog. And fulfilling the recommendation would not only be a logistical nightmare, but a massive barrier to entry for small businesses.

Regulators “are really swimming in the deep end of the pool without any help,” said Annette Sandberg, who led the FMCSA from 2003 to 2006 and dealt with the efforts to evaluate the recommendation. “The agency has never been given enough resources.”

That’s quite a contrast to the money spent regulating the airline industry. In 2020, the Department of Transportation spent 25 times more overseeing aviation than trucking, reflecting, in part, the headline-grabbing nature of plane crashes that make air safety a national focus. By contrast, trucking disasters that kill two or four or six at a time rarely capture the nation’s attention, and there is little public pressure for change.

Indeed, the FMCSA is increasingly dwarfed by the industry it oversees. Before 1980, when trucking was deregulated, there were fewer than 20,000 trucking companies operating on American roads, and most were big businesses. Today, there are more than half a million — and more than 90 percent are small-time outfits like Westfield, with 10 trucks or fewer. Many of these are businesses with razor-thin profit margins, run out of basements and bedrooms, their names written in pen on small-town mailboxes. To regulate all that, the FMCSA deploys a limited staff that is responsible not only for the trucking industry, but the entire busing industry as well.

“You felt like you were drinking out of the fire hose,” Sandberg said of her time at the helm.

Unable to police the entire industry, the FMCSA focuses on the companies that get caught over and over again failing to meet basic safety standards and those with high crash rates. But the agency’s regulatory net is so full of holes that swaths of the industry pass through undetected.

Compliance with many of the agency’s requirements is increasingly monitored remotely, often with paperwork that companies simply send in, with little verification or first-hand observation.

The FMCSA does get information from traffic stops by police and unannounced roadside inspections conducted by state regulators at weigh stations around the country. But that provides a haphazard picture at best: More than a million of the 4.6 million commercial vehicles the FMCSA regulated in 2018, for example, were not stopped once through the entire year, according to federal statistics.

Even the bad actors that regulators do get in their sights are rarely prevented from operating. In 2018, the FMCSA allowed almost 17,000 trucking companies to continue operating despite having a less than satisfactory safety rating from the agency.

As a result, people die in preventable accidents, sometimes in alarming clusters.

Take one deadly period in 2013. In March, a truck operated by a troubled company that the FMCSA had investigated and found safe enough to operate just five days earlier slammed into an SUV on a highway in Kentucky, killing six people from Wisconsin, including an 8-year-old.

Less than three months later, a Mack truck belonging to a company that was allowed to keep operating even though it had flagrantly flouted regulations for two years smashed into a freight train carrying volatile chemicals in Maryland, causing a massive explosion and fire and injuring five.

Two weeks after that, a truck operated by a company with a history of drivers falsifying logs to hide dangerously long hours behind the wheel crashed into a line of highway traffic in Tennessee, killing a couple headed to a music festival.

Horrified, NTSB officials once again called for the federal trucking agency to require testing and auditing of companies before they start operations. Ten years earlier, the FMCSA had started a screening program for new companies, but the barriers to get on the road remained low.

But, in January 2019, the FMCSA concluded that the NTSB’s recommendation wouldn’t significantly boost safety and would cost too much to implement. So they asked NTSB to drop the issue.

“We are disappointed,” replied the NTSB in a statement that included a litany of crashes that might have been avoided. Sixteen years of deaths, and still the FMCSA would not budge.

That’s the way the story goes at the FMCSA. Even when change does come, it can take years. Two significant regulations have been in the works for almost 20 years. Since the election of President Trump, moreover, the agency has been more inclined to eliminate regulations rather than add them.

“There’s more of a trend right now to take away regulations,” said Robert Molloy, director of the NTSB Office of Highway Safety. “That limits the ability to make sure everyone is operating in a safe environment.”

But even in one case where seemingly everyone agrees change is needed, regulators remain stalled: drug testing. The industry and safety advocates alike say the current testing system is inadequate, failing to screen at all for such drugs as synthetic cannabinoids. And regulators rely on urinalysis rather than hair samples, which means they capture use in recent days, not months.

Last year, the Trucking Alliance, an organization made up of some of the biggest trucking companies, testified before the House of Representatives that its research showed urinalysis was missing 9 out of 10 drug users and estimated that more than 300,000 commercial truck drivers are currently using drugs undetected.

Still, if there was one person that the FMCSA or the state licensing agencies should have stopped, it was Volodymyr Zhukovskyy. But this man was about to demonstrate the lethal consequences of a failed regulatory system.

Zhukovskyy, his family, and his attorneys declined repeated requests for comment for this story.

Zhukovskyy had been a menace behind the wheel since before he even got his learner’s permit, driving drunk, and crashing again and again. His license had been suspended seven times in three-and-a-half years by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and he had crashed his car four times. He’d picked up charges for speeding, driving with a suspended license, lying to police about driving with a fake license, and possessing cocaine and heroin.

That didn’t stop Massachusetts from granting him a commercial driver’s license in August 2018, which allowed him to drive the heaviest trucks on the road. And the arrests and alleged drug use didn’t stop once he was working as a trucker. In February of 2019, he was arrested at a Denny’s restaurant in Baytown, Texas, in the middle of the night, revved up and squirming. He had a crack pipe in his pocket, and his truck was parked outside.

In May 2019, Zhukovskyy allegedly snorted three bags of heroin and overdosed in a parking lot. It took three doses of Narcan to revive him. Six days later, police in East Windsor, Conn., said they found him hopped up and leaping around a rented Nissan in the parking lot of a Walmart. They guessed he was on methamphetamine and arrested him. At the station, Zhukovskyy refused a drug test, triggering the suspension of his licenses. He was hysterical.

“My life is over,” he wailed again and again. “I don’t want to live anymore.”

But lives other than his were in jeopardy. Zhukovskyy was soon back on the road.

Because the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles failed to process two violation notifications from motor vehicle authorities in Connecticut, Zhukovskyy’s license suspension, which should have gone into effect June 10, was never enacted, and he was free to drive without consequence. A national database that tracks commercial drivers was no help.

An FMCSA spokesman declined to comment on the Zhukovskyy case because it is under investigation but noted that the agency is not responsible for issuing the licenses of individual commercial drivers. That’s the state’s job. So when the system in Massachusetts broke down, there was no fallback.

When Zhukovskyy turned an 18-wheeler over on a stretch of dark Texas highway on June 3, somehow emerging unharmed, the only response by police was to take him to a local motel.

Zhukovskyy lost his job with the company whose truck he wrecked in Texas. It took him just a few weeks to find another that would take him on.

The gravel lot where Westfield Transport Inc. kept its trucks was about a mile from the house in West Springfield house where Zhukovskyy lived with his parents. The company was operated by the Gasanov brothers, 35-year-old Dartanyan and 36-year-old Dunyadar. They didn’t fret over whether their drivers had clean records — not that June when Zhukovskyy showed up and not years earlier, when Westfield Transport was not a trucking company but a dubious for-hire livery service on its way to amassing more than 1,300 user complaints over four years for unsafe conditions and no-show drivers.

The Gasanovs declined repeated requests for comment for this story and did not respond to a list of detailed questions. In civil court documents, they have said that the Massachusetts RMV told them Zhukovskyy had a valid license.

In Westfield Transport’s early days, the drivers piloted Toyota Priuses, not Dodge trucks, and, under a state contract, ferried Medicaid patients to methadone clinics and doctor appointments. It did not go well. One driver hit a tree. Another hit a wheelchair van. A third hit a pedestrian. They hit other cars, too, and the infractions piled up, for everything from driving without a license to vaping THC behind the wheel. Finally, after discovering in early 2016 that the Gasanovs continued to employ three drivers the state had specifically barred, the state revoked their contract.

It wasn’t much of a setback for the Gasanovs, who simply converted their business from a livery service into a federally regulated trucking company. They quickly won FMCSA approval and relaunched that summer under the same name.

It didn’t matter that the Gasanov brothers had checkered driving records themselves; Dartanyan’s passenger vehicle license had been suspended twice, and Dunyadar’s license had been suspended 10 times, including for drunken driving.

And it didn’t matter much whom they hired. Westfield Transport was running “medium-duty” trucks, lighter than 26,001 pounds, and didn’t haul hazardous materials, meaning their drivers weren’t required to hold commercial licenses. Companies like Westfield don’t need to test their drivers for drugs, either, and their drivers’ names are not entered into the federal database with commercially licensed drivers. In fact, 800,000 people drive medium-duty trucks across state lines and the federal government isn’t even asking their names.

The Gasanovs’ business now was hauling cars, transporting them on long trailers between dealerships and auctions across the country.

They ran a frenetic operation, relentlessly focused on making money, said Andy Dominguez, a 43-year-old who lives in Springfield, the first driver they hired. Dominguez had worked for the brothers when they ran the livery service, too — he was one of the three drivers the state barred. “When it comes to running their business,” he said, “they’re just cheap.”

He said Dunyadar would call him while he was on the road and shout at him to drive faster. When equipment broke down, as it seemed constantly to do, Dartanyan fixed the trailers himself, Dominguez said.

“All they need is duct tape, Gorilla Glue, and a rope, and they’ll fix anything,” he said.

In March of 2018, a Vermont inspector checking Dominguez’s vehicle at a weigh station found that its brakes were shot and that he had marijuana with him (though Dominguez has a medical marijuana card). The inspector “red flagged” the truck, declaring it unfit to drive. Dominguez said he called Dunyadar Gasanov, who told him to wait until the trooper left and start driving again.

He was somewhere in Pennsylvania when he looked out his window and saw one of his trailer’s tires bouncing down the road. He pulled over and called Gasanov again. This time, Dominguez said, Gasanov told him he was on his own and hung up.

Dominguez strapped the tire back onto his trailer and headed back to Springfield, where a state trooper stopped him for speeding, cited him for the brakes and marijuana, and again red-flagged the vehicle. Dominguez, disgusted, took his things out of the truck and went home. He was done with Westfield.

“I just felt like I was gonna hurt somebody, or somebody was gonna hurt me,” he said.

That was fine with the Gasanovs. They had plenty of other drivers.

There was Dzhamal Ragibov, an Ohio trucker who had lost his license repeatedly for reckless driving and refusing or failing breath tests.

There was Nadjib Osmanli, of West Springfield, who had had his license suspended and who ran his own trucking company until the FMCSA revoked his operating authority in 2018.

And there was Oleg Kostyushko, a 32-year-old with a history of heroin use who had been in trouble on and off the road, picking up charges for drugs, assaults, and speeding in six states. He had settled two lawsuits for injuring people: one in 2014 in California, where he crashed his rig into a car and fled, and another in 2016 in Arizona, where his truck forced a Ford Focus into a concrete barrier.

The Gasanovs and their fleet of troubled drivers accumulated more than 60 violations during the time Westfield was a trucking company, and trucks and drivers — including Dartanyan and Dunyadar themselves — were taken out of service for serious safety violations 26 times. There were no crashes on their record, but still, problems piled up. The FMCSA not only failed to take any meaningful action against the company, it granted Dartanyan the authority in 2018 to open a second trucking business.

By the time Zhukovskyy climbed into the cab of a Westfield Transport Dodge Ram in late June, headed west from a stop at a dealership in New Hampshire, it was clear that no one cared to stop him.

It was just before 6:30 p.m. on June 21, 2019, the first day of summer, when Zhukovskyy pulled a gooseneck trailer through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, kicking up dirt behind him every time he veered out onto the soft shoulder. Other cars, wary of his velocity, gave him space. The highway snaked upwards. He weaved back and forth.

Up ahead, out of view over the crest of a hill, 21 members and friends of the Jarheads Motorcycle Club rode toward him in formation.

At the top of the hill, it would be all over. Zhukovskyy in his Westfield truck would hurtle across the center line and into the bikers, throwing them skyward or pulling them under, in a blast of metal, glass, and flame. Even the trees around them would burn.

Seven people would die and three would be injured. Zhukovskyy, his blood coursing with heroin and cocaine, according to police, would be allowed to go home for three days before police came to arrest him on seven counts of negligent homicide. They found him sleeping in his parents’ house next to 27 empty bags of heroin and fentanyl marked “Superman.”

Zhukovskyy would argue in court paperwork that an accident reconstruction showed the crash was caused by the lead motorcyclist, whose autopsy found he was intoxicated. Soon after the crash, the Gasanovs would close down Westfield Transport Inc. Scandal would engulf the Massachusetts RMV. The Department of Transportation would announce an audit of the FMCSA.

But for one last moment on June 21, the horizon was clear. There was nothing but the breeze and the sunlight falling on Mount Jefferson.

Zhukovskyy leaned forward in the cab of his truck, reaching for a drink. Witnesses said he never even hit the brakes.

By Matt Rocheleau and Vernal Coleman 

More than half of all states consistently break federal rules that mandate they quickly warn each other about troubled truck drivers, many of whom should be immediately pulled from the road, records show.

State motor vehicle agencies are required to notify other jurisdictions within 10 days when one of the nation’s 3.5 million commercially licensed drivers receives a suspension or conviction. But often agencies take weeks, if not months, to send the notices, according to timeliness records obtained and analyzed by the Globe. In several cases, the notices were issued more than 30 years after a trucker was supposed to have been barred from getting behind the wheel.

The delays in reporting drivers’ convictions and suspensions mean lawbreaking truckers continue to traverse the country with valid commercial licenses, putting countless other motorists in danger.

Some major trucking states — such as Mississippi and Texas — were late in sending nearly all of their conviction notices over the past five years. Even Massachusetts, which said it enacted reforms last year to address shortcomings exposed after a fatal crash, has still failed to comply.

Experts say these critical delays have cost lives.

“When you’re on an interstate highway, you’re frequently within three or four feet from an 80,000-pound tractor trailer rig that’s being operated by a driver who may not be qualified,” said Lane Kidd, managing director of the Trucking Alliance, an organization made up of some of the biggest trucking companies. “It’s a terrible situation.”

The Globe’s recent “Blind Spot” investigation showed how the increasingly deadly trucking industry — linked to nearly 5,000 deaths a year — operates with minimal federal government oversight. The dilemma is compounded by state motor vehicle agencies that struggle mightily to communicate with each other, allowing dangerous drivers to skirt scrutiny. About one in 20 inspections of truckers on the road uncovers a violation that sidelines the driver, statistics show.

Meanwhile, federal regulators earlier this year temporarily paused penalties for states breaking the rules regarding sending the notices on time, citing President Trump’s national emergency declaration due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The importance of pulling troubled drivers from the roads was made clear in June 2019, when Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, a 24-year-old truck driver with an atrocious record, allegedly crossed the center line of a New Hampshire highway and crashed into a group of motorcyclists, killing seven. His driver’s license should have been suspended at the time but remained valid due to the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles' failure to act on an earlier notice from Connecticut.

Massachusetts, which subsequently rolled out a suite of reforms, has significantly improved its speed at sending conviction notices but still lags in sending suspension notices. For example, during the first two months of 2020, prior to the pandemic, the state sent just about 42 percent of its suspension notices on time.

Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack told the Globe that a recent annual federal review also flagged these problems. “We are trying to address all of those issues and meet all of the requirements, but we’re not there yet.”

The federal transportation inspector general’s office said it is examining the issue nationwide following the fatal New Hampshire crash.

For about 30 years, state motor vehicle agencies have used an electronic system to share truck driver warnings and information in real time. These agencies also receive monthly status reports on the timeliness of their interstate warnings from a nonprofit organization that manages the system under an agreement with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA.

The Globe obtained these timeliness reports through records requests and analyzed every state’s statistics from 2015 through 2019.

Over that time, 35 states had terrible track records, sending fewer than 70 percent of their conviction or suspension notices within the federally mandated 10-day window.

“It’s deeply disappointing, but not surprising,” said Peter Kurdock, general counsel of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “I don’t know why they can’t seem to figure this out.”

Nationwide, 59,613 notices about truck driver suspensions and another 789,731 notices about truck driver convictions were transmitted over five years. About a fourth of these warnings were issued past the 10-day deadline, records show.

Federal regulations call for the FMCSA, which conducts annual reviews of states’ performance, to withhold certain federal highway funding from states found to be in “substantial non-compliance.” The federal agency also can strip states’ ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses.

But this almost never happens. Experts said they were not aware of any case where the agency has enforced such penalties. The agency said it has made threats to withhold funding but would not say if it has actually pulled funding.

Annette Sandberg, a transportation consultant who led the FMCSA from 2003 to 2006, said a state would have to “thumb their nose completely” in order to be considered in “substantial non-compliance.” Even if they did, cutting off federal funding or stripping a state’s ability to issue commercial licenses is not viewed as a realistic option.

“You want to talk about a political firestorm, oh my god,” said Sandberg.

The FMCSA said that when it finds a state to be non-compliant, its “goal is to work with the state toward getting it back into compliance in an efficient and effective manner.” The agency also said it has done training and outreach to try to address the delays. It provides over $370 million a year in grant funding to states for commercial driving safety improvements.

Federal authorities have long known about the delays, but have done little to fix the problem.

A 2000 audit by the federal Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General uncovered a variety of failures with states’ use of the Commercial Driver’s License Information System, including that they regularly did not send conviction notices on time. A 2009 audit by the same office estimated that about 500,000 active commercial drivers at the time had received at least one out-of-state conviction. Among them, about one in five had convictions that were added to their records late.

Following the audit, Anne Ferro, then-chief of the FMCSA, told state agencies that their delays were diminishing highway safety. Ferro now leads the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, or AAMVA, the nonprofit trade group that helps administer the electronic exchange of truck drivers’ records. She said it’s the FMCSA’s job to enforce and uphold the standard.

But FMCSA officials stressed the responsibility for the delays, and to improve timeliness, ultimately lies with the states. Meanwhile, state motor vehicle agencies blame local court systems, saying the delays often result from courts taking too long to send conviction information to them.

Attempts to fix these issues continue to move at a glacial pace.

“The reality is that the speed of change is limited by factors beyond an agency’s control, such as their resources/budget and legislative mandates,” Ferro said in a statement.

Sandberg, the former FMCSA head, said many state motor vehicle agencies rely on antiquated computer systems and have limited funding, and competing interests that sometimes trump public safety.

“If this were airplanes going down, people would be paying attention to it, but it’s just one death or a few deaths at a time,” said Sandberg. “I think we’ve just kind of numbed ourselves to, ’Oh well, it happens.’”

For some states, the track record of delays is abysmal.

Mississippi met the federal 10-day deadline for sending conviction notices in only about 2 percent of its cases over the past five years. Texas sent conviction notices on time only about 7 percent of the time. Officials from both states did not respond to requests for comment.

Those two states were among six — along with Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada, plus Washington, D.C. — that fell short of the federal benchmark for sending conviction notices for five straight years.

Staci Hoyt, deputy commissioner of the Office of Motor Vehicles in Louisiana, which met the federal 10-day deadline for sending convictions only about 23 percent of the time over the past five years, said, like many other states did, the delays often are caused by courts.

But she acknowledged that the average citizen cares less about the excuses and more about ensuring the problem is fixed.

“John Q. Citizen, all they are worried about is if that person is not supposed to be driving that truck, they should be out of that truck," she said. "And we completely agree.”

By Laura Crimaldi

First, there was 10-year-old Lacey Packer of Reading, killed by a drunk driver as she sat on the back of her father’s motorcycle on the edge of a highway. That was 1989.

Then there was Haley Cremer, 20, killed by a driver with a suspended license as she jogged in her hometown of Sharon in 2014.

Both times, the families channeled their grief into passing state laws to force the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles to crack down on habitually bad drivers by better tracking their atrocious records.

But neither law could save seven motorcyclists from dying on a lonely New Hampshire road last year allegedly at the hands of a drugged driver from Massachusetts who should have been taken off the road long ago because of his bad driving record.

It turns out that, despite promises made in the wake of tragedy, parts of both laws weren’t enforced, seriously undermining reform efforts that span three decades. That inaction has allowed an unknown number of dangerous drivers from Massachusetts to stay on the roads — including Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, who had a long trail of crashes behind him before he allegedly killed seven people when he drove his pickup truck into a group of motorcyclists in Randolph, N.H., last year.

“What happened? How could this be? Again?” said Gordon Packer, the father of Lacey, at his home in Raymond, N.H.

The “Lacey Packer Bill” had promised to bring the Massachusetts Registry into the electronic age and ensure the state could communicate quickly and efficiently about problem drivers. In particular, it would close loopholes that had allowed Peter Dushame, the man who killed Lacey Packer, to hold a valid Massachusetts driver’s license even though he had been convicted of drunken driving five times and had been involved, but not found at fault, in two previous fatal crashes.

“I thought this is a new age and a new way of doing things and we need to start talking to each other and sharing information,” said Donna Packer, Lacey’s mother, recalling her efforts more than 30 years ago. “I thought, ‘Here we are. We’re blazing a trail.’ ”

But the New Hampshire crash showed how little progress the Massachusetts Registry had made in 30 years. Zhukovskyy still had a valid Massachusetts driver’s license because the Registry failed to process two violation notifications from Connecticut — violations that would have led to license suspension. It was the scenario lawmakers tried to prevent after Dushame’s troubling driving history came to light.

“Somebody dropped the ball,” said Donna Packer. “This could have been prevented.”

Indeed, it could. Despite the Packers’ advocacy decades ago, state motor vehicle agencies in Massachusetts and other states still routinely fail to communicate and sideline some of the most dangerous drivers on the nation’s roadways. In 1989, officials blamed a lack of technology. Yet even in today’s wired world, many states still send warning notices through the mail, while some don’t bother at all.

The Globe’s “Blind Spot” investigation found that more than one in 10 drivers have a conviction that doesn’t appear on their official driving record, often because state motor vehicle agencies don’t talk to each other and there’s no national database to track violators.

Nowhere was the failure to communicate more clear cut than Massachusetts, where Registry officials ignored or brushed aside warning signs for years. At the time of Zhukovskyy’s crash in 2019, the Registry had stacks of out-of-state driving violations in cardboard banker boxes in an office, waiting to be processed.

“It’s incompetence. That’s what gets you hitting your head against the wall,” said Kay Dudley, a former chairwoman of the Massachusetts chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver in 1984.

In the wake of last year’s New Hampshire crash, Massachusetts’ registrar resigned and legislative hearings revealed the agency knowingly stopped processing alerts from other states about law-breaking drivers. A 106-page independent audit laid bare an agency culture that prioritized faster customer service over public safety.

“Do I feel responsible for the motorcyclists who were killed in New Hampshire? Yes,” Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack said in an interview.

She described a herculean agency-wide effort over the last year to tackle longstanding flaws and better identify menacing drivers. “We need to get them off the road and we need not to have these things happen again,” she said.

But for the families touched by past, preventable roadway tragedies, these pledges may ring hollow. They’ve heard the promises before.

“It takes a tragedy to make change,” said Donna Packer. “That’s just horrible, but it’s the way life is.”

On the afternoon of Father’s Day in 2014, Haley Cremer, 20, jogged through her Sharon neighborhood and stopped to talk to a woman.

An SUV sped from around a corner, drove across a lane marker, and struck Cremer, catapulting her more than 85 feet down the street, right out of her shoes, authorities said.

The driver, Jeffrey Bickoff, had 20 driving-related violations on his record, including 10 speeding tickets and 10 car crashes for which he was found to be at fault.

After the crash, Sharon police said the Massachusetts State Registry never notified officers that it had suspended Bickoff’s license. Had they known about the suspension, police said, they could have arrested Bickoff if they spotted him driving.

Much like the Packers, Cremer’s father, Marc, lobbied legislators for a law to address this shortcoming. About six months later, legislation sometimes referred to as “Haley’s Law” was signed, aiming to address flaws in how information about habitual traffic offenders was shared between the Registry and police.

Again, the Registry fell short. The Globe revealed last summer, in the wake of the fatal New Hampshire crash, that the agency wasn’t regularly notifying local police departments when residents had their driver’s licenses suspended or revoked.

“It’s appalling that we fought so hard to get this legislation only to have it not enacted as intended,” Marc Cremer said at the time. “We did this to save lives, and potentially prevent families from going through the tragedy that we live with every day.”

After the avalanche of Registry scandals, Cremer worked with Jamey Tesler, the current registrar, to address the agency’s failure to follow the law.

In early August, a new notification system developed by the Registry and the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services began sending alerts to Massachusetts police departments.

“They promised me that this would be done right and they did it right,” said Cremer, who is now pushing House lawmakers to pass a bill that would establish new criminal offenses for driving with a suspended license.

A key part of the Lacey Packer Bill, sadly, has yet to be realized.

Governor Michael Dukakis signed the legislation into law at a State House ceremony in November 1990. Surrounded by schoolchildren and police officers, Dukakis vowed that reckless drivers could no longer skirt scrutiny between states.

Thirteen months earlier, Dushame, 33, of North Andover, Mass., consumed five vodka tonics and plowed his Pontiac into a motorcycle parked in the breakdown lane of the F.E. Everett Turnpike in Nashua.

Gordon Packer had pulled onto the side of the highway to put his helmet back on before crossing into Massachusetts. Lacey sat behind him with her helmet on, waving to passing motorists. Father and daughter were headed home to Reading, Mass., after a Toys for Tots event.

A couple traveling with the Packers saw the careening car first. They waved their arms and tried to alert the driver.

Dushame lifted his hands from the steering wheel and waved back, then rammed into the motorcycles.

The tragedy erupted into scandal when details emerged of Dushame’s earlier drunken driving convictions and involvement in two fatal crashes, for which he was charged criminally, but later cleared.

Massachusetts suspended Dushame’s driver’s license in 1988 as a result of one of his drunken driving cases in New Hampshire, but reinstated it in January 1989. New Hampshire officials had barred him from driving there in 1983, an order that remained in effect when he struck the motorcycles.

The legislation signed by Dukakis gave the Registry the authority to apply all out-of-state driving convictions to the records of its drivers, a measure that could have stripped Dushame of his license. It also loosened the requirements for sharing driver information, easing the way for an electronic data exchange.

“It should,” Dukakis said at the bill-signing ceremony, “send a message that reckless drivers inside and outside the Commonwealth will not escape the law.”

But through the 1990s, the lessons learned from Lacey’s death appeared to have faded away. Sometime between 1999 and 2002, an undated memo from the Registry’s legal counsel warned that the state was inheriting “many bad drivers” from other states and granting them “clean records” because Massachusetts was among four states that refused to join an interstate agreement for sharing driving records.

The memo, its letterhead listing then-registrar Daniel Grabauskas, was uncovered in an audit commissioned last year by Governor Charlie Baker. In 2004, another memo raised red flags. This one was sent to a group of state employees considering whether Massachusetts should sign onto the interstate agreement.

The state resisted the move to this day. Few people outside the Massachusetts Registry seemed aware of the potential consequences. Meanwhile, the Registry was failing on another whole front and this too would prove deadly.

In many ways, Massachusetts is in the same spot it was 30 years ago when it comes to sharing driving records electronically with other states.

The United States still has no effective national system to keep tabs on drivers who commit serious offenses in another state. Agencies nationwide still heavily rely on mailing paper documents to notify each other about infractions.

“All of us have smartphones and smart appliances and are surrounded by technology that seems to make it feel like, ‘How hard can it be to do this?’ ” Pollack said in an interview. “It’s hard.”

The Registry now has a unit dedicated to processing incoming and outgoing notifications about out-of-state violations and an electronic system for exchanging driver records with New Hampshire. But that’s the only state the Registry has such an arrangement with. The agency uses the National Driver Register, a federal database, to identify traffic violations by Massachusetts drivers in states that don’t send notices.

Registry officials aim to keep driver records accurate and current, Pollack said, but the agency has no authority requiring other states to do the same. Pollack said she believes a national system would solve the problem, but such an effort is likely years away.

The situation is baffling to people like the Packers.

“There should be a federal agency that everybody can plug into,” said Donna Packer. “Come on. We have the cloud."

But in this case, cloud computing has yet to deliver a solution. In 2020, the defense against the disaster in New Hampshire remains mailing a paper notice and hoping the receiving state bureaucracy doesn’t hide the alert in a box.