The driver of a garbage truck that plowed into a West Islip man after hitting his car and other vehicles waiting at a red light in Hauppauge last year was charged with criminally negligent homicide in Riverhead on Friday, according to Suffolk prosecutors.
The 19-ton garbage truck was traveling at a high speed when Jaswinder Singh, 52, of Bellerose, Queens, left the Long Island Expressway at Exit 57 on July 3, Suffolk District Attorney Ray Tierney said in a statement. Singh failed to slow down as he approached a red light on Express Drive South and the truck hit a Honda Civic driven by Joseph Kelly, 24, of West Islip, who died on impact, prosecutors said.
The collision with the Honda sparked a chain reaction of crashes, damaging five vehicles, including a Suffolk County Transportation school bus carrying three toddlers, Suffolk police said at the time of the crash. The school bus driver and the children were not injured.
Tierney said Singh was driving the truck from Brooklyn to a commercial establishment in Suffolk, where it was to be outfitted before being put into service with the New York City Department of Sanitation.
It was unclear who represented Singh at Friday’s court appearance. Singh is scheduled to return to court May 17.
The victim’s father, John Kelly said in a statement thanking the district attorney’s office: “There is no way to express the profound loss that has befallen our family and community because of this horrific, unimaginable and senseless tragedy. Joseph was a strong, loyal, hardworking, ambitious, kind-hearted and caring person who would do anything to help his family and friends and even strangers….This catastrophic tragedy should have never happened and our family will never be the same without him.”
The indictment also charged Singh with two counts of third-degree assault, one count of reckless driving and one count of speeding not reasonable and prudent. Acting Supreme Court Justice Stephen Pilewski ordered Singh to surrender his passport, placed him on supervised release and suspended his driver’s license. He faces up to 4 years in prison if convicted on the criminally negligent homicide charge, a felony.
“This defendant, who was allegedly driving a 19-ton truck, had a responsibility to drive prudently and cautiously. Instead, he is alleged to have been speeding, causing him to crash into a line of cars stopped at the traffic light, resulting in the loss of Joseph Kelly’s life,” Tierney said.
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