Middletown resident Kevin Freibott, a former township police officer, was sentenced to 11 years in state prison yesterday for a car crash that killed a two-year-old boy and left his mother comatose and severely brain-injured, today’s Star-Ledger reports.
The accident occurred 13 months ago on the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City, where Freibott was then employed as a cop, after a five-and-a-half-hour drinking marathon. His blood-alcohol level was .242 percent, more than three times the legal limit, the Ledger reports.
An FBI agent who saw Freibott’s Jeep Cherokee shortly before the crash told authorities that it “blew by him like he was standing still,” Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Peter Stoma told Superior Court Judge Peter J. Vazquez.
At the sentencing, the boy’s father said his family had come on vacation from their home in Honduras to visit him while he was receiving job training. He showed pictures of his beaming son and disabled wife, and spoke of the crash’s effects on his 14-year-old daughter.
From the story:
“Mr. Freibott, you don’t have any idea what you have already done to me and my family, a good family,” said the father, Carlos Zelaya. “We will never be the same again, ever!”
“I want to say in person that I am, with all my heart, sorry for the loss of your son,” the newspaper quotes Freibott saying.
Freibott, 40, was fired from the Middletown police in 2001 after a minor accident outside a tavern, but was ordered reinstated a year later. In 2005, he transferred to the force in Jersey City, where his second cousin, Jeremiah Healy, is mayor.
1010 WINS reported that
Freibott had a history of driving offenses dating back to 1986, according to Motor Vehicle Commission records. Six of the violations occurred between 1988 and 2001 and included two for speeding and one for driving under the influence.
The sentence was the maximum under a deal late last year in which Freibott pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide, assault by auto and driving while intoxicated. He will be eligible for parole in seven years.
