A Long Island woman who killed an NYPD police officer in a drunken hit-and-run on the Long Island Expressway was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years in prison for manslaughter after the heroic officer’s heartbreaking and tearful plea. was announced. she is a widow.
Irene Tsakos told a Queens courtroom packed with New York’s Finest that her family was shattered by the senseless death of her police officer husband Anastasios Tsakos at the hands of drunk driver Jessica Beauvais in 2021. .
“As Jessica Bouvet sobered up at the police station that morning, our world was falling apart,” she sobbed. “Because of one person’s despicable act, our family has been sentenced to a lifetime of loss.
“My children don’t understand the permanence of death,” added Irene Tsakos. “They were trying to figure out a way to bring him back. My son bought me a big kite, flew it high in the air, and wanted his daddy to grab him and bring him home. He cried every day. Yes, because Daddy would never hold him again. He was only three years old.
“Our 6-year-old daughter is a daddy’s girl,” she said. “At night she prayed and she promised me that things would be so much better if I could bring her dad back.”
Tsakos, a 43-year-old father of two young children, was investigating a crash on the Long Island Expressway around 2 a.m. on April 27, 2021, when Beauvais struck him, killing him. He is said to have driven off, leaving the car crashing into the road. She was driving a damaged 2013 Volkswagen.
At Beauvais’s trial in October, prosecutors gave a gruesome account of his fatal injuries.
“His organs and bones were crushed,” Assistant District Attorney Greg Lasak Jr. told jurors during opening arguments in Queens Supreme Court. “His leg was severed. He landed 171 feet from impact,” the prosecutor continued. “She left him to die on the side of the road, missing his legs.”
Beauvais, 34, was a drug addict and had a blood-alcohol level of 0.15 (nearly twice the legal limit) when he fatally struck Tsakos, a 14-year NYPD veteran.
Just hours before the tragedy, Beauvais appeared on a live podcast posted to Facebook, in which she was seen downing several drinks while issuing an anti-cop rant.
At her trial, defense attorney Jorge Santos told jurors that the officers were at least partially to blame.
“The officers were not wearing reflective vests,” the attorney said. “Officer Tsakos was sitting in his patrol car. Regulations require him to face traffic, but he was looking down and texting on his cell phone.”
He also said Beauvais was driving at speeds of up to 110km/h on the motorway, but at the time he allegedly hit the officer he had slowed down “significantly” and was cruising at “approximately the speed limit”. said that he had done so.
However, the jury ignored those arguments, and Beauvais was found guilty on all charges in late October.
In court Wednesday, Queens Supreme Court Judge Michael Aloisido sentenced her to 20 years in prison for aggravated manslaughter and 2 1/2 to 7 years for leaving the scene of an accident, with the sentences to run consecutively. It was decided that
Beauvais was also found guilty of negligent homicide and sentenced to 2 1/2 to 7 years in prison, which will be served concurrently with his other sentences.
