‘SORRY EVERY DAY’: Bus driver Ophadell Williams. (Dennis Clark)
He wants to get back behind the wheel.
The Chinatown casino-bus driver recently acquitted of manslaughter for the deaths of 15 passengers in a horrific Bronx crash admitted yesterday that he still hopes to drive a bus again one day.
“I love to drive buses. I drove a bus for 11 years,” Ophadell Williams, 41, told The Post at his Brooklyn home.
But he conceded, “Who’s going to hire me?”
“I feel sorry every day . . . I hurt every day,” Williams (pictured, yesterday) added, recalling the March 2011 crash on I-95. “My heart hurts. Fifteen people pass away — 14 people got hurt and lost limbs.”
Still, “I have to live with it the rest of my life,’’ the driver said. “It’s a tragic thing. I can’t even imagine it, and I was there.
“Nobody is a winner here,” said Williams, adding that he’d like to meet with the crash survivors.
Williams spent 15 months locked up on Rikers Island on charges that he was so sleep-deprived while driving a World Wide Travel bus back from the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut that he was criminally responsible for the deaths and injuries.
Federal safety investigators determined his bus was speeding at 78 mph in a 50-mph-limit zone just before it careened onto its side and its top half was sheared off when it struck a pole.
Still, jurors acquitted Williams on Friday of nearly all charges.