By The newspaper
01 Jun 2024, 15:17 PM EDT
Jovanny Crespo reacted with tears yesterday to hear that he had been sentenced to consecutive prison terms totaling 27 years for shooting two men during a frantic car chase in 2019, killing one of them, while he was a police officer in Newark, the most populous city in New Jersey.
Judge Michael L. Ravin called the five-minute chase “an abhorrent abuse of police power.” A video of the deadly sequence was recorded on the police cruiser’s dashboard and body cameras. Caution is recommended when observing it.
Crespo (31) had been found guilty in July of last year and has been imprisoned in Middlesex County Jail since then. Citing the need to discourage police officers from what he called a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality, Judge Ravin has now sentenced him to 20 years for fatally shooting the chase driver, Gregory Griffin (46), and another 7 years for injuring passenger Andrew J. Dixon. Both were shot in the head.
The judge also sentenced Crespo to two 6-year prison terms for two counts of official misconduct, to run concurrently. He will not be eligible for parole for 22 years and 11 months. stood out NJ.com.
Crespo was traveling armed with his partner Eric Ortiz on the night of January 28, 2019 when they received a call to be on the lookout for a Chrysler 300 car with two armed men who moments before had fled from another police officer during a traffic stop.
During the chase, Crespo jumped out of his patrol car at three points and opened fire, although in the video his partner is repeatedly heard telling him to calm down.
Crespo burst into tears when his mother Aida and sister Evalise asked the judge for mercy. His attorney, Isaac Wright Jr., did as well, telling the judge that at the time of the events he was a patrol officer who had been on the job for less than two years and had not received sufficient training. Wright also tried to convince the judge that Crespo’s superiors should not have assigned him to that chase.
“I was a rookie,” Wright told the judge, adding that his partner driving the patrol car had also been on the job for less than two years. “Two rookies in the car on a high-speed chase with an armed individual. “Why would the policy allow two kids to go out and engage in a high-speed chase?” the defender asked.
Prosecutor Alexander Albu responded that Crespo spent more than six months training at the police academy, where he learned about the proper use of deadly force. And Judge Ravin agreed.
“The court is not swayed by the fact that he was young and inexperienced,” Ravin said. “He was extensively trained.” The sentence was slightly less than the 33 years that prosecutor Albu had requested.
Before being sentenced, Crespo briefly apologized yesterday to the victims’ families who were sitting across the courtroom.
New Jersey Attorney General guidelines prohibit opening fire on a moving vehicle unless it is a last resort or to prevent death or serious injury to the police officer or another person. But prosecutors argued that Crespo was never in “imminent danger” and that shooting the car three times was not justified.