Singas: get tougher on scofflaw drivers

Twelve-year-old Zachary Ranftle was killed in December when a driver with a suspended license struck him on Merrick Road in Valley Stream. Last week, Acting Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas joined Zachary’s parents to call on state lawmakers to adopt legislation her office drafted that creates stiffer penalties for drivers with suspended or revoked licenses who kill or seriously injure others.

“Today we say, ‘Enough,’” Singas said on April 2. “Innocent people should not have to live in fear of suspended or revoked drivers who should not be on the road. I call upon the Legislature to recognize that a suspended or revoked driver who seriously injures or kills should be charged with a felony — not the same misdemeanor charge the driver would have received if they had just been stopped by a police officer.”

Singas and Zachary’s parents, Kathleen and Patrick Flood, held a press conference the same day that the driver who was charged with the boy’s death, Austin Soldano, 29, of Seaford, was arraigned on a grand jury indictment. Singas’s office combined Soldano’s previous felony charges of driving while intoxicated in Long Beach in August 2014 with the misdemeanor charges he faces in connection with the incident in December, when he made a right turn from South Franklin Avenue onto Merrick Road in a GMC Yukon, according to police, striking Zachary as the seventh-grader walked to Memorial Junior High School.

The indictment effectively wrapped the previous DWI charges into the same case as the misdemeanors, since it was the August arrest that resulted in the suspension of Soldano’s license. Singas’s office called the two cases “inextricably linked.”

If he is convicted of the DWI charges, Soldano faces up to 1 1/3 to 4 years in prison, according to Paul Leonard, Singas’s deputy communications director. Soldano also faces 180 days for the misdemeanor charge of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle for the incident that resulted in Zachary’s death. By law, that sentence would be merged with any sentence Soldano receives for the DWI. He is due back in court on April 24.