January 9, 2009
Guilty verdict for Heidgen in limo crash trial
In the last minute of Martin Heidgen's six-week trial, jurors crumbled under the emotional weight of the case, sobbing as their foreman pronounced Heidgen guilty of murder.
The verdict triggered a victorious cheer in the gallery from relatives of Katie Flynn, 7, of Long Beach, and Stanley Rabinowitz, 59, of Farmingdale. Katie's mother, Jennifer Flynn, collapsed onto her husband Neil's chest as he bent to comfort her.
In a far corner of the courtroom, Heidgen's mother, Margot Aponte, sat silently, her head bowed. Her son, now facing 25 years to life, showed little emotion.
Jurors were visibly shaking when they entered the packed courtroom about 5 p.m., several of them burying their faces in their hands as the forewoman pronounced the verdict.
In an extremely rare and hard-fought decision, Heidgen was convicted of second-degree murder for driving drunk the wrong way on the Meadowbrook Parkway in July of last year, smashing into a limousine and killing two people. It is unusual to charge someone with murder in a fatal drunken driving crash, and even rarer to get a conviction. This verdict, while it will almost certainly be appealed, will also seal new District Attorney Kathleen Rice's reputation as a warrior in the fight against drunken driving on Long Island.
"If you get drunk and kill someone, that's murder and you will be held accountable," Rice said after the verdict.
The verdict came at the end of a wrenching trial filled with surprising twists, just when lawyers and relatives of the two people killed in the crash had started to believe that the jury was deadlocked. The jury was sequestered after it first said it couldn't reach a verdict Monday.
Neil and Jennifer Flynn stressed that the verdict will not bring their daughter back, or even help them to repair their broken lives. But they said it does bring some satisfaction to know that Heidgen, 25, of Valley Stream, will not get away with murder.
"This guy did it, and he made choices, and he took actions, and now he's going to pay for those actions," said Neil Flynn, who testified about how one of the happiest days of his life, his sister-in-law's wedding, became a horror when Heidgen hit their limo in the early morning hours of July 2, 2005, decapitating Katie and maiming him and his wife's parents, Denise and Chris Tangney.
Heidgen's lawyer, Stephen LaMagna, of Garden City, said he was "devastated" by the verdict but that he is confident it will be overturned on appeal.
Denna Cohen, who heads the Long Island chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and who sat through much of the trial, said Heidgen's conviction will send an unmistakable message to anyone who would think of getting behind the wheel drunk.
"From now on, drunks who kill will know we're going to get them, and convict them of murder," Cohen said afterward.
Charging Heidgen with murder was just the first in a string of twists and turns the highly publicized trial took.
Early in the trial, Acting State Supreme Court Justice Alan Honorof surprised many participants when he threw out a blood test that showed Heidgen had roughly 14 drinks in his system at the time of the crash, after State Police troopers admitted mishandling the blood sample. Later, after Honorof let prosecutors take a saliva swab from Heidgen to confirm through DNA testing that the blood sample was his, prosecutors said Heidgen tried to trip up the test by putting another man's body fluid in his mouth before the swab was taken.
New York State Police later conducted an internal investigation into the mishandling of the blood evidence and found that troopers were "careless." It was the second time in less than a year that they mishandled blood evidence in two fatal drunken driving crashes on Long Island.
Heidgen was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder, three counts of first-degree assault and driving while intoxicated. The jury found him not guilty of reckless endangerment for jeopardizing the people whom he passed going the wrong way before hitting the limo.
After the verdict, jurors said they thought Heidgen must have known what he was doing as he headed in the wrong direction on the parkway for more than two miles. But they said there were two jurors who did not agree at first, and tempers on both sides flared.
Ultimately, though, they said they knew what they had to do.
"Once we finally put it on paper, guilty, guilty, it just became so emotional in that moment," said a juror named Michelle, 38, of Roosevelt, who would not give her last name. "Once it was sealed, ready to go downstairs, it was like a big weight off our shoulders, it just became very emotional for everybody."
Staff writers Denise M. Bonilla and Michael Frazier contributed to this story.
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