Sean Smith leaned into a microphone in a New York courtroom on Monday and apologized. He was standing next to his teenage son, who was accused of driving 101 mph before hitting a truck last year — causing his 14-year-old passenger to fly out of the car and die at the scene.
Behind Smith sat Keisha Francis, whose daughter, Fortune Williams, was the victim in that crash. Francis said she accepted Smith’s apology, but she was pleased that Smith and the driver’s mother, Deo Ramnarine, were being punished.
Smith, who had bought his son a BMW when the teen had a junior driver’s license, and Ramnarine, who prosecutors said was notified of her son driving illegally in New York City, were each charged in December with endangering the welfare of a child.
A judge in a Queens criminal court sentenced the couple Monday. Smith, 40, was sentenced to three years of probation and a 26-week parenting class after he pleaded guilty to his charge in June. Ramnarine, 43, was sentenced in June to a 26-week parenting class after pleading guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and disorderly conduct, prosecutors said.
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The Queens District Attorney’s Office called the sentencing a “groundbreaking case” of parents being held responsible for their child’s actions. It came three months after Jennifer and James Crumbley — whose teenage son opened fire in an Oxford, Mich., high school in 2021, killing four students — were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison on involuntary manslaughter charges.
“A car is different than a gun, but both could be deadly,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz told The Washington Post.
But lawyers for Smith and Ramnarine questioned how much responsibility the parents bore.
“My client was charged and ended up taking a plea to a crime that he wasn’t present at and he had absolutely no knowledge that was occurring,” James Polk, Smith’s attorney, told The Post on Wednesday. “I think that’s a very far-reaching idea of criminal liability.”
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Randall Unger, Ramnarine’s lawyer, told The Post that civil action against his client would have been more appropriate. The criminal case set “the precedent of holding a parent responsible for actions by a child that I don’t think really were foreseeable.”
Francis told The Post that she would have liked both parents to serve a year in jail, the maximum penalty for their charges.
For more than two months after the crash, Francis, 37, struggled to eat, sleep, shower and work. She said she covered her Queens house with photos of Fortune, who wanted to be a doctor, so she could pretend to greet her every day.
Each week, Francis visits her daughter’s grave in Farmingdale, N.Y., and leaves Fortune’s favorite flowers — red and purple roses. Francis said she continues to pay Fortune’s phone bill so she can hear her brief voicemail: “It’s Fortune.”
“I’m going to be hurting still for the rest of my life,” Francis said.
The 17-year-old driver, whom officials have not publicly identified because he’s underage, was arraigned in December on multiple charges, including second-degree manslaughter, third-degree assault, second-degree reckless endangerment and three counts of second-degree assault. He could face up to 15 years in prison if he’s convicted. He has not yet entered a plea, and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
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On May 17, 2023, the driver, who was 16 at the time, was driving a 2005 BMW 325i about 70 mph over the speed limit in Queens with Fortune in the passenger seat, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. The driver lost control of the BMW while switching lanes, crashing into the back of a parked UPS truck, the New York Police Department said at the time.
Fortune was ejected from the vehicle, the prosecutor’s office said. Police said she suffered head trauma and was pronounced dead at the scene.
The driver was taken to Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Queens with minor injuries, police said. He told police there that he had picked up Fortune at her home and was taking her to his grandmother’s house, according to the district attorney’s office. Smith told police that the BMW was registered in his name but that he had bought the car for his son, prosecutors said.
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The teen had a junior driver’s license, which prohibited him from driving in New York City but allowed him to drive without a supervisor in Upstate New York most hours of the day.
Francis said she spoke to Fortune on the phone about 30 minutes before she died.
“I’m going to call you back,” Francis recalled her daughter saying. “I love you, mom.”
“I love you too, babe,” Francis said she responded.
Fortune never called back. Francis said she heard that her daughter was in a car crash from police, who picked her up from the nursing home she works at in Woodmere, N.Y., and took her to a precinct station in Queens. Officers showed her two pieces of jewelry the victim was wearing — a white diamond necklace and a gold anklet — and asked if they were her daughter’s, Francis said.
They were. Francis screamed, holding her stomach and falling to the floor crying, she said. She said she didn’t know the driver, whom Fortune met at school.
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Investigators found that the driver had been ticketed in November 2022 for driving without a license and driving while using a portable electronic device, prosecutors said. The same month, an administrator at the teen’s high school had informed his parents that he had been driving to school, according to prosecutors.
That evidence helped Katz build a case that the parents were aware of their son breaking the law, she said.
“You can’t give a vehicle to someone who doesn’t have a license,” Katz said, “and then obviate all responsibility for that vehicle, especially if you’re a parent.”
Authorities charged the driver and his parents in December after prosecutors investigated the crash.
While Monday’s sentencing was rare, a similar case occurred in Nassau County, N.Y., in 2012, when two parents were charged with unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle after prosecutors said their son killed four people in a crash while he was driving with a learner’s permit.
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The driver of the BMW in Queens is scheduled to appear in court again in September. Francis said she’s considering further legal action against his parents.
“If they didn’t give their son that car, my daughter would be here right now,” Francis said. “ … She’d probably be watching TV right now or be in her room or be in my bed — because she loves to lie in my bed. She’ll be here living her normal life like every other kid.”
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