The Sky Express Corporate Resurrection That Killed 4
When Four Lives Became the Price of Regulatory Failure
The call came in at 4:55 AM on May 31, 2011, to Caroline County emergency. A motorcoach had rolled over on Interstate 95 near Doswell, Virginia, about 30 miles north of Richmond. When Virginia State Trooper Andrea Vowell arrived at the scene, the bus was still rocking. The roof was crushed. Four passengers were dead, and 49 others were injured, some severely.
This wasn’t an accident, this was the culmination of years of regulatory failure that allowed a dangerous operator to keep rolling on borrowed time. Sky Express was literally operating under a federal extension that should have expired three days before the crash.
What happened next would expose one of the most egregious examples of what federal regulators call “chameleon” or “reincarnation” companies, businesses that shut down after safety violations only to resurface under new names with the same unsafe practices. Sky Express Inc. was trying to come back from the dead.
Behind the wheel of the 2000 Setra motorcoach that morning was Kin Yiu Cheung, a 37-year-old driver from Flushing, Queens, who had been with Sky Express for just 11 months. The bus had departed Greensboro, North Carolina, at 10:30 PM the previous evening, bound for New York’s Chinatown with 58 passengers aboard.
For hours before the crash, passengers watched in growing terror as Cheung’s driving became increasingly erratic. Passenger Karrica Finch later testified that Cheung appeared confused and was drinking coffee and Red Bull energy drinks throughout the overnight trip. “It was almost as if you’re on a roller-coaster ride,” she said.
Passengers described hearing Cheung complain on his cell phone that he hadn’t gotten enough rest. Cell phone records showed he made or received 21 calls during the trip, with the last call occurring at 3:46 AM, just over an hour before the crash.
Cheung made two unscheduled stops at highway rest areas, each lasting 30-45 minutes, during which he disappeared from the passengers’ view without explanation. These stops were never recorded in his logbooks.
Finally, around 4:55 AM, the inevitable happened. Cheung nodded off at the wheel as the bus traveled at 55-60 mph in the right lane of I-95. The motorcoach drifted off the roadway at a shallow angle, struck a cable barrier, rotated counterclockwise, and overturned onto its roof.
When Trooper Vowell asked Cheung if he had fallen asleep at the wheel, he nodded. In a written statement, Cheung wrote: “Maybe I feeling tired and sleepy time.”
This is yet another nod to English Language Proficiency standards and their failure to be enforced.
The four victims, Karen Blyden-Decastro, 46, of Cambria Heights, New York; Sie Giok Giang, 63, of Philadelphia; Josefa Torres, 78, of Jamaica, New York; and Denny Estefany Martinez, 25, of Jersey City, New Jersey, died from a combination of being ejected from their seats and crushed when the bus roof collapsed.
Two passengers were asphyxiated when they were crushed between the bus roof and the backs of their seats. The other two died from blunt-force injuries after being partially ejected from the windows and crushed between the vehicle and the ground.
Fourteen passengers received serious injuries, including spinal compression fractures, brain contusions, pelvic fractures, and extremity fractures. Thirty-five others sustained minor injuries. Five passengers could not be traced due to incomplete records, a telling indication of Sky Express’s shoddy record-keeping.
Sky Express Inc. should never have been on the road that morning. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based company had been operating with a horrific safety record that federal regulators had documented for years. Even worse, the company was operating on borrowed time, having received a 10-day federal extension just days before the crash.
The corporate trail reveals a pattern of evasion dating back to 2002. Two individuals who would later own Sky Express operated a company called “Wah Hun,” running 15-passenger vans as a shuttle service in North Carolina. This merged with “Horse Run Tours” in 2004 under the company name “Lei Shi,” which then became “Sky Express” between 2007 and 2009, a pattern of corporate evolution that would prove prophetic when the company tried to evade federal shutdown through rebranding.
North Carolina incorporation documents reveal the shadowy figures behind Sky Express’s operations:
The Shareholders and Officers:
Lei Shi: President, Secretary, and Registered Agent
Guo Wei Lin: Vice President
Ming Gao: Shareholder
Xi Yun Xu: Shareholder
Martin Wong of 17 East Broadway #204, New York, NY, signed the original incorporation documents on December 6, 2004, establishing the connection between Sky Express and the New York Chinatown transportation network.
Rather than operating from a central headquarters, Sky Express functioned as a distributed network. The company’s official address in Charlotte, North Carolina, was actually the home address of the corporate secretary. Drivers were dispatched from New York City for southbound routes and from Charlotte for northbound routes, staying in company-arranged apartments and motels.
Lei Shi emerges as the central figure controlling both the corporate structure and daily operations. Sky Express had no central terminal, no office location, and no company garage. Vehicles were housed in a rented parking lot in Brooklyn and maintained at various repair shops around New York City. This distributed model made it nearly impossible for federal regulators to conduct comprehensive oversight and perfectly positioned the company for the corporate shell games that would follow the crash.
NTSB investigators would later discover that in the available logbook records for just five months of Cheung’s employment, he had violated federal hours-of-service rules at least 85 times. In February 2011 alone, just three months before the crash, investigators found 71 hours-of-service violations in his logs.
Sky Express claimed to require drivers to submit logbooks every 15 days, but the company had no process in place for reviewing them for compliance, and stored the records haphazardly in cardboard boxes. For the six months before the crash, Sky Express could only provide investigators with logbooks for three months of Cheung’s employment, the rest were missing.
Cheung’s training consisted of just 13 hours of one-on-one instruction at a Brooklyn driving school, studying the New York CDL Manual, and listening to a Chinese/English audio compact disc about vehicle inspections. He had about 2 hours of behind-the-wheel training driving a school bus before being issued his CDL in June 2010.
His previous employment had been as a delivery driver for two restaurants in Virginia. He had no commercial motor vehicle driving experience before 2010. Sky Express gave him a road test consisting of approximately 30 miles of driving, conducted by the company president, Lei Shi.
The night of the crash, Cheung had a maximum sleep opportunity of 6.5 hours during his 16.5-hour off-duty period. Cell phone records showed that he continued making calls until 6:45 AM, after going off duty, and then had periods of unknown activity. Given his need to travel from Durham to Greensboro and prepare for sleep, investigators determined he likely received disrupted sleep at best.
By May 2011, Sky Express’s safety record was catastrophic. Between 2008 and the accident date, the company had been subjected to five FMCSA compliance reviews, an extraordinary level of scrutiny that reflected its persistent safety issues. Federal investigators documented 63 violations of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, with 24 classified as critical or acute violations.
The company received an appalling rating of 86.2 percent, which is 86.2 percent worse than all passenger bus companies in the “Fatigued Driver” category over the previous 24 months. They scored worse than 62.9 percent of bus companies in the “Unsafe Driving” category.
Between June 2010 and May 2011, Sky Express vehicles were subjected to 94 roadside inspections that resulted in 204 violations:
HOS or logbook violations: 48
Driver or license-related violations: 22
Equipment violations: 112
Other violations: 22
The most damning detail: On April 7, 2011, the FMCSA conducted yet another compliance review and found Sky Express unsatisfactory in two significant areas and conditional in another, resulting in a proposed overall rating of “unsatisfactory,” which should have led to their shutdown.
The company had 45 days to appeal, with the deadline set for May 28, 2011, but in a decision that would prove fatal, FMCSA granted Sky Express a 10-day extension, moving the shutdown date to June 7, 2011. The crash occurred on May 31, and Sky Express was operating illegally at the time that federal regulators had given them as a courtesy.
When the National Transportation Safety Board released its final report in July 2012, the findings were damning. The board concluded that the crash was caused by “acute sleep loss” suffered by the driver, but placed equal blame on Sky Express and the federal oversight system.
“This company should not have been operating,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told ABC News after the crash. The NTSB found that Sky Express had “no regard for passenger safety” and had failed to provide any fatigue management program or formal written safety policies for its drivers.
The investigation revealed that Cheung had limited opportunities for quality sleep in the days leading up to the accident. But more troubling was the pattern of regulatory failures that allowed Sky Express to continue operating despite years of safety violations.
Board member Robert Sumwalt was blunt in his assessment: “They had no regard for the safety and well-being of their passengers.”
The NTSB determined the probable cause was “the failure of the motorcoach driver to maintain control of the vehicle due to his falling asleep while driving because of fatigue resulting from acute sleep loss, poor sleep quality, and circadian disruption and the failure of Sky Express, Inc., management to follow adequate safety practices and to exercise safety oversight of the driver.”
Contributing factors included the FMCSA’s inadequate oversight and the absence of a comprehensive occupant protection system, including passenger restraints and sufficient roof strength.
In most cases, this would be where the story ends. The company gets shut down, the driver faces criminal charges, and the industry moves on. But Sky Express had other plans. Within days of the federal shutdown order, the same buses, routes, and unsafe practices continued under new names.
Sky Express attempted to evade the government shutdown by repainting its buses and operating them under different company names, specifically 108 Tours and 108 Bus. They changed the paint job but kept everything else the same, the same vehicles, the same routes, the same management, and crucially, the same safety culture that had killed four people.
This brazen attempt at corporate resurrection triggered an unprecedented federal response. On June 10, 2011, just 10 days after the crash, FMCSA issued a cease and desist order specifically targeting Sky Express’s reincarnation attempts.
“We are relentlessly targeting unsafe and illegal bus companies,” Transportation Secretary LaHood said. “This action sends a strong message that the U.S. Department of Transportation will pursue companies that attempt to evade safety oversight through reincarnation.”
The federal response went further. As part of FMCSA’s investigation, the agency subpoenaed the records of three internet ticket broker websites, gotobus.com, taketours.com, and 2001bus.com, that had been selling tickets for Sky Express and other bus companies. This move was designed to cut off the oxygen that these chameleon companies needed to survive: access to customers through online ticket sales.
Despite extensive searches of corporate databases, investigators could not locate incorporation records for 108 Tours or 108 Bus, suggesting they may have been incorporated in different states or under other business structures to obscure their connection to the known Sky Express shareholders.
The corporate resurrection attempts were just the beginning. In 2013, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced the guilty pleas of Guo Wei Lin, Lei Shi, and Ming Gao for failing to pay their workers who drove buses from New York to points in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina.
The three owners and Sky Express Inc. admitted to a misdemeanor count of Failure to Pay Wages, owing at least 13 employees over $40,035 in unpaid wages. Sky Express had stopped operating after the fatal Virginia accident, leaving numerous workers jobless and unpaid for their entire month of work in May 2011.
“Paying wages is the most basic obligation of an employer to his or her employees,” said Attorney General Schneiderman. “Employers like Lin, Shi and Gao can’t walk away from this legal and moral responsibility, and they will be held accountable.”
Cheung’s trial in November 2012 became a reminder of the human cost of corporate negligence. Survivors testified about the terror they experienced watching their driver struggle to stay awake for hours. Passenger Andrew Jennings described the crash as “like a nightmare,” while LiDenne Cromartie testified about helping others escape the overturned bus.
Defense attorney Taylor Stone argued that while Cheung acknowledged falling asleep, the crash was a “horrendous accident” rather than criminal negligence. The prosecution disagreed.
In November 2012, a Caroline County judge convicted Cheung of all four counts of involuntary manslaughter. In January 2013, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison with 34 years suspended, meaning he would serve six years behind bars.
The Virginia Court of Appeals later upheld the conviction in a detailed 2014 opinion that laid bare the systemic negligence behind the crash. The court ruled that Cheung’s decision to continue driving while knowing he could fall asleep was “a callous act of indifference to the safety of others.”
Court records indicate that Cheung’s wife testified that he had twice traveled back to China, though officials said they had no record of this travel. Additionally, Cheung apparently didn’t live at the Flushing, New York address listed on his driver’s license, raising questions about his immigration status that were never fully resolved in public records.
Based on the typical six-year sentence, Cheung would have been released from Virginia state prison around 2019. His current whereabouts and activities remain unknown.
The corporate entities behind Sky Express proved more elusive to track down. Despite extensive regulatory documentation of the company’s violations and rebranding attempts, the specific current activities of Sky Express’s owners remain largely hidden from public view.
Lei Shi, Guo Wei Lin, Ming Gao, and Xi Yun Xu, the four shareholders who controlled Sky Express, faced criminal prosecution for wage theft but their current business activities are unknown. This opacity is part of the broader problem that makes chameleon companies so difficult to combat, the same people who run unsafe operations can simply disappear into new corporate shells.
What is clear is that the Sky Express case became a watershed moment for federal bus safety enforcement. The case was explicitly referenced in congressional hearings on bus safety and became a primary example in federal reports on the “curbside intercity bus industry.” The aggressive federal response, including the subpoenaing of ticket broker records, established new precedents for combating reincarnated bus companies.
The Sky Express case exposed fundamental flaws in the federal motor carrier safety system that allowed dangerous operators to continue running deadly operations. The NTSB’s investigation led to several critical recommendations:
The board called for mandatory fatigue management programs for bus carriers and revised regulations for driver hours of service. More importantly, it demanded that FMCSA improve its safety assurance program for new motor carriers, calling the existing program “a program with little safety assurance.”
In response to this and other bus crashes, FMCSA doubled down on enforcement efforts. The agency shut down 54 unsafe bus companies in 2011 alone and closed the loophole that allowed 10-day extensions for passenger bus companies undergoing safety compliance reviews.
Following the crash, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro announced significant policy changes: “We have revised our enforcement policies to eliminate 10-day extensions on out-of-service orders and are putting carriers out of service as quickly as our authority permits.”
While the investigation revealed extensive details about Sky Express’s corporate structure and safety violations, the immigration status of the company’s owners, drivers, and employees remains unclear.
This gap is significant because the “Chinatown bus” industry has historically operated in regulatory gray areas, with questions about worker documentation and corporate oversight that complicate enforcement efforts. The inability to trace the current activities of the Sky Express principals may be partly due to these unresolved immigration issues.
The court’s concerns about Cheung being a flight risk, combined with discrepancies in his documentation and testimony about travel to China, suggest that immigration status may have been a factor in the case that was never fully explored in public proceedings.
Sky Express wasn’t an isolated case of regulatory failure. The 2011 crash occurred during a particularly deadly period for the discount bus industry. Just two months earlier, in March 2011, 15 people were killed when a bus operated by World Wide Travel crashed on I-95 in the Bronx.
These crashes exposed systemic problems in an industry that had grown rapidly with minimal federal oversight. The NTSB investigation revealed that between June 2010 and May 2011, Sky Express vehicles were subjected to 94 roadside inspections, resulting in 204 violations, an average of more than two violations per inspection. Yet the company continued operating.
The chameleon company problem exemplified by Sky Express remains a challenge today. Federal databases show numerous cases of bus and trucking companies that shut down after safety violations, only to resurface under new names.
The Sky Express crash also highlighted a critical safety deficiency in motorcoach design. The accident resulted in four fatalities, all of whom were initially seated on the passenger side of the bus in the region of maximum roof deformation.
The roof collapsed so severely that in the center of the bus, the interior luggage rack and roof were resting on top of the seats. The metal tubular frames of seven rows of passenger-side seatbacks were fractured, with broken metal frames poking through the cushions.
None of the passenger seats were equipped with any form of restraint system. Computer simulations showed that while seat belts would have reduced some injuries by keeping passengers in their seats, the extent of roof crush might still have caused severe head injuries due to the extreme loss of survivable space.
The NTSB concluded that “both a restraint system and a system ensuring sufficient roof strength, working in combination as part of a comprehensive occupant protection system, are needed to provide adequate protection to motorcoach occupants in the event of a rollover.”
Fourteen years after the Sky Express crash, the fundamental questions raised by this tragedy remain relevant. How do we prevent companies with documented safety violations from continuing to operate? How do we ensure that corporate responsibility doesn’t disappear behind a new coat of paint and a different business name?
The Sky Express case provides both sobering answers and cautionary warnings. The aggressive federal response, shutting down the company, pursuing its reincarnations, and subpoenaing ticket broker records, demonstrated that regulators could act decisively when they chose to. But the case also revealed how many warning signs had been ignored before four people died on a Virginia highway.
The victims of the Sky Express crash, Karen Blyden-Decastro, Sie Giok Giang, Josefa Torres, and Denny Estefany Martinez, died because a system designed to protect them failed at every level. Their deaths became a catalyst for regulatory reform, but they also serve as a permanent reminder of the human cost when safety becomes secondary to profit.
As we continue to grapple with transportation safety in an era of ridesharing, autonomous vehicles, and new mobility technologies, the Sky Express case reminds us that the fundamentals haven’t changed. When companies prioritize profits over people, when regulators fail to act on obvious warning signs, and when enforcement lacks teeth, people die.
The Sky Express bus is gone, crushed and scrapped long ago. The corporate principals have vanished into new identities or returned to whatever shadows they emerged from. But the corporate shell games, regulatory gaps, and safety culture failures that killed four people that May morning in 2011 continue to challenge us today.
In the end, that may be the most sobering lesson of all: that even when the system works to shut down a killer company, the people behind it can simply walk away, change names, and start again. Until we solve that problem, another Sky Express will always be waiting to happen.