A 35-year-old woman in New York will spend more than two decades behind bars for killing an NYPD officer while driving drunk without a license in a hit-and-run collision that occurred only a few hours after she had recorded a podcast in which she drank vodka and repeatedly disparaged police.
Queens County Supreme Court Justice Michael Aloise on Wednesday ordered Jessica Beauvais to serve up to 27 years in a state correctional facility in the 2021 death of Detective Anastasios Tsakos, authorities announced.
“Her license had been suspended, she was drunk and had smoked marijuana. For everyone’s safety and wellbeing, including her own, the defendant should not have been behind the wheel of a car,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement following the sentencing hearing. “A police officer, doing his job protecting others, lost his life. I hope today’s sentence provides at least some closure for the detective’s loved ones.”
A jury in October found Beauvais guilty of one count of second-degree aggravated manslaughter, one count of vehicular manslaughter, and one count of leaving the scene of an accident. Aloise sentenced Beauvais to 20 years on the aggravated manslaughter charge and two to seven years for leaving the scene of an accident, with the sentences running consecutively, meaning one after the other. Following her release, Beauvais will be required to spend an additional five years on probation.
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