AUSTIN, Texas — The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launched an incident investigation on Monday into last month’s deadly school bus crash in Bastrop County.
On March 22, an FJM concrete pumper truck crashed into a Hays CISD school bus on State Highway 21, killing 5-year-old Ulises Rodriguez Montoya and 33-year-old Ryan Wallace, who was driving in a car behind the bus.
The driver of the concrete pumper truck, Jerry Hernandez, is charged with criminally negligent homicide.
In a statement to KVUE, the NTSB said an incident investigation is different from a full investigation. It will not be sending a team of issuing any reports, findings or conclusions about the crash.
“We will be gathering information from the Texas Department of Public Safety and other local authorities which could be referenced in other school bus crash investigations we are currently conducting,” the NTSB said.
The incident investigation could help federal officials understand similar crashes and determine potential safety improvements, Deputy Director of the Office of Highway Safety Kristin Poland told KVUE’s media partners at the Austin-American Statesman on Wednesday. The agency is also investigating other recent school bus crashes in West Virginia and Illinois.
Poland told the Statesman the safety board’s incident investigations seek to understand the safety features of the vehicles involved in a crash.
"What we want to understand is what's on the vehicle at the time of the crash and what could have been on the vehicle at the time of the crash," Poland told the Statesman. "It's not just the school bus. We're looking at all the other vehicles and the environment at well."
Last month, Hays CISD told KVUE the district has 109 buses on a daily route and that the one involved in the accident was one of 15 older buses that doesn't have seat belts. The district bought those buses prior to a 2017 Texas law that required all new buses to have seat belts.
The district said it now has 21 new buses that will replace the ones without seat belts.
Investigators say Hernandez admitted to using cocaine the morning of the crash and he had failed drug tests in 2020, 2022 and 2023 but didn't go through a background check before working for the concrete company.
As of April 5, Hernandez remains booked in jail on a $500,000 bond for the criminally negligent homicide charge. He is not currently facing any additional charges.