Concrete company owner tied to Hays bus crash hired unlicensed driver years prior, JP says

The owner of a concrete company tied to the Hays school district bus crash last month was ticketed in Hays County for employing an unlicensed driver more than two years prior to the wreck that injured more than 50 people and killed two, including a prekindergarten student.

Francisco Martinez Jr., the owner of FJM Concrete Pumping LLC, pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor traffic offense and paid the $316 ticket on Tuesday, closing the October 2021 case, according to the office of Hays County Precinct 4 Justice of the Peace John Burns.

Bastrop County authorities on Friday arrested Martinez's employee, Jerry Hernandez, on a warrant charging him with criminally negligent homicide in relation to the March 22 school bus crash. According to charging documents for Hernandez, Martinez told authorities he had not verified the status of Hernandez's commercial license or his driver's history prior to employing him.

Neither Martinez nor his attorney, Thomas Fagerberg, returned phone calls seeking comment Tuesday afternoon. Reached by the American-Statesman last week, Martinez deferred questions to Fagerberg.

On Monday, Burns' office issued a warrant for Martinez in relation to the years-old ticket, which was unpaid and delinquent. In a statement Tuesday, the office attributed the delay in issuing a warrant to a policy allowing those ticketed additional time to pay citations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We held off on warrants from 2021 and gave extra time to get citation (sic) taken care of due to Covid, but now that time has passed, we are issuing them when we come across them," the office said in an unattributed statement to the Statesman.

The author of the statement declined a request for an interview with Burns, writing, "Judge is not available and has no comment."

The unlicensed driver for whom Martinez was ticketed was not Hernandez, according to a complaint filed with the ticket by the Texas Department of Public Safety trooper who handled the October 2021 case.

According to charging documents, Hernandez had previously failed a drug test for marijuana in December 2022 and another for cocaine in April 2023. Hernandez was tested because, in September 2020, his employer at the time had "reasonable suspicion" that he was on drugs, but he refused a test, according to data from the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, a national database containing information about drug and alcohol violations of drivers with commercial driver's licenses.

Despite these violations and the resulting "prohibited" status of his commercial driver's license, Hernandez was permitted to operate the concrete pump truck involved in the March 22 crash in Texas. A search of the state's driver's license system showed he was "eligible," a state trooper wrote in charging documents.

Federal reporting requirements around clearinghouse violations and what triggers ineligibility may change this fall. Last month, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration proposed changes to require states' licensing agencies to downgrade a driver's commercial license for such violations. Had those changes been in effect, Hernandez's commercial license would have been downgraded, barring him from driving a pump truck for the purpose of intrastate commerce, the state trooper wrote.

Those changes won't take effect until Nov. 18, according to a notice published in the Federal Register.

Hernandez told investigators he had smoked marijuana the night before the crash at 10 p.m., according to the charging documents. On the morning of March 22, he did a "small amount of cocaine" at 1 a.m. after waking up at 12:30 a.m. to go to work. Hernandez had refused to voluntarily give a blood sample at the scene of the crash.

Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, a 5-year-old pre-K student at Tom Green Elementary School in the Hays school district, and Ryan Wallace, a 33-year-old University of Texas doctoral student who was driving a vehicle behind the bus, died in the crash.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Company owner tied to Hays CISD crash previously hired unlicensed driver