News: LI Teacher Charged With DWI
(Long Island, N.Y.) A thirty-eight-year-old man pleaded not guilty on Thursday at a Long Beach City Court to driving while intoxicated felony charges. The man had been driving a gray Acura during a July 25th traffic stop when police and authorities noticed he had been drinking. They had attempted to pull him over for talking on his cell phone while driving on Lincoln Boulevard in the eastern section of Long Beach.
The man later abandoned his vehicle on East Fulton Street and proceeded to evade authorities on foot. Reports stated that an officer had previously approached his vehicle at roughly nine that evening. In addition to the felony driving while intoxicated charge, he is also facing resisting officers in his arrest, reckless driving, operating a vehicle without a court-ordered interlock device, and driving with a suspended license charges.
Fleeing from police charges have also been added to the long list of offenses, and reports stated he had been avoiding officers along East Park Avenue. It allegedly took four officers and a witness to aid in his arrest. According to sources, the man was a resident of the city of Long Beach.
The man is also a social studies teacher at Eastport South Manor Junior-Senior High School. He has been teaching for fourteen years and was named Teacher Of The Year on multiple occasions. Some followers of the case believe that such achievements should have been all the more reason he maintained a clean reputation and set a good example for his students.
The teacher was also a former quarterback for Stony Brook University, and played during the 1990s when the school was a Division III team. He was named an All-American in 1995, broke school records, and was titled Most Valuable Player on three separate occasions. He did, however, have prior convictions for drinking and driving on Long Island.
Some reports stated that the teacher had three prior convictions, and many wondered if school officials were aware of his previous arrests. In 2008 he had been arrested in Suffolk County for allegedly fleeing police, resisting arrest, reckless driving, and a felony driving while intoxicated. Reports stated that he pleaded guilty, served ninety days in jail, paid a thousand-dollar fine, and served a year’s worth of probation.
Prior to that, the teacher was charged with a misdemeanor driving while intoxicated in Nassau County in 2004. He allegedly paid a five-hundred-dollar fine for the previous arrest. Sources claimed that he was charged with over twenty traffic violations for the July 25th incident.
Reports stated that his lawyer claimed Long Beach police had used excessive and unnecessary force in securing their arrest. He said that his client has suffered permanent vision loss in his right eye, and pictures show the teacher with an eye that has been swollen shut. He asked for a bail reduction at his client’s arraignment, seeing that it was reduced from $100k to $25k cash, so that the teacher could return home to his fiancé and five-year-old son.
