A Long Island woman who killed an NYPD cop in a drunken hit-and-run on the Long Island Expressway was hit with a 20-year prison sentence for manslaughter on Wednesday — following a heart-wrenching and tearful 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 Bouve 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 ‘cuz 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. on 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.
At her trial, 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 at “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 on Wednesday, Queens Supreme Court Justice Michael Aloysed 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.
Beauvais was also convicted of negligent homicide, which also carries a 2 1/3 to 7 years sentence but is to run concurrently with the other sentences.
