via GoFundMe page
The former NYPD sergeant who drove drunk in the wrong direction on the Taconic State Parkway and killed longtime Upper East Side doorman Manuel Boitel has pleaded guilty.
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Tiffany Howell, 48, of Warwick, pleaded guilty Wednesday to aggravated vehicular homicide, a class B felony, and second-degree manslaughter, a class C felony, before Judge Anne B. Bianchi in Westchester County Court, according to the New York Attorney General’s Office. Bianchi said she’ll sentence Howell to four to 12 years in prison. Howell waived her right to appeal.Sentencing is scheduled for October 28. The judge continued bail at a $250,000 bond, or a $500,000 partially secured bond, with a $100,000 cash alternative.
Howell admitted to two of the five felony counts she was indicted on in March. She pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicular homicide, the top charge, and to second-degree manslaughter. Prosecutors said at her arraignment that the top count alone carried up to 25 years in prison. The four to 12 years the judge described is well below that.
Prosecutors say Howell was driving south in the northbound lanes at more than 50 mph when she hit Boitel’s car head-on at 11:37 p.m. on January 22 in Mount Pleasant. Her blood alcohol content was at least 0.18, more than twice the legal limit of 0.08. Boitel was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead shortly after midnight. He was 61.
Boitel had worked the door at the St. Tropez condominium at 340 East 64th Street for three decades and was on his way home to Peekskill after a night shift when he was killed. He and his wife, Marisol Cabrera Boitel, had been married for 42 years and emigrated from the Dominican Republic. He was a member of 32BJ SEIU and, as ESF reported after the January crash, he was about two years from retirement.
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Howell had spent the evening at a party she hosted for the Holy Name Society, a police fraternal organization, at a cigar bar in Scarsdale, prosecutors said in March. The event had an open bar, and video showed her drinking multiple times over the course of the night.Howell joined the NYPD in 2008 and was assigned to a juvenile crime strategy unit. She was placed on modified duty after the crash and suspended without pay on February 2 following an Internal Affairs investigation. The attorney general’s office now refers to her as a former sergeant.
Boitel’s family has said the case carries a painful irony. He’d long admired law enforcement and had once hoped to become a police officer himself, and he donated regularly to funds supporting officers. Residents of 340 East 64th Street built a memorial on the lobby desk where he greeted them for 30 years, and a GoFundMe campaign for the family has raised more than $70,000.
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