By Scott Brinton
Calhoun addresses drunk driving.
Joseph Dell'Anno clutched a framed photograph of his daughter, Ginamarie, and held back tears as he spoke before a crowd of roughly 100 Calhoun High School seniors last Wednesday morning. Behind him in the dimly lit auditorium, family photographs of Ginamarie flashed across a giant projection screen.
The 23-year-old Massapequa Park resident was a passenger in a sports car that veered off the Wantagh Parkway in October 2004. The vehicle was speeding at more than 120 miles an hour -- fast enough, Joseph Dell'Anno noted, for a small plane to take off. Ginamarie died in what her father said could only be described as a "wreck." So did a second passenger, Matthew Adduci, 29, of Bethpage.
The driver, 24-year-old Anthony Raffio, survived the crash. He was drunk at the time. He pleaded guilty recently to two counts of vehicular manslaughter in the second degree, a Class D felony, and driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to 2 1/3 to 7 seven years in prison.
His sentencing brought no relief from the psychic wounds that Joseph Dell'Anno suffered on the day his daughter died. "I cannot explain the pain," Dell'Anno told the Calhoun students. "It's unbelievable. I never thought in a million years that this would happen."
Dell'Anno was speaking as part of an hour-long program developed by Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, a Democrat, to send a message to graduating high school seniors: Don't drink and drive. Drinking and driving kills.
Wendy Tepfer, the Bellmore-Merrick Community Parent Center coordinator, helped bring the assembly to Calhoun. Arnold Goldstein, Bellmore-Merrick's assistant superintendent for instruction, said the district intends to offer the program at all three Central District high schools in the fall. It might also be shown to parents.
Assistant District Attorney Maureen McCormick, chief of the DA's Vehicular Offenses Bureau who prosecuted the Raffio case, wrote the program. It brings together the family member of a DWI victim, in this case Joseph Dell'Anno, with two young DWI offenders who were caught driving drunk before they killed anyone. As part of their sentences, they must do community service, speaking to young people about their experiences after they were arrested for DWI.
With tears filling her eyes and stuttering as she spoke, one young woman told of how she was strip-searched twice before she was sent to a sterile cell in the Nassau County jail on the night that she was arrested. She said she is sorry that she injured - and nearly killed - a man who was riding his bicycle. And she now faces years in legal battles and tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys' fees. She lives with her brother at his Queens apartment because she hasn't the money for her own place. She is unsure whether she will go to prison.
New York Sen. Charles Fuschillo, who has authored a number of bills and laws to toughen the state's DWI statutes, was on hand for the presentation. The senator, a Republican of Merrick, said he has a 10th-grader at Calhoun. He wants to protect young people from the fate suffered by Ginamarie Dell'Anno and Matthew Adduci.
Fuschillo also spoke of the Flynn family of Long Beach. Seven-year-old Katie Flynn died in a limousine crash on the west side of the Meadowbrook Parkway, near the Babylon Turnpike exit, in July 2005. A drunken driver, Martin Heidgen, who was speeding the wrong way in a pickup truck on the Meadowbrook, slammed his vehicle into the limousine, whose driver, Stanley Rabinowitz, 59, died as well. Katie had served as a flower girl in a family wedding earlier in the day. Her mother, Jennifer, found her severed head in the grass. Heidgen was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to 18 years to life in prison.
State DWI laws, Fuschillo insisted, must be upgraded. "There are too many loopholes, too many excuses," he said.
Writing in the Nassau Lawyer newsletter last year, Rice said DWI crashes are not accidents; they are products of bad choices. "The only difference between a misdemeanor DWI and a homicide prosecution is pure luck - absolute arbitrary luck," Rice wrote. "The behavior on the part of the defendant is exactly the same in both cases. The only thing that differs is the result."
John Brigandi, a Nassau County police officer attached to the central DWI testing unit in Mineola, said his office processes 3,500 to 4,000 suspected drunken drivers annually.
According to the DA's office, between 2001 and 2005, 171 people died in DWI crashes in Nassau County; 91 died in intentional homicides.
In an interview after the assembly, McCormick, a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney, said she hopes to see the DA's DWI program shown at every Nassau County high school. She noted, though, that "it's very difficult to get into schools. They are inundated with requests for" assemblies.
This program, however, is one that all high school students should be required to see, McCormick said.
B: Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, at lectern, developed the DWI program with Maureen McCormick, chief of the DA's Vehicular Offenses Bureau.
E: State Sen. Charles Fuschillo Jr., a Republican of Merrick who has worked to upgrade DWI laws, spoke at the assembly.
Comments about this story? Sbrinton@liherald.com (516) 569-4000 ext. 203.
