Investigation into crash allegedly involving retired Tuckahoe police chief's wife prompts internal review
The Westchester County district attorney's office has released body camera footage showing what it says is the aftermath of a former Tuckahoe police chief's wife allegedly crashing into three cars.
Prosecutors say Donna Costanzo, the wife of retired Tuckahoe Police Chief John Costanzo, crashed into all three parked cars within a half hour back on Aug. 14.
Yonkers police say she drove away after she allegedly hit the first two. The Westchester district attorney says she then struck an Amazon truck in Tuckahoe. She stayed on scene after that incident, the DA says.
No one reported any injuries in any of the incidents, but at least one of the parked cars was damaged and Amazon says their truck was dented and scraped in Yonkers.
"She seemed a little disoriented. I don't know if she's on meds, but you know, I don't wanna assume nothing," the Amazon driver says in the body cam video.
A statement from the Westchester DA says, "Witness testimony found that Mrs. Costanzo exhibited signs that could be consistent with intoxication."
But the DA's office says no one reported any odor of alcohol or definitive signs of intoxication, and "none of the Tuckahoe police officers who responded to the scene investigated whether Mrs. Constanzo was impaired or otherwise evaluated her sobriety."
"Instead," the DA's office wrote, "one of the responding officers stated during our review that he knew Mrs. Costanzo was the wife of the former Tuckahoe Police Chief and drove her home following the accident."
Prosecutors say the battery on one body camera died less than two minutes after the officer wearing it arrived on scene, and the officer wearing the other camera "appeared to deactivate their body-worn camera moments after approaching Mrs. Costanzo ... although the officer denied doing so."
Prosecutors say an off-duty Tuckahoe lieutenant also responded to that scene after Donna Costanzo had left.
"It's concerning from multiple angles," said M. Quentin Williams, a law enforcement expert and former FBI agent. "There has to be a deeper investigation into why they didn't conduct the field sobriety test, why they didn't request a breathalyzer."
The DA says it investigated whether the responding officers violated the law and did not find sufficient evidence, so they referred the case back to Tuckahoe Police for internal review.
Tuckahoe's current chief says he can't do an interview with us while the internal review is ongoing.
"The community might think, well, they're just covering it up if they do it internally," Williams said, "but if a third party does it, a trusted third party, the community might tend to have greater trust in the process."
Williams added that officers are allowed to turn body-worn cameras off under certain circumstances, but they're not supposed to for a field investigation.
No one answered the door at the Costanzos' home when CBS News New York tried to contact them in August, and the couple did not call us back to answer our questions.
Yonkers police say they also visited the home after the crash and wrote two citations to Donna Costanzo for leaving the scene of an accident. Police reports say John Costanzo told those officers his wife was not home at the time.
