Federal Judge Sandra Feuerstein of New York was killed, in Florida, mere days before she was to hear a major case involving a police scandal. Former New York City police officer Valerie Cincinelli stands accused of “paying her lover to kill her husband.” Her “lover” ratted her out. What happened takes the phrase “freak accident” to whole new levels of freakishness.
Judge dying for vacation
Federal Judges are having a hard time getting life insurance these days, ever since a disgruntled lawyer showed up at the doorstep of Esther Salas with a delivery of bullets which killed her son and injured her husband.
The only way to describe what happened to Judge Feuerstein is to call it a “freak” accident. Boca Raton is still trying to figure out the whole story.
Florida denizen Nastasia Snape, age 23, “claimed she was Harry Potter” when police pried her out of the vehicle she used to run down Feuerstein, then a 6-year-old boy who survived.
She fatally struck the visiting judge and the boy after swerving her car onto the sidewalk, but it wasn’t intentional homicide, she was high as a spy-satellite on bath salts. The woman is accused of vehicular homicide and other felonies.
The 75-year-old judge flew south to escape the Covid-19 repression, and the cold dreary conditions of her courtroom in the Eastern District of New York, but she would have been safer in one of Andrew Cuomo’s nursing homes than on the sidewalk in Boca Raton.
The injured child, Anthony Ovchinnikov, was transported to the nearest hospital. As of Wednesday, his condition “could not be determined.”
Hit and run
As described by witnesses, “Snape was driving erratically, going around stopped traffic, on a busy road, when she drove onto the sidewalk and struck Feuerstein.” She didn’t stop after plowing over the judge.
“Snape then drove back onto the roadway, striking the boy in a crosswalk.” Those stripes of paint won’t stop anarchy. She kept going from there too.
The way police put it, “Snape then fled into neighboring Delray Beach, where she crashed.” When a Delray police officer finally got a good look at her, “Snape appeared to be having convulsions.” She “was able to get out of the car,” but “stared into space and would only say she was OK.”
She didn’t seem to be real aware of either the judge or the little boy she ran over. Once they got her into an ambulance, “Snape began screaming and fighting with medics while yelling she was Harry Potter,” so they drugged her. Once the cops emptied her purse, they found the bath salts.
Ms. Snape was hauled off to the Palm Beach County jail where she’s held on a $60,000 bond. Feuerstein was appointed by George W. Bush and is famous because her mom was also a judge.
Cincinelli had been expected to plead guilty anyway so this shouldn’t affect the case much. The New York court system will greatly miss Feuerstein’s “eccentric style and warm personality” which “lit up the courtroom.” She went out in “eccentric style” as well, that’s for sure.
