Long Island woman hit with 20 year sentence for killing officer in 2021
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The car Jessica Beauvais was driving when she fatally struck NYPD highway patrol officer Anastasios Tsakos in April 2021. Beauvais was sentenced to over 20 years in prison for manslaughter on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. Photo via Queens district attorney’s office
By Jacob Kaye
The Long Island woman who in 2021 fatally ran over a highway patrol officer in Queens while driving drunk and high was sentenced to over two decades in prison on Wednesday.
In front of a courtroom packed with NYPD officers and detectives, Jessica Beauvais was sentenced to between 22 ⅓ years in prison to 27 years in prison by Queens Supreme Court Judge Michael Aloise, who said that he would have “unhesitatingly given [Beauvais] life for taking a life” had she been charged with murder instead of manslaughter.
Wednesday’s sentencing appears to have marked the legal end to a tragic saga that began on the Long Island Expressway in April 2021 with the death of Anastasios Tsakos, a highway patrol officer who was promoted to detective after his death. But despite the end of the courtroom proceedings, the incident will continue to reverberate in the lives of both Beauvais’ and Tsakos’ family, those testifying said on Wednesday.
“Our family’s sentence came the very day [Beauvais] killed my husband,” said Irene Tsakos, the slain detective’s widow and mother of their two young children. “It’s a life sentence.”
Beauvais, who had around a dozen family members in attendance at the hearing, gave a brief and hushed statement toward the end of the proceeding on Wednesday. Her attorney, Jorge Santos, said that Beauvais, the mother to a teenage son, was having difficulty breathing and was unable to speak for long.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tsakos,” said Beauvais, who brought with her to court a Bible and rosary beads from Rikers Island where she was being held. “I’m sorry.”
Despite an attempt by Santos and his colleague to get Aloise to impose a shortened sentence, the judge gave Beauvais the maximum sentence allowed by law on Wednesday.
“I’m sure that you are sympathetic and that you feel bad for the Tsakos family,” Aloise said. “But how are you going to react to this? Are you going to change your thinking, or alter your behavior or your attitude? I don't have the answer to that and you come to the Bible, with the rosary beads, and I contend to you now that that's the first and best place to find those answers.”
“You certainly now are going to have the time to find those answers,” he added.
Dozens of NYPD highway patrol officers, police officers and detectives were on hand for the sentencing of Jessica Beauvais on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
In a statement, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said that she hoped the “sentence provides at least some closure for the detective’s loved ones.”
Patrick Hendry, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, said he was “relieved” by the sentence.
“She deserves to be behind bars for a long time,” Hendry said.
Much of Wednesday’s hearing revolved around Beauvais’ perception of the police. Hours before running over Tsakos, Beauvais recorded a podcast in which she discussed the police killing of George Floyd.
“This week, we are going to talk about the ignorance that was the Derek Chauvin trial, or the ignorance that is essentially just is this f–ing justice system,” she said on the podcast, on which she also downed several alcoholic drinks and smoked from a pipe.
Prosecutors claimed Beauvais’ podcast, which was recorded about a week after the close of Chauvin’s trial, proved that she had a “disregard for human life not only for police officers, but also police officers’ family members and the community.”
Aloise also did not take kindly to the podcast.
“To all those infantile yahoos in our society protesting the police or wanting to defund the police, they should have a glimpse of what transpired in this case,” the judge said. “We have a defendant who spent all their time publicly and privately displaying animus towards the police, spent the afternoon, evening and the morning getting intoxicated, getting high…and then gets behind the wheel of a car and drives erratically along the highway, ignoring signs, hitting a police officer is so hard that she almost cuts him in half.”
According to prosecutors, Beauvais, who had a suspended license at the time of the crash, spent much of the day on April 26, 2021 drinking and driving.
After recording the podcast that day, Beauvais, who is now 35, hung out at the recording studio in Brooklyn for several hours drinking some more, according to the charges.
She left shortly after midnight and headed toward her home in Hempstead. Prosecutors say that she was so intoxicated that she needed help getting into her car.
Around 2 a.m., Beauvais was driving above the speed limit on the Long Island Expressway near the Clearview Expressway exit when she came across an investigation being conducted by officers on the highway following a fatal crash.
Tsakos was in the street, standing just beyond a roadblock he had set up when Beauvais hit him.
Anastasios Tsakos was killed by Jessica Beauvais, who was driving drunk, in April 2021. Beauvais was sentenced to over 20 years in prison on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. File photo via NYPD
The officer slammed in the car’s windshield, shattering it, before he was launched into the air, landing 170 feet away and losing his leg. He was later taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Beauvais sped away and exited the Long Island Expressway. She then drove through several residential Queens streets, driving on sidewalks and down one-way streets the wrong way.
Police caught up with her on the Horace Harding Expressway and she put her car in reverse and hit a police car behind her.
Just after hitting the car, she was taken from the driver seat of her own car and arrested.
Police claim that two hours after striking Tsakos, Beauvais had a blood alcohol level of 0.15, nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08.
“You killed my husband, an innocent man, a good man who did nothing to you,” Tsakos’ wife said at the hearing on Wednesday to Beauvais. “That’s on your conscious.”
“You truly earned every day you spend in prison,” she added. “I hope you take that time to reflect on your actions and feel remorse for all the devastation you have caused my family and to yours, as well.”
