When off-his-meds, epileptic cabby Hassan Afzal had a seizure behind the wheel in lower Manhattan four years ago, he killed a beautiful young college sophomore, and badly injured her three friends.
But the heartless hack won’t spend a single day behind bars for the carnage of that 2006 cab ride from hell, even though he’d repeatedly lied to hide his epilepsy on licensing forms and had stopped taking his anti-seizure medication weeks before the crash — an outcome that left his victims in tears.
“There is no justice,” Anna Sallustio, 20, said from her Brooklyn home after learning of Afzal’s no-jail deal, struck in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday.
“I am appalled,” said Sallustio, whose leg and pelvis were shattered in the horrific West Side Highway crash.
Her big sister, Enza, 25, was left comatose for two weeks from head injuries.
Afzal, 25, will serve just five years’ probation for criminally negligent homicide.
“We’re heartbroken,” Richard Ricco, 50, said of the bittersweet outcome in the death of his daughter, beautiful Danielle Ricco, 21 — crushed by an oncoming cab after being thrown from Afzal’s taxi as it careened through the Meatpacking District.
On the one hand, Ricco said, he and his wife, Diane, of Staten Island, were finally able to sit in court yesterday and hear Afzal admit his seizure caused the crash after four years of insisting his brakes had failed.
Had Afzal kept up his “bad brakes” fiction, it would have been difficult to give jurors medical evidence that he had a seizure.
But on the other hand, family members said, the slap on the wrist stings them far more than it does the cabby.
“We really wish that he had been a decent human being and shown some sign of remorse,” said Judy Vallarelli, of Westchester, whose daughter Amy, 25, is only now able to walk unassisted after suffering a fractured pelvis and a shattered femur.
But Afzal’s lawyer, Bryan Konoski, insisted, “He has actually expressed great remorse. He feels extremely bad for the pain and suffering the girls and their families went through.”
That’s news to the families.
“I look him in the eye, I give him the opportunity to say he’s sorry,” said Richard Ricco. “But he doesn’t. I don’t know what he holds in his heart.”