Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of a pair of accidents on local roads that claimed the lives of two local residents and changed their families forever.
On Thursday, January 16, 2014 Jamesport resident Jim Callaghan set out for a pre-dawn morning run. He was struck and killed while jogging on Main Road in Laurel. The vehicle that hit Callaghan left the scene and two other vehicles hit his body lying in the roadway. (See story.) The hit-and-run driver was never found. Callaghan, 49, was married and the father of six.
About two hours later, Hampton Bays resident Barbara Tocci was on Flanders Road on her way to work in Riverhead when a southbound PSEG utility truck crossed into northbound lane and struck her Ford SUV head-on. She was killed instantly. (See story.) Tocci, 47, was the mother of two grown sons and had five young grandchildren.
For the survivors of the two people taken in the prime of their lives on that January morning, the numbness that follows sudden, tragic loss has worn away, but the questions remain.
“How can you live with yourself when you hit a person in the road and drive away?” ponders Callaghan’s widow Jennifer. The couple had been married less than 16 months when he was killed. They were still flush with new love and their lives were full of plans.
Her husband was in excellent health, a fact confirmed by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner in an autopsy following the accident. Investigators determined that he was lying in the westbound lane of Route 25 when struck by two westbound vehicles. The ME’s investigation ruled out a heart attack or some other medical condition that might have brought him down.
“There was no other reason for him to be lying there,” Jennifer Callaghan said this week.
Jim Callaghan’s cause of death was blunt force trauma, according to the ME’s report. It will never be known which vehicle struck the fatal blow. His wife believes he was running westbound in the shoulder on the south side of the road and an eastbound vehicle hit him and threw him into the westbound lane, where two other vehicles hit him. The operators of those vehicles remained on the scene and were not charged with any crime.
Police thought the car that fled was westbound, Jennifer Callaghan said. “But knowing my husband the way I do, I know there’s no way he would have been running west in the westbound lane. He would have been running against traffic.”
Southold Police have closed the investigation, she said. “It’s a cold case.”
The Barbara Tocci case resulted in an arrest. After a year-long investigation, the driver of the utility truck, PSEG employee Michael Pepe, 54, was charged with criminally negligent homicide, a felony and reckless driving.
Prosecutors said Pepe was having “an extended text conversation with his girlfriend” when he lost control of his truck and entered the oncoming lane of travel on Flanders Road. Pepe had put his personal cell phone in his lunch bag and first gave investigators his company-issued cell. He’d been texting on his personal phone, which he later turned over to police, for nearly half an hour immediately before the crash.
But the evidence produced showed Pepe was texting “four to five minutes prior to the crash,” and his “alleged poor judgment several minutes prior to an accident with devastating results, based upon these facts, fails to rise to the level of moral blameworthiness to support a finding of criminal negligence,” State Supreme Court Justice Fernando Camacho wrote in a decision dismissing the felony charge in August. The last text message on Pepe’s cell phone came in at 7:53 a.m. Police investigators put the time of the crash at 7:57.
The reckless driving charge remains pending in Suffolk County Criminal Court. Pepe’s lawyer says he is fighting the charge and is demanding a trial. The attorney, Steven Epstein, blames the accident on the condition of Flanders Road at the time of the crash. It was cratered with potholes about which numerous community members had long complained. The state DOT made repairs to the roadway surface in the area of the crash on the afternoon of the accident.
Barbara Tocci’s death left her close-knit family reeling. Her sister Susan erected a billboard on her Flanders Road property warning against texting and driving. The Tocci family has pressed prosecutors to pursue the case against Pepe. They’ve held vigils in Barbara Tocci’s memory and memorial fundraisers in her name to support local charitable causes.
Tocci family members ask grapple with the same question that nags at Callaghan:
“How does he live with himself?” Susan Tocci asked, referring to the truck driver. “He knows what he was doing. He killed my sister,” she says, her voice filled with emotion. “And all he cares about is preserving his pension, and that’s why he’s still fighting the remaining charge.”
This year there will be no roadside memorial services for either accident victim on the anniversary of their deaths.
Susan Tocci worries about her elderly father, who has not recovered from the loss.
“This Christmas was so hard for him, harder than last year. He refused to go anywhere. Losing Barbara has just taken a toll on him that will never be reversed,” she said. He’s insisted on going back and forth to court in Central Islip, so he could be in the courtroom every time Pepe has to appear before the judge.
“We decided it might be better for him if we didn’t hold a memorial this year. We were afraid it would just be too hard.”
Jennifer Callaghan says her husband told her through a medium not to go to the site where he was killed.
“He wants you to stop,” she said the medium told her. “He doesn’t want you to remember him that way, because every time you go there, it destroys you.”
“It’s true,” Jennifer Callaghan said. “It’s hard enough to drive by it.”
She has moved from her home in Jamesport, which she said they’d put on the market the month before the accident. They were planning to move to Arizona, where they hoped to be able to spend more time enjoying life together and less time working to pay bills. She decided to stay on Long Island because of her mother’s failing health, and after it sold, she moved to Center Moriches.
Her mother, Patricia Garrett, died January 10. The funeral is today.
On her deathbed the night before she passed away, her mother told her with confidence that Jim was going to come to escort her to the next life.
Jennifer plans to gather with friends and family tomorrow to remember Jim at the couple’s favorite restaurant, Diggers in Riverhead. They met there on Feb. 22, 2011, he proposed to her there — they were married on Sept. 22, 2012 — and they went there for dinner on the 22nd of every month, to commemorate the day they met.
“It was our spot,” she said. “Jim would always have a Black and Tan, so we will order one for him and put it on the bar for a toast.” They will gather to celebrate his life in a place he loved, she said.
“That’s the way he wants it.”
