She Spent Days Baking Desserts for a Wedding . The Driver of the Bus That Killed Her Family Couldn’t Read English Road Signs.
An immigrant family from Moldova, on their way to celebrate. A 48-year-old Chinese driver from Staten Island who federal officials say had no business behind the wheel of a 34-passenger motorcoach. Five dead on I-95.
She Had Spent Days Baking
There is a photograph the Doncev family used for their GoFundMe page that you will not be able to forget once you have seen it. Dmitri, the father, stands on the right in a navy patterned shirt. His hand rests on the shoulder of his thirteen-year-old daughter Emily, who is wearing a private-school uniform — white blouse, plaid skirt, the Providence school crest behind her. Their seven-year-old son Mark stands solemnly in the middle, in a small dark blazer. Ecaterina, the mother, stands on the left holding a bouquet of flowers.
They had emigrated from Moldova in 2008 and settled in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Dmitri, 45, was a nurse at Holyoke Medical Center. Ecaterina, 44, was a hairstylist. According to relatives interviewed by the Associated Press, she had spent days in her kitchen baking homemade desserts for a family wedding in South Carolina. The wedding was on Sunday. A carload of those desserts was traveling with the family when they pulled onto Interstate 95 in the predawn hours of Friday, May 29.
Dmitri’s brother Iuri was making the same drive in a separate vehicle. At some point on the road, the two cars got separated. “Dmitri said, ‘You go ahead. I’ll catch up later,’” his niece, Carolina Bublik, later told reporters.
Iuri arrived at the house in South Carolina.
Dmitri’s car did not. He wasn’t picking up the phone.
That was when the family began to panic.
Mile Marker 146
At approximately 2:35 a.m., near mile marker 146 in Stafford County, Virginia — within sight of the Quantico exit — southbound traffic on I-95 was slowing for a work zone. Cars were merging into a single lane. This is the most ordinary hazard on the most heavily trafficked highway corridor in the eastern United States.
A 56-passenger motorcoach operated by E&P Travel Inc., en route from New York City to Charlotte, North Carolina, did not slow.
Virginia State Police say the bus plowed into the back of a Chevrolet Suburban at what NTSB Board Member Tom Chapman later described as “a high rate of speed” with “little, if any, braking” before impact. The Suburban was driven into the Acura carrying the Doncev family. The Acura caught fire. Four more vehicles were struck in the chain reaction.
The driver of the Suburban — 25-year-old Priscilla R. Mafalda of Worcester, Massachusetts — was killed. All four Doncevs were killed. Forty-four other people were transported to hospitals; three were initially listed in critical condition. There were thirty-four passengers on the bus.
The bus driver — 48-year-old Jing Sheng Dong of Staten Island, New York — survived. He was arrested in his hospital bed Saturday evening. Stafford County Commonwealth’s Attorney Eric Olsen charged him with two felony counts of involuntary manslaughter. A magistrate ordered him held without bond.
A License From a State That Doesn’t Ask
Within hours of the crash, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was on X with a statement that did not bother with the usual diplomatic pause. The driver, Duffy said, did not speak English. He had obtained his Commercial Driver’s License in New York in 2024. And Duffy left no ambiguity about who he blamed.
“This is unacceptable. This is exactly why we have been working so hard to strictly enforce traffic regulations and crack down on drivers who can’t speak English,” Duffy wrote. “If you cannot accept proper training, cannot read road signs, or cannot communicate with law enforcement officers, you should not be driving a bus.”
The training providers, the CDL school, and the driver’s history are now under federal review. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration says “any motor carrier school or training provider that puts unqualified drivers on the road will face strict scrutiny.”
This is the part where the story stops being about one terrible crash.
Washington Has Been Saying This Out Loud
For more than a year, the Department of Transportation has been telling the country, in increasingly urgent language, that a category of unqualified commercial drivers has been quietly accumulating on American highways — and that the failure point was at the state level, in the issuance of so-called “non-domiciled CDLs” and the under-enforcement of English Language Proficiency standards.
The numbers DOT has published in its own briefings are striking. Since June 2025, more than 20,000 truckers have been placed out of service for failing to meet basic requirements, according to FMCSA. More than 28,000 illegally issued non-domiciled CDLs have been revoked nationwide. More than 6,800 training providers have been struck from the federal registry. Twenty-six states have been served with official enforcement actions for issuing non-compliant CDLs.
And the federal hammer has come down hardest on the states that have leaned hardest into the loopholes. FMCSA withheld $40 million from California in October 2025 for refusing to enforce English Language Proficiency. It withheld $160 million from California in January 2026 for failing to revoke illegally issued non-domiciled CDLs.
In April 2026, FMCSA withheld $73 million from New York — the state that issued Jing Sheng Dong’s CDL the year before — for the same failure.
A month later, his bus failed to slow on I-95.
The Company in Kings Mountain
E&P Travel Inc., the carrier that put Dong behind the wheel, was incorporated in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, on November 24, 2023 — barely eighteen months before the crash. According to North Carolina Secretary of State records, it was registered by an individual named Shuo Liu, who is also listed as the company’s registered agent.
The federal record on this carrier is not the picture of a long-running fly-by-night. FMCSA’s compliance snapshot listed its safety rating as “satisfactory.” The company operated four vehicles with eleven drivers. But the violation history, when you read it carefully, is the kind of thing that warrants a second look.
According to FMCSA data reported by NBC News, the company had four violations: three for driving a bus fifteen or more miles per hour above the posted speed limit, and one for a driver who allegedly could not satisfy English proficiency requirements. The company was also involved in a 2024 crash that injured nine people; fault was not formally assigned.
A small carrier. A pattern of speeding violations. A pre-existing English-proficiency citation. A driver licensed by a state that the federal government had just publicly sanctioned for licensing failures. A 2:35 a.m. departure from New York running a long-haul interstate route popular with budget travelers.
These are the components that the National Transportation Safety Board will now spend months reassembling. None of them, individually, was supposed to be enough to kill the Doncev family. Collectively, they were.
What the Numbers Won’t Say
It is worth steelmanning the strongest objection to where this story is now headed. Commercial driving is dangerous. Charter buses log millions of miles every week. Crashes happen. Drivers who speak fluent English crash buses, too. The honest answer to “did the language barrier cause this crash?” is that the NTSB has not yet concluded that — and may never definitively conclude it. The most likely proximate cause is the failure to brake for a work zone, which can result from fatigue, distraction, mechanical failure, or any number of factors unrelated to language.
That argument is true. It is also incomplete.
The federal English Language Proficiency standard does not exist because Washington thinks immigrants should not drive trucks. It exists because a commercial motor vehicle operator who cannot read a work-zone advisory sign, cannot understand a CB radio warning from another driver, and cannot communicate with a state trooper at a roadside inspection is a worse driver than one who can. The standard has been on the books, in some form, for decades. What changed under the previous administration was the willingness to enforce it. What changed under the current one is the willingness to claw back federal funding from states that refused to.
The deeper story on I-95 last Friday morning is not about one driver. It is about a parallel transportation economy — small charter operators, often serving immigrant communities, often running discount long-haul routes between Chinese, Korean, and Latin American population centers — that has grown up in the gap between what federal regulators require and what state DMVs actually verify. It is profitable precisely because it is cheap. It is cheap precisely because the labor pool includes drivers who could not pass a Commercial Driver’s License exam in any other jurisdiction in the developed world.
The cost of that economy is not paid by the people who run it. It is paid by people like Priscilla Mafalda, driving home from somewhere at 2:35 a.m. on a Friday. It is paid by Dmitri Doncev, who told his brother you go ahead, I’ll catch up later.
It is paid by a thirteen-year-old girl in a school-crest blouse and a seven-year-old boy in a small navy blazer who never made it to the wedding.
The federal investigation is ongoing. The criminal proceedings against Jing Sheng Dong have just begun. The audit of New York’s non-domiciled CDL issuance is, as of this writing, still unresolved. The Doncev family’s GoFundMe is currently the only place in this story where the desserts that Ecaterina spent days baking are mentioned at all.
The wedding in South Carolina went forward on Sunday. The family said it had to.
Original article by me @aricchen. Views are my own — welcome to discuss!
© 2026 Aric Chen