Background: River Road in Selkirk, N.Y. (Google Maps). Inset (left): Jacklyn Parker (Albany County District Attorney”s Office). Inset (right): Colleen Selkirk (Babcock Funeral Home).
A New York woman was sentenced more than a year after causing a fatal crash by failing to take her anti-seizure medication.
Jacklyn Parker, 25, pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in July, almost one year after she was involved in a head-on collision with 60-year-old Colleen Selkirk in upstate New York. According to the Albany County District Attorney’s Office, Parker was behind the wheel driving herself and a passenger on River Road in Selkirk on Aug. 19, 2024. While she was driving, she suffered an epileptic seizure, which caused her to veer across the double yellow line in the road and hit the vehicle driven by Selkirk.
Parker and her passenger were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Selkirk was pronounced dead at the scene.
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The DA’s office said that Parker was “warned by her doctor that she could not operate a vehicle if she failed to take medication.” After the crash, Parker admitted to police that she had not taken her medication for more than a week. She had a seizure seconds before crashing into Selkirk.
After Parker entered her plea on July 15, she was scheduled to be sentenced in September. However, she was charged with DWI the same month, which prosecutors asked the judge to consider when handing down Parker’s sentence on Monday.
According to courtroom reporting by local NBC affiliate WNYT, Parker apologized to Selkirk’s family before her sentence was handed down. Selkirk’s daughter, Katherine Giordano, also spoke at the hearing, asking, “How do you explain to children so little, who loved their Nana so much, that they will never see her again? [One child] still sometimes asks me if her Nana is ‘feeling better yet.'”
Parker was sentenced to 16 months to four years in prison, slightly more than the one to three years that was originally going to be handed down.
