Anti-cop driver who killed NYPD officer in boozy hit-and-run sentenced after widow’s emotional plea in court
A Long Island woman who killed an NYPD cop in a drunken hit-and-run on the Long Island Expressway was handed a 20-year prison sentence for manslaughter on Wednesday — following a tearful, heart-wrenching plea for justice from the hero officer’s widow.
Irene Tsakos said in a Queens courtroom packed with New York’s Finest that the senseless 2021 death of her cop husband, Anastasios Tsakos, by drunk driver Jessica Beauvais has left her family ravaged.
“As Jessica Beauvais was sobering up in a police station that morning, our world was collapsing,” she sobbed. “Because of a single person’s despicable actions, our family was sentenced to a lifetime of loss.
“My children don’t understand the permanence of death,” Irene Tsakos added. “They were trying to figure out ways to bring him back somehow. Our son wanted me to get him a big kite so he could fly it high in the sky so his daddy could grab onto it and bring him back. He cried daily ’cause Daddy would never hold him again. He was only 3 years old.
“Our 6-year-old daughter is a daddy’s girl,” she said. “At night she would pray and promise to be very good if only he would bring her daddy back.”
Tsakos, a 43-year-old dad of two young kids, was investigating an accident on the Long Island Expressway around 2 a.m. April 27, 2021, when Beauvais allegedly slammed into him — leaving his body battered on the road as she drove off in her damaged 2013 Volkswagen.
At Beauvais’ trial in October, prosecutors gave a gruesome description of his fatal injuries.
“His organs and bones were crushed,” Assistant District Attorney Greg Lasak Jr. told the jury during opening arguments in Queens Supreme Court. “His leg was amputated. He landed 171 feet from impact,” the prosecutor continued. “She left him there on the side of the road to die, without his leg.”
Beauvais, 34, was high on drugs and had a blood alcohol level of .15 — nearly twice the legal limit — when she hit Tsakos, a 14-year NYPD veteran at the time of his death.
Just hours before the tragedy, Beauvais was on a live podcast posted on Facebook that showed her downing drinks — including guzzling several shots — while going off on an anti-cop rant.
Irene Tsakos slammed the podcast during her statement Wednesday.
“I want to say that you do not think, speak and spread hate out into the world and expect good things to happen to you,” she told Beauvais. “You cannot wish harm on people and influence others to do harm and expect good things in return.
“You killed my husband, an innocent man, a good man who did nothing to you,” she said. “That’s on your conscience. Your choice and your behavior landed you here today. You have no one but yourself to blame.”
At her trial last year, defense attorney Jorge Santos told jurors the cop was at least partially to blame.
“The officers were not wearing reflective vests,” the lawyer said. “Officer Tsakos was sitting on the police car. Regulations require him to be facing traffic but he was text messaging on his phone looking down.”
He also said Beauvais was driving at speeds up to 70 mph on the expressway but slowed down “significantly” and was cruising “almost at the speed limit” when she allegedly struck the cop.
The jury, however, brushed aside those arguments and Beauvais was convicted on all charges at the end of October.
In court Wednesday, Queens Supreme Court Justice Michael Aloise sentenced her to 20 years in prison for aggravated manslaughter and 2 1/3 to 7 years for leaving the scene of an accident, with the sentences to run consecutively.
Asked for leniency by Beauvais’ lawyer, the judge said she got all the leniency she was going to get during the prosecution’s presentation to a grand jury.
“In my opinion, leniency was shown in the presentation to the grand jury,” Aloise said. “I think that if the grand jury was presented with the opportunity to indict this defendant with depraved and indifferent homicide, if they had done that, based on the evidence presented to this court she would have been convicted and I would have unhesitantly given her life for having taken a life.”
Beauvais was also convicted of negligent homicide, which also carries a 2 1/3- to 7-year sentence but is to run concurrently with the other sentences.
