Jessica Beauvais filming her final podcast episode (YouTube screenshot), Detective Anastasios Tsakos (NYPD), and the scene of the fatal crash (WCBS screenshot)
A 35-year-old woman in New York will spend more than two decades behind bars for killing an NYPD officer while driving drunk without a license in a hit-and-run collision that occurred only a few hours after she had recorded a podcast in which she drank vodka and repeatedly disparaged police.
Queens County Supreme Court Justice Michael Aloise on Wednesday ordered Jessica Beauvais to serve up to 27 years in a state correctional facility in the 2021 death of Detective Anastasios Tsakos, authorities announced.
“Her license had been suspended, she was drunk and had smoked marijuana. For everyone’s safety and wellbeing, including her own, the defendant should not have been behind the wheel of a car,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement following the sentencing hearing. “A police officer, doing his job protecting others, lost his life. I hope today’s sentence provides at least some closure for the detective’s loved ones.”
A jury in October found Beauvais guilty of one count of second-degree aggravated manslaughter, one count of vehicular manslaughter, and one count of leaving the scene of an accident. Aloise sentenced Beauvais to 20 years on the aggravated manslaughter charge and two to seven years for leaving the scene of an accident, with the sentences running consecutively, meaning one after the other. Following her release, Beauvais will be required to spend an additional five years on probation.
According to a news release from the Queens DA’s Office, Tsakos and his highway patrol partner on April 27, 2021, were at the scene of a fatal accident on the eastbound side of the Long Island Expressway near the Clearview Expressway where they were diverting traffic around the site.
“Tsakos was standing just beyond the roadblock, at approximately 1:57 a.m., when Beauvais sped through the traffic cones in a 2013 Volkswagen Passat and struck him,” the release states. “The impact threw Tsakos and severed his left leg at the knee. His body landed approximately 170 feet away on the highway’s shoulder.”
But that wasn’t enough to prevent Beauvais from trying to flee the scene.
“Without ever stopping, Beauvais sped away from the scene and exited the Long Island Expressway,” the release continued. “Police pursued her for approximately three miles. She eventually drove onto the sidewalk in front of 221-22 Horace Harding Expressway, put her car in reverse and hit a police cruiser behind her.”
Officers removed Beauvais from her car and placed her under arrest. She was described as having “bloodshot and watery eyes” while responding to officers with “slurred speech” and smelled strongly of alcohol. About two hours after the crash, Beauvais submitted to a chemical test and had a blood alcohol content of 0.15, nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08.
Tsakos was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.
During Wednesday’s hearing, the victim’s wife, Irene Tsakos, read an emotional victim impact statement that referenced the podcast Beauvais recorded prior to the fatal collision.
“She made a podcast hours before killing my husband for the world to hear,” said Irene Tsakos, per a report from Newsday. “I heard it too. I want to say that you cannot think, speak and spread hate out into the word and expect good things to happen to you. You cannot wish harm on people and influence others to do harm and expect good things in return.”
Beauvais’ two-hour podcast centered around the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd in May 2020. While Aloise refused to let prosecutors play clips from the podcast episode during the trial, on Wednesday he addressed Beauvais directly and said that she had “vilified the police.” He added that the facts of the case were more “vile and overwhelming” than anything that had been in his courtroom, per Newsday.
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