A Long Island man has pleaded guilty to driving drunk and killing a Nassau County police officer, in a case that prosecutors say followed hours of underage drinking before the deadly crash. Matthew Smith, 20, admitted in court to the role he played in a collision that took the life of an officer on her way to work, with members of her family sitting in the courtroom as he entered his plea.
According to prosecutors, Smith began drinking on the afternoon of January 30, moving between bars and buying alcohol in Hauppauge, Miller Place and Patchogue over the course of the day and into the night. The account laid out in court described a young man, under the legal drinking age, spending hours consuming alcohol at a string of locations before getting behind the wheel.
Early the next morning, at around 5:30, Smith was turned away from Jake's 58 in Islandia. About 20 minutes later he ran a stop sign while driving between 70 and 75 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone in Lake Grove, far beyond the limit for the residential roads he was travelling on.
It was on that stretch that he struck Officer Patricia Espinosa as she drove to work. The crash killed the officer, turning what should have been an ordinary commute into a tragedy that prosecutors and her relatives say has left a permanent void in the lives of those closest to her.
Espinosa's family was in the courtroom as Smith pleaded guilty, and their grief was raw. "This family is destroyed," one relative said, rejecting any suggestion that the plea brought a sense of resolution. "You want to talk about closure. There's no closure." For them, the guilty plea did little to ease the loss of a wife, mother and sister.
Reporters who visited one of the bars Smith had been to found that he admitted to drinking there, while the owner denied knowing anything about serving someone under the legal age. The question of how a 20-year-old was able to drink for hours at several establishments before the crash has become one of the threads running through the case.
Smith now faces up to 22 years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced on July 20. Until then, the family of Officer Espinosa is left to wait, having made clear that no court outcome will bring back the person they lost on a road she travelled every day to serve her community.