The widow of one of the victims of a fatal truck crash in Connecticut is suing the company whose dump truck caused the wreck.

Ellen Stotler, the wife of Paul A. “Chip” Stotler, who was killed in the July 29 crash, has sued to freeze the assets of American Crushing & Recycling, and has told the state’s transportation commissioner that she also intends to file suit against the state for ignoring the safety problems at the crash site, the Hartford Courant reported.

On July 29, a 12-wheeled dump truck owned by American Crushing and Recycling careened down Route 44 near Avon, and slammed into cars waiting at the intersection with Route 10 at the bottom of a steep grade. Four people were killed, including the truck’s driver, Abdulraheem Naafi, also known as Terrance R. Stokes.

“Unfortunately, the state waited until after this horrendous collision to put up the appropriate signs, and they still haven’t developed a plan for putting up runaway truck ramps or closing the road to trucks entirely,” Stotler’s lawyer, Michael A. Stratton, told the Courant. “Chip and his family paid a terrible price for that inaction.”

The lawsuit is the latest legal problem for the trucking company. On Thursday, Sept. 22, new evidence surfaced showing that on Jan. 3 American Crushing and Recycling had suspended its insurance coverage on the truck involved in the crash. The company cashed a refund check of almost $40,000, the Courant reported. Then, 118 minutes after the July 29 crash, the company’s insurance agent requested a reinstatement of the suspended coverage, retroactive to July 1.

However, Hubert J. Santos, a lawyer for the trucking company, issued a statement Friday,Sept. 23, that said the company had “continuous liability coverage at all times.”

On Thursday, Sept. 22, Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell asked the state’s attorney general to determine if the company could be criminally charged with fraud for operating without insurance.

“The more I learn about this company the more enraged and horror-struck I become,” Rell said in a statement.

The accident sparked public interest and outrage, causing officials to take a hard look at safety violators within the state. On Aug. 17, Rell asked for a top-25 list of companies with poor safety records. Those companies underwent additional inspections, putting 61 trucks out of service.

However, the list faced scrutiny for not including companies based in Connecticut and operating out-of-state. On Aug. 23, the state’s Transportation Commissioner released a second list of the top 25 interstate companies with poor safety records on order of the governor.

Department of Transportation records show that inspectors had found five brake violations on the truck involved in the crash during inspections in the past. All of the problems were corrected, according to Newsday.

American Crushing and Recycling, the company that owned the truck, also had 448 mechanical violations between 1994 and 2001 while operating as Wilcox Trucking. The company changed names after the state Department of Motor Vehicles suspended the registrations of 16 of its trucks because they failed to comply with a number of repair orders, a DMV spokesperson told Newsday.

Despite a number of violations, the company was not in either of the lists for the top 25 violators in the state.

Naafi’s own history is also being questioned in the investigation. The accident occurred just two days after he began working for American Crushing and Recycling – the day after he was fired from another trucking company partially because he could not operate the truck’s transmission, Newsday reported.

Under a third, unreleased name, Naafi had a criminal record that included a robbery conviction.