Parents of Teen Driver Who Killed Girl in High-Speed Crash Are Sentenced

A New York couple who bought their 16-year-old son a BMW were sentenced on Monday to three years of probation and 26 weeks of parenting classes after the teenager drove the car at speeds of more than 100 miles an hour, slammed into a truck and killed his passenger, a 14-year-old girl.

The teenager, whose name has not been released because of his age, was arraigned last December on at least a dozen charges, including second-degree manslaughter and reckless endangerment of a child. He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

He had a junior driver’s license, which prohibited him from driving unsupervised under any circumstances in New York City, when in May 2023 he crashed his red 2005 BMW 325i into the back of a parked UPS truck in the Springfield Gardens neighborhood of Queens, prosecutors said.

The teenage driver survived the crash with minor injuries, but his passenger, Fortune Williams, a freshman at a Springfield Gardens high school, was thrown from the car and pronounced dead at the scene, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors decided to charge the teenager’s father, Sean Smith, 40, and mother, Deo Ramnarine, 43, with endangering the welfare of a child when they learned that the parents had given him the car and allowed him to drive it to school, even after school administrators had warned them that he was too young to drive legally.

The parents were charged with endangering the welfare of their own son, in a case that prosecutors described as “groundbreaking” and “the first of its kind in New York.”