Jonatan Hernández Gómez found a new kind of farm work in New York state at the end of a difficult journey from Chiapas, the mountainous rainforest at the southern tip of Mexico.
Instead of picking fruits and vegetables, he and his fellow migrant workers would help harvest the sun.
Every day, they woke up in company-provided hotel rooms and rode the company-provided bus to vacant land in St. Lawrence County, where they installed a solar farm for a company called LBFNY LLC, based in Cayuga County.
In just a short time, Hernández Gómez made enough money to help his parents in Mexico pay off debts and start building a new kitchen. He supported his daughter and three younger siblings and bought some land. He had a dream to return to Mexico and finish his degree in agricultural engineering, his sister Andrea Lizbeth Hernández Gómez said.
Instead, he came home dead, his body in a condition his sister called “indescribable.”
“I couldn’t believe it was him,” she said in Spanish. “It was incredibly difficult.”
Hernández Gómez, 25, left his home in Mexico in January 2022 and died nearly one year later in a horrific bus crash near the Canadian border.
Leer aquí en Español. Read here in Spanish.
In the pre-dawn darkness of Jan. 28, 2023, a box truck crossed the center line and peeled off the side of a bus carrying him and 14 other migrant workers to a job site in Northern New York. The vehicles crashed on state Route 37 near Massena, nine miles from the Econo Lodge where the workers were living.
Every passenger in a window seat on the driver’s side of the bus died.
Six men from Mexico went home in caskets. Nine others from Mexico and Venezuela survived, some climbing through a hole in the side of the bus to see three friends who had been ejected and fatally injured.
The truck driver, who survived, was issued a minor traffic ticket for failing to keep right.
But the crash caught the attention of the National Transportation Safety Board, a federal agency that examines accidents in such detail that they X-rayed the lightbulbs to see if the headlights were on.
The NTSB is still investigating, but the agency has compiled thousands of pages of documents.
For this report, syracuse.com | The Post-Standard reviewed the records — victims’ statements, witness accounts, first responders’ testimony and crash reconstruction reports. Reporters interviewed survivors, family members and a witness.
The NTSB has laid out a set of facts that show how the solar farm exploited loopholes in laws that regulate transportation and migrant labor.
The bus should not have been on the road.
The company refused to have the bus inspected, as is required under New York and federal law. The state and feds ordered the bus off the road. Instead of getting the required inspections, the company created a shell company and registered the bus in Montana — a state willing to issue license plates without inspections.
Seven months later, the bus crashed.
The driver, from Venezuela, did not have a commercial driver’s license, records show.
Nothing in the NTSB investigation alleges an inspection or proper driver training would have made a difference in the deadly crash. But it is clear that the solar panel company went out of its way to avoid a safety inspection.
The company has not been charged with any crimes or traffic violations related to the crash. But the federal government fined the company $32,000 for a long list of safety issues discovered after the crash — retrofitted seats, a lack of seat belts and more.
The investigation also exposes gaps in U.S. labor laws intended to protect migrant workers. If the laborers had seasonal jobs in fruit and vegetable farming, a different set of laws would have applied. Those laws would have required the company to register with the labor department, which would have to make sure the bus passed inspection, experts say.
Federal laws have simply not kept up with the kinds of jobs migrant workers do now in the United States, experts say.
More than a year later, the tragedy remains a mystery to family members in Mexico. It is mostly forgotten in New York.
In Chiapas, the sisters of Hernández Gómez told syracuse.com they wish they could bring their parents to New York to see the site and ask questions in person.
“They want to go where the accident happened because for them, it still hurts,” Andrea Lizbeth Hernández Gómez said in Spanish.
‘Muchachos! Esta bien?!’
At about 6 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 28, 2023, workers left the Econo Lodge in Massena to travel to a solar farm site in Madrid.
The bus driver Christopher Valero, 36, paused to let a snowplow pass. It was snowing, but the roads were clear, he later told investigators.
The men relaxed. Some drank coffee and looked at their phones. Others slept. The bus continued along for almost 10 minutes when the bright lights of an oncoming box truck shined through the front windshield.
Valero swore and pulled the bus to the right, he said, but it was too late.
The rented box truck carrying auto parts crossed the rumble strips in the center line and hit the side of the bus, the report said. The truck was traveling about 53 mph just before the crash.
The truck driver, Harly Diaz Baez, 25, slumped his head against the wheel. His hand, hip and leg were broken, he told investigators.
He told first responders to leave him and take care of the bus passengers, the fire chief told investigators.
Baltasar Jiménez López, 46, was riding the bus with his nephew, Jonatan López Rodríguez, 35. In a Syracuse.com interview, Jiménez López remembered the impact.
“It hit the side of the truck in the front and managed to take everything from the side of the bus, as if it were a curtain,” he said in Spanish.
Raúl Martínez said he woke up to hear the driver shouting “Muchachos! Muchachos! Esta bien?” or “Guys! Guys! Is everybody OK?!” He saw the hole in the bus and noticed the empty seats, he told investigators.
Martínez said he kicked open the door and helped others out. He hugged Valero, who was crying.
Antonio López Díaz’s head hit the window. Luckily, his hard hat saved his head from shattered glass. He crawled through the broken window, he told investigators.
Jiménez López said Abel de Jesús López López landed on top of him. López López was bleeding from the ears, eyes, nose and mouth. Jiménez López said he pushed López López to the side.
Jiménez López said he called to his nephew, “Son, are you OK?”
“Yes, Uncle, I’m good. Let’s get out of here because the bus might explode,” Jiménez López said his nephew replied.
López Rodríguez stood frozen in disbelief next to the bus. His leg was broken, but it took a full day to notice. Emergency workers gave him an ice pack for his swollen face, he told syracuse.com.
Andy Vera-León was looking at his phone when he suddenly hit the roof of the bus, he told investigators. He escaped through the back door and realized his roommate, López López, was still on the bus.
Vera-León climbed back in, despite the calls that the bus could explode. Lopez-Lopez was still alive, with his leg pinned, he said. His head was injured. The inside of the bus was covered in blood, Vera-León said. He pulled at his roommate but couldn’t get him free. He had to leave him, he said.
The only passenger who survived on the driver’s side of the bus was the only passenger who wore a seatbelt. He was unconscious. He suffered severe head trauma and lost an ear, records show.
After the company bought the old school bus from a Western New York school district, the new owners welded a wheelchair door shut and added two seats, without seatbelts, that would not have passed inspection, records show.
Other seatbelts were stuffed into the seat cushions or wrapped around the seat legs.
Once the men got out of the bus they found the three men who had had been ejected. One was pinned under a tire. They saw a piece of skull on the pavement. Their coworker had been decapitated.
Another man was gasping for breath, but then fell silent, they said.
“There was nothing anybody could do,” Vera-León told investigators.
Martínez, the only passenger who spoke English, had to identify the bodies of:
· José de Jesús Aguirre Tronco, 35, of Vigencia
· Jonatan Hernández Gómez, 24, of Chiapas
· Abel de Jesús López López, 39, of Chiapas
· Pedro Pablo Galicia-Ignacio, 29, of Puebla
· Alejandro Vázquez Valdez, 45, of Puebla
· Jesús Martínez-Parra, 44, of Puebla
‘Hang on, man’
Jonathan Lebel was near the end of his 90-minute commute from Riverview Correctional Facility when he saw headlights, then taillights, then headlights – a vehicle spinning, then stopping ahead.
Lebel, a corrections lieutenant and hunter, is always prepared with extra flashlights, tow ropes and blankets. He jumped out of the car with none of those things or his coat or his phone, still playing a podcast.
The road was covered in debris. In the pre-dawn darkness, he saw the outline of man after man walking from a bus tilted in a snowy ditch. The silent men were wearing reflective vests.
He shouted for someone to call 911. Strangely, no one responded.
He asked how many people were on the bus? The men kept walking.
“It didn’t click at first, then I heard them speaking and I’m like, ‘They’re not speaking English,’ ” he told syracuse.com.
Then he saw a man who had been ejected from the bus.
Lebel flipped the man over and heard him take a “gurgly” breath. He tried chest compressions, but each move pushed the man further into the snow. Lebel rubbed the man’s sternum. He crossed the man’s hands over his heart to keep them warm.
“I kept saying, ‘Hang on, man. Hang on. They’re on their way,’ ” he remembered. “He looked at me in the eyes and that was the part that sticks with me the longest.”
The man took his last breath.
Lebel left him and crawled through the back door of the bus toward another voice. The bus was tipped about a third of the way onto its side, he said.
Bodies were pinned by seats. He shook an unconscious man, then saw the extent of his injuries.
“I just moved forward and kept going,” he said.
Someone’s iPhone had detected the crash and automatically called 911. The fire chief who responded, a friend, told Lebel, “Go home. Get some sleep.”
Lebel had been awake for 19 hours. He called his wife and broke down. He stripped off his clothes and threw them in the garbage.
Lebel said he turned down suggestions of an award for his bravery. He had joined the fire department and an emergency dive team after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis gave him the drive to live life fuller and faster.
“I don’t feel like I helped anybody. Like anything I did didn’t affect the outcome of the situation,” he said.
In more than a year, Lebel never learned the names or stories of the people he tried to help. In a way, that makes it easier to file the accident away in a separate mental drawer, he said.
When a reporter told him about the parents, wives and children left behind, Lebel paused. He said he would take them to the site if they ever made it to the United States.
“He didn’t die alone,” he said to tell the family of the man in the snow. “Obviously, he was trying to do anything he could to help his family.”
Six migrant workers killed in North Country bus crash in January 2023
‘We have to work’
Jiménez López and his nephew López Rodríguez also came to the solar farm in Upstate New York after a difficult journey from a small village in the state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala.
There, Jiménez López said he had earned a degree in industrial engineering. He married and had two children. But there wasn’t much work in his village of only 500 residents.
He crossed the border in 2006 and found field work in the United States, he said. But the work was too hard and he returned to Mexico.
There, he worked as a social worker but fell into debt, he said. After he divorced and his two children were grown, he decided to go to the United States again.
Jiménez López admitted he didn’t wait for a work visa. He brought the sons of his cousins and trained ahead of time before starting the journey.
“Through the desert, I walked nine hours,” he said.
By the time they made it to New Mexico, one man was suffering from hypothermia, he said. They turned themselves in to authorities to get medical help, he said.
Afterward, a brother working at the solar company helped him get a job. His life became a cycle.
Wake up at 4 a.m. Make lunch. Get on the bus at 5:30. Start work at 7. Finish at 5. Shower, eat, repeat.
“That’s the life of a migrant here in the United States,” he said. “Those who haven’t come here think that it’s pure happiness when, in reality, you come to enter a prison. It’s your home and work.”
In interviews with syrause.com, the two remembered the colleagues who died. They were good, hard-working men who came to the United States for jobs, they said. They sometimes played soccer together and shared meals.
They knew each other by nicknames. Martínez Parra was “El Ratón,” or “The Mouse” because he was small.
Vázquez Valdez was “El Licensio,” or “The Graduate,” because he carried a bag like a briefcase.
Just weeks before the crash, the workers welcomed the new year together at the hotel. The men and food and drink took up four rooms. They toasted to 2023.
“It never crossed my mind that this was the final goodbye with six of my coworkers,” Jiménez López said.
Jiménez López now lives in Troy, N.Y. López Rodríguez said he still works for the solar farm company. That is why he is here, he said, to work and send money home to his wife and two children.
He hasn’t seen his family through two Christmases. But the moments are there on his phone. During an interview, he shared a picture from the day before of his children, ages 7 and 9, after they won a soccer game.
López Rodríguez said he relives the memory of the crash every time he gets on the bus to a new job site.
“There were times when I was afraid,” he said in Spanish. “But we have to go. We have to work.”
A new kind of farm
Jim Begley owns the solar farm company. He did not respond to interview requests for this report. His brother Brian Begley answered the door at the company’s Weedsport headquarters and told Syracuse.com they had put the crash behind them.
Jim Begley grew up in a family that hired migrant workers to pick vegetables, he told investigators three days after the crash. About four years ago, he seized an opportunity to branch into solar panel installation.
Begley started a new company called LBFNY LLC, which shares an office in Weedsport with his family’s vegetable farm called Lake Breeze Farms.
The company grew quickly and by 2023 had 100 employees and 15 buses, installing solar panels all over New York. Other jobs have been in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, he said.
The company had $11 million in gross revenue for 2022, according to federal records.
The company bought the 2013 bus from the Hilton Central School District in November 2021 for $8,500. It had 165,000 miles on the odometer, the NTSB found.
Two months later, the New York State Police stopped the bus for a roadside inspection in the parking lot of the Econo Lodge, records show. State police found the bus lacked its annual inspection. The state fined the solar company $10,000.
In addition to an annual state inspection, the federal government requires companies with passenger buses to have an annual safety audit. The company refused that, too. In April 2022, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ordered the company to “immediately cease all Interstate motor carrier operations in the United States.”
Instead, the company set up a shell company in Montana and registered the fleet there. Montana issues license plates without inspection and without checking on previous violations in New York, according to the FMCSA.
LBFNY created a new limited liability company called LBF MT with an address in Helena, Montana. An NTSB investigator visited the address and found the business office for a company that advertises that it will help out-of-state vehicle owners create companies that can own and register vehicles in Montana.
It’s a well-known gimmick more often used to avoid sales taxes on expensive vehicles or to get around emissions standards on antique cars.
The company got the Montana plates and another benefit: The move treated Begley’s Montana company as a new owner and erased the “out of service” order, according to the FMCSA.
When investigators asked Begley about the Montana license plates, he said he did it to avoid sales taxes and “it was a little faster than New York state.”
“And now I’m wishing it all (was) registered in New York state,” Begley told them.
The federal investigation after the crash found a long list of other violations. The bus driver, from Venezuela, did not have a required commercial driver’s license. The company did not give a formal road test or conduct a background check on drivers. Staff simply told the drivers not to speed, be careful and don’t drink and drive, the report said.
The crash also exposes this gap in labor laws:
If the company had employed seasonal agricultural workers, a federal migrant protection law would have required the federal labor department to make sure transportation inspections were up to date, experts say.
These solar farm workers have the same vulnerabilities as migrant laborers who work only part of the year to pick vegetables and fruits. They work for someone who controls their jobs, housing and transportation. But the migrant safety law does not apply to employers that are not seasonal and not agricultural, said Hannah Gordon, an attorney for the Farmworker Law Project.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is also not interested in investigating the crash. OSHA does not consider an injury to be work-related if it happens on the commute to work, officials said.
Begley told investigators his company had logged half a million work hours without a workplace accident, the report said.
The solar farm’s website still says the company takes great pride in its commitment to safety and has “an outstanding track record of zero job site accidents.”
The survivors interviewed for this report had no complaints about Begley. Lawyers for other survivors and the families of the dead also said Begley took good care of his workers. Some of the crash victims stayed to work for him. Workers said they were paid as much as $47 an hour on some contracts.
They said Begley paid for the memorial service, held at St. Joseph’s Church in Weedsport. He drove his workers to medical appointments and continued to pay them while they recovered, the men said.
A traffic ticket
In the end, state police issued a minor traffic ticket to the driver of the leased box truck.
Diaz Baez, 25, had been driving all night for his job delivering auto parts to car dealerships, he told investigators. He had been working for the company Aero Global Logistics for three weeks.
The company, based in Virginia, transports auto parts from distribution centers in the Mid-Atlantic region to car dealerships. AGL leases trucks from Penske Truck Rental. Diaz Baez drove a round-trip route between Whitesboro and the North Country – about 360 miles in 10 hours starting at about 1 a.m., records show.
A lawyer for Diaz Baez and Aero Global Logistics did not respond to interview requests.
State police said their investigation is over.
“A full investigation was completed on our end and at this time no crime was committed that we can prove,” Trooper Brandi Ashley said. “Accidents occur and tragedies happen. Not all fatal accidents result in criminal charges.”
The bodies of the six who died were returned to Mexico.
Some of the workers said they qualified for workers’ compensation from New York.
In Mexico, the wife and two children of López López receive $700 a week, based on an average salary of $1,045, attorney Ralph Kirk said.
The 32-year-old widow drives two hours to the nearest post office to pick up the check. If she remarries, she will lose the money, Kirk said.
Kirk said he did not know whether López López had a work visa.
Workers, family members and their lawyers gave conflicting reports about the immigration status of the solar farm workers. Begley told Syracuse.com in January 2023 that they were in the United States legally. Several remain in the United States.
The solar farm workers and their families described surviving dangerous border crossings into the United States. The company does not appear among the names of businesses that applied for visas to host migrant workers.
‘Somebody cares’
Before the crash, some of the men came in contact with a Syracuse group that advocates for migrant workers.
Jessica Maxwell and others from the Workers’ Center of Central New York met Hernández Gómez and José de Jesús Aguirre Tronco in October 2022 when they visited other workers at a greenhouse in North Syracuse.
Hernández Gómez had no concerns, but he invited them to the North Country to help his colleagues who had questions about things like the taxes withheld from their paychecks, Maxwell said.
Hernández Gómez asked if there were other jobs they could do that were not so harsh in the winter. They couldn’t always get in a full work week in snowy conditions, she said.
She told him about a packing plant in Oswego County.
After the accident, the group connected the men with lawyers for workers’ compensation claims and counselors from the Mexican Consulate.
“They’re living in a hotel in the middle of nowhere with nobody to process this,” she said. “They have their coworkers, but they were all traumatized together.”
The advocates brought chicken soup “to try to just give them that sense of somebody cares what happened to you, that this happened,” she said.
He ‘wanted to come back’
The day before he died, Hernández Gómez called his mother, his sister Marta Lucía Hernández Gómez told syracuse.com.
They talked for an hour about how much he missed everyone and wanted to come home to Chiapas, she said.
It was difficult to hear after he suffered so much to get into the United States, she said. He was turned away at the border six times before he finally made it to New York.
“He was happy,” she said in Spanish. “He already wanted to come back.”
The day of the crash, she texted him some childhood pictures. One shows him peering into her baby carrier. Hernández Gómez said she called her brother twice that Saturday and he didn’t answer. Even when he was working, he would usually answer and say he could talk later, she said.
Then, a godfather and an uncle came to the house to tell her parents their son was gone.
Now, she brings his memory to life by replaying the voicemail messages she saved on her phone.
“He had many, many things ahead of him, a future that he wanted,” she said. “God only knows why, why he took him before his time.”
Contact Michelle Breidenbach | mbreidenbach@syracuse.com | 315-470-3186.
Staff writer Rylee Kirk covers breaking news, crime and public safety. Have a tip, story idea, photo, question or comment? Reach her at 315-396-5961, on Twitter @kirk_rylee, or rkirk@syracuse.com.