Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was wrong on both the law and the message when he downgraded the charges against a former detective accused of callously killing a beloved Con Edison worker during a fit of road rage on the George Washington Bridge.
On Tuesday, Con Edison worker Koran Irvine, 47, was on his commute home from work; he never made it over the GWB. Instead, 62-year-old retired NYPD detective Victor Romero allegedly shot and killed the father of two through his rear windshield in a road rage incident.
To the arresting officers of the NYPD, this seemed like murder, but not apparently to Bragg’s office. In a shock to Irvine’s assembled family, prosecutors downgraded the charges from murder to manslaughter at Romero’s arraignment. Ultimately any felony charge will not be up to the cops or the DA, but to 23 anonymous Manhattan citizens sitting in a secret grand jury.
Bragg’s assistants will present the case and the grand jurors will have to decide if to vote to indict. The prosecutors should seek murder instead of manslaughter and it’s hard not to see that the grand jurors will agree.
A murder conviction means 25 years to life in prison, while manslaughter is five to 25 years. The difference matters.
Police officers are supposed to be accountable to the same laws as everyone else. But a situation like this undermines that notion, as New Yorkers may take away that a cop, even a retired one, can literally get away with murder.
The facts of the case are at this point well-established and not really in dispute: according to prosecutors, Romero was at all times the aggressor, belligerently tailgating Irvine’s vehicle after they had earlier had a near collision of the sort that can be frightening but is not that unusual when merging into busy traffic.
Irvine never posed any danger to Romero and seemed simply to be trying to continue on his drive home to Rockland County as the retired detective pursued him. In this context, Romero made the conscious decision to draw his firearm and shoot Irving on a busy roadway, inside a moving vehicle on the world’s busiest bridge during rush hour; frankly, it’s a miracle that there weren’t more fatalities or serious injuries.
Romero could have leaned on his horn. He could have flipped a middle finger at Irvine. He could have screamed at him. Instead he took out his gun, aimed and fired. And he killed a man.
As an armed civilian, Romero had a duty to retreat from a situation before using deadly force, which not only did he fail to do but in fact instigated the entire situation with “depraved indifference to human life,” as is the standard under the law for a murder charge.
Being a former cop does not lessen that responsibility, and in fact only magnifies it, as he had received extensive training and a wider share of the public’s trust. And, even after all of this, after having fired on an unarmed man and watched his car crash, Romero decided not to take any responsibility or render aid but to flee the scene.
Manslaughter is generally when death is an incidental outcome of an altercation. It seems already that prosecutors have clear evidence documenting every part of the sequence of events, from the initial near-collision to Romero driving off in the aftermath.
The remaining question is one of intent, and there’s no way that Romero, who had himself been wounded in a shooting in 2000, did not understand that aiming and firing a round on that bridge was likely to cause Irvine’s death and potentially that of other drivers around him. Romero deserves a fair trial, but a trial for the charge of murder.