The cabbie who killed a 9-year-old boy as he held his dad’s hand in a Manhattan crosswalk was given a slap on the wrist sentence Monday as the child’s family ripped the Manhattan DA for not criminally prosecuting the driver.
Koffi Komlani, 55, was hit with just a $580 fine in a plea deal for failing to exercise due care in the Upper West Side crash that killed Cooper Stock. He will also have his license suspended for six months.
“My son’s life is worth $580?” said the victim’s mother Dana Lerner. “It’s an insult. It’s a criminal offense. At the very least, he should have his license permanently removed. The District Attorney should have made more of an effort to make this a criminal offense.”
Komlani could have gotten 15 days in jail for the traffic offense with which he was charged, but his lawyer Raymond Colon told The Post that prosecutors never asked for that.
Lerner said District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office told her they needed two misdemeanors to charge Komlani criminally — even though the prosecutor campaigned on getting rid of that case law precedent, referred to as the “rule of two.”
During Komlani’s court appearance, prosecutor Mary Ostberg read a statement from Lerner and her husband Dr. Richard Stock.
“It goes without saying that what happened here today does not even begin to bring justice in the death of my son Cooper Stock,” she said. “Giving this man a traffic ticket for killing my son is an insult to us and to Cooper’s memory. Is a life worth nothing more than a traffic ticket?”
Komlani, who hails from upstate Harriman, tearfully apologized in court for the Jan. 10 crash last year, but claimed he didn’t know what happened.
“I’m just sorry for what happened,” he said. “I have no words to justify how I feel. I don’t know what happened. For that day, I’m sorry.”
In a court appearance in December, Komlani had blamed the light fog that night and even tried to fight the two traffic tickets he got for the crash.
He was given one for failing to yield, and one for failing to exercise due care.
Stock was coming home from dinner with his dad when Komlani turned left from 97th Street onto West End Avenue, and hit both of them in the crosswalk on the avenue.
Cooper’s Law, named in the child’s memory, was passed last year. It gives the city the power to take away a cab driver’s license if the hack fails to yield and causes a serious or fatal crash.
Komlani, who was a new cabbie and still on probation, had his Hacks License stripped permanently last spring.