A furious Queens mom yesterday lashed out at the man who killed her daughter and ripped the legal system after he was sentenced to just a year in jail.
“Marvin, I want you to look at her,” said Dolores Johnson, as she held up an 8-by-10 photo of her daughter, Dominique Johnson, who was killed on Dec. 20.
“Look at her. What did she do to you?”
Marvin Oestricher, 20, admitted he shot Johnson in the neck at a Springfield Gardens party, but prosecutors believed his story that the gun went off accidentally while he was showing off the illegal weapon.
Rather than face up to 25 years on a manslaughter charge, he pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon.
“It appears that from all of the evidence that this was in fact an accident,” prosecutor Erin Zacher told Supreme Court Justice Dorothy Chin-Brandt, who imposed the agreed sentence.
“There is no type of plea that will make up for the loss of Mrs. Johnson’s daughter.”
Her words didn’t comfort Johnson.
“What the system is really doing is punishing my family and rewarding the killer, and I don’t understand why,” Johnson told the judge.
Neither Oestricher nor his lawyer, Eugene Levy, addressed the shooting incident yesterday.
With her husband by her side, Johnson read from a letter she wrote to the court – remembering their daughter as a loving child who cared deeply for her family.
“Dominique and I had developed a strong bond. We were very close,” Johnson said of the 18-year-old, who had just moved home from boarding school.
She said they spoke over the phone several times a day and enjoyed shopping together and staying up late talking and laughing.
“She would give me hugs and kisses and one would think she had not seen me for awhile,” Johnson said.
“They would never believe she just saw me that morning before I left for work.”
The heartbroken mom said Dominique was her only child, meaning she will never have grandchildren.
“Oestricher has taken all these things away from me and my family,” she said.
“We don’t want revenge, we just want justice.”