SCHENECTADY – The grief-stricken mother and other relatives of an innocent woman shot and killed in the summer of 2020 while sitting on the front porch of her Mont Pleasant home expressed outrage Wednesday at the district attorney’s office for the sentences given to three men involved in the case.
“They gave us hope that justice was going to be done,” said an emotional Tina Buskey outside court moments after the men – one of them a close family friend – were sentenced for their role in the shooting death of her daughter Jennifer Ostrander. “I’m angry and it hurts.”
Buskey was joined in the court hallway by several family members, including her daughter, Christina Pike.
“We would have taken it to trial if we knew he was getting two years,” said Pike about the time Marchello Rizzo, who they considered family, will serve in prison when he’s credited for time served.
But Schenectady County District Attorney Robert M. Carney during a phone conversation later Wednesday said he is extremely proud of the hard work by his prosecutors that resulted in convictions of seven defendants in the complex gang-related case.
One of those attorneys, Christina Temante-Pelham, was adamant that “we’ve kept them (Ostrander’s family members) informed, and that those were the plea agreements that they pleaded to, and the judge sentenced them accordingly.”
Under heavy security earlier Wednesday, County Court Judge Matthew Sypniewski had the trio brought into the court at the same time so Buskey wouldn’t have to deliver her victim impact statement three separate times.
She told the court that her life was “forever changed” when she found her daughter had died, a tragedy compounded when she later learned that a “close family member” was involved. She told that man, Rizzo, that “your brother…
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