The driver who killed public school teacher Matthew Jensen in a Williamsburg hit-and-run was sentenced in a packed courtroom on Wednesday morning, nearly two years to the day after Jensen’s death.
Tariq Witherspoon, a 31-year-old former EMT, will spend six months behind bars after agreeing to a plea deal with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Witherspoon was indicted on multiple felony and misdemeanor counts, and pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide.
He will be subject to five years’ probation after his half-year prison sentence.
Witherspoon was cuffed and led out of the courtroom immediately after the sentence was made official in Brooklyn Supreme Court while Jensen’s family and friends looked on.
In the early hours of May 18, 2021, Witherspoon struck Jensen at the intersection of McGuinness Boulevard and Bayard Street, as the teacher was walking home from a family celebration. Jensen had celebrated his 58th birthday just two days earlier.
At the time, Witherspoon was reportedly traveling in a borrowed Rolls-Royce roughly 50 mph — twice the posted speed limit. He did not stop after hitting the Jensen, who taught at nearby P.S. 110, and nine months passed before the NYPD was able to identify and arrest him.
Paramedics arrived on the scene of the crash and found a gravely-injured Jensen lying in the road, and rushed him to Woodhull Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead later that night.
Witherspoon did not address the crowd of Jensen’s loved ones assembled in the courtroom for the sentencing. In a statement read by his lawyer, he apologized to Jensen’s friends and family and acknowledged the “compassion” they have shown him over the last two years, and asked for their forgiveness.
‘How could you leave the scene?’
Jensen’s family, though, directly addressed Witherspoon before his sentence was read, expressing their grief and anger over their loved one’s death.
John Ogren, Jensen’s…
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