Ordered to End Tours : PUC Probing Firm in Fatal Van Crash

The state Public Utilities Commission is investigating whether a Koreatown tour company violated an order to temporarily cease operations by organizing a tour of the Grand Canyon last weekend, just three days after one of the firm’s vans crashed in the California desert, killing seven passengers and injuring five others.

The commission has received several reports this week that Doremi Tours of Los Angeles took 21 people to the Grand Canyon during the Memorial Day weekend. “Right now, we have a few leads and we’re trying to confirm them,” said Mike Coughlin, head of the commission’s Los Angeles enforcement office.

Last Thursday, a day after the van overturned and crashed on Interstate 15, near the Nevada border, PUC officials ordered Doremi to cease all operations in California or face prosecution for operating without government permits.

Two victims of the crash were memorialized in a funeral service Wednesday attended by 250 mourners, many from Los Angeles’ Korean community. Although police and safety specialists are still investigating the cause of the crash, California Highway Patrol officials have said the van was traveling at more than 55 m.p.h.

Alan S. Vertun, an attorney for Doremi’s owner, Ji Soo Kim, said he had no knowledge of any Grand Canyon trip. “As far as I was told, there were no further tours,” Vertun said, adding that Kim had told him that the firm had ceased all operations after the crash.

Vertun said that on Tuesday, Kim showed him a letter from the PUC, dated May 22, ordering Doremi to shut down its operations. Vertun said he was uncertain whether Kim received the order before or after the Memorial Day weekend.

But a Doremi tour guide interviewed at the company’s headquarters on Olympic Boulevard said Wednesday that his firm had booked 21 clients into a three-day bus tour of the Grand Canyon beginning May 23. The Doremi guide, Tae Soo Kim (no relation to the firm’s owner), said the company, which had booked the tour more than a month ago, did not itself conduct the tour. Tae Kim said that the clients were instead added to a Grand Canyon tour organized by Saerona Tour Service, another Koreatown tour company.

“Originally we had 40 reservations. All but 21 canceled their reservations after the accident,” Tae Kim said through an interpreter. “Those 21 were added to the Saerona Tour Service’s trip to Grand Canyon and boarded on the same bus.”

Saerona officials, however, insisted Wednesday that the two tours went on different buses and were run separately.

Saerona’s owner, Se Hwan Kim, said that most of Doremi’s passengers had already paid that firm for the Grand Canyon tour. “We did not make any money from this,” Se Kim said. “It was all Doremi’s operation.”

Yong H. Kim, a Saerona tour guide, said that although both tours boarded their separate buses outside Saerona’s West 8th Street headquarters last Saturday, his firm did not collect any payment from Doremi clients. Yong Kim added that while Saerona’s passengers stayed at the Mountainside Hotel in Williams Village, Ariz., the Doremi customers stayed at another hotel in the Grand Canyon area.

Regulation Issue

In the wake of the van crash, Yong Kim said, some of Koreatown’s tour operators have begun talking about forming an association to regulate the community’s tourist trade. The tour guide said that the association would insist that its members obtain proper licensing and provide adequate insurance coverage for any future catastrophes.

Preliminary checks by investigators from the PUC and the National Transportation Safety Board have been unable to find any state permits filed by Doremi. State penalties for operating without proper authorization include a $1,000-a-day fine or three months of imprisonment.

At a funeral held Wednesday at St. Gregory’s Catholic Church in Koreatown for two of the van crash victims, family members complained bitterly about what they claimed was Doremi Tours’ reluctance to provide unconditional aid to help defray burial and other expenses.

Jae Young Lee, who carried a gilt-framed photograph of his mother, Kwang Ok Suh, as he led a procession of her mourners from the church, said that he was offered $6,000 by Doremi’s owner to cover funeral costs. Lee said that Doremi owner Kim offered him the money only with the condition that he sign legal papers that would allow Doremi attorneys to “resolve compensation related to the death of my mother.”

Lee said he refused the offer. “I told him I would not agree to any conditional offers at this time,” he said.

Some Reportedly Accept

Doremi tour guide Tae Soo Kim said that three of the seven families of the crash victims have accepted the firm’s offer to pay for funeral expenses. Doremi attorney Vertun said he was not aware of any conditional offers. “(The firm) has sent out letters of sympathy and said they would be happy to help,” Vertun said.

The funeral for Kwang Ok Suh, who was 68, and another Los Angeles woman, Chae Chung Kang, 72, lasted little more than an hour. More than 250 Korean immigrants, some wearing the traditional white mourning garments of their homeland and others dressed in black, listened solemnly as the Rev. Anthony Mortell briefly eulogized the two women.

“It was such a shock to this community, such a huge tragedy” the priest said.

After the service, as the coffins were slowly slid into two hearses, Chie Myung Lee, the daughter-in-law of Kwang Ok Suh, bent over and cried out: “Why is this? We believed our mother would live a long life and now she’s no longer here!”

Contributing to this story was staff photographer Hyungwon Kang.