Can Gov. Hochul Stop Staged Car Crashes in New York?
2nd March 2026
When Ian Davey of Davenport, Florida, filed an insurance claim for a 2023 car crash with a day care bus in Queens, he filled in a section asking whether the incident was staged with a definitive answer: “Hells F–ing NO.”
But there were some red flags.
The doctor who declared Davey “totally disabled” by his injuries was a urologist practicing at a hospital in Bangladesh, according to court documents. Records show the only witness to the collision owned a personal injury consulting firm and later retracted his statement to investigators. And the surgeon who operated on Davey was named in a civil racketeering case as part of an alleged criminal network that staged crashes and exaggerated injuries to inflate insurance claims.
“This case is a fraud from top to bottom, an entirely manufactured claim,” said attorney Dan Johnston, who’s representing the bus driver. “The most horrifying part is that this is a set of circumstances that repeat over and over again every single day in the courts of New York.”