Documents Show General Motors Kept Silent on Fatal Crashes
By REBECCA R. RUIZ and DANIELLE IVORY
New York Times
JULY 15, 2014

In a truly civil society, corporate executives would do hard prison time for contributing to or covering up death and destruction.
Mike Velemirovich, Nova Scotia

How can GM corporate individuals remain completely unpunished after making such terrible decisions?? It defies logic. They are brazen... The car crash that killed Gene Erickson caught the attention of federal regulators. Why did the Saturn Ion he was traveling in, along a rural Texas road, suddenly swerve into a tree? Why did the air bags fail? General Motors told federal authorities that it could not provide answers.

But only a month earlier, a G.M. engineer had concluded in an internal evaluation that the Ion had most likely lost power, disabling its air bags, according to a subsequent internal investigation commissioned by G.M.

Now, G.M.'s response, as well as its replies to queries in other crashes obtained by The New York Times from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, casts doubt on how forthright the automaker was with regulators over a defective ignition switch that G.M. has linked to at least 13 deaths over the last decade.

They provide details for the first time on the issue at the heart of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department: whether G.M., in its interaction with safety regulators, obscured a deadly defect that would also injure perhaps hundreds of people...