Crackdown on drivers who fail to move over for stopped roadside vehicles, workers over next 2 weeks

Suffolk County police on Friday launched a two-week crackdown on drivers who fail to move over and slow down when police, ambulances, road repair crews or even disabled motorists or tow trucks are stopped or working alongside a road.

  Th  e enforcement action comes after a driver struck and killed a construction worker and injured two others at a work zone on a Nesconset road on Aug. 10.

The driver, Thomas Lobianco, 26, of Lake Ronkonkoma, was charged with driving while ability impaired by drugs and may have ingested marijuana minutes before the crash that killed Joel Sicon-Porix, 38, of Mastic, Suffolk police said. Lobianco allegedly was heading east in a westbound lane of Townline Road, and drove through a red light and onto a sidewalk, where he hit the three construction workers.

"We're having this press conference because we don't want to see another fatality of people who work on our roads," Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine told reporters gathered Friday on Middle Road in Blue Point. Nearby, workers from the same company that employed the worker who was killed were busy repaving the road.

Kevin Catalina, commissioner of the Suffolk County Police Department, said tickets handed out by Suffolk police for failing to obey the state "Move Over" law have increased 37%, to 783 from 600, so far this year compared with the same period last year.

The "men and women who work on the roadways are essential to the well-being and survival of Suffolk County," Catalina said.

Violating the Mover Over law, he said, can result in fines up to $150 and two points on a driver’s license. Fines can be doubled if the driver is also speeding in the zone, Catalina said.

"It is a common sense law that we want to make sure everybody pays attention to," Catalina said.

The Move Over law went into effect in 2011 to protect stopped police and emergency vehicles. It was later expanded to include tow trucks, hazard vehicles displaying amber lights and, in 2024, "all vehicles stopped on the roadway, including ordinary disabled passenger vehicles," according to the Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The law requires drivers "to change into a lane not immediately adjacent to the vehicle, or slow down to a reasonable speed if unable to safely make a lane change," the state website says.

From 2016 to 2020, 37 people were killed outside disabled vehicles in New York, according to the state government website.

Bobby Garone, chief operating officer of Rosemar Construction, which employed Sicon-Porix, said the company was still traumatized by his death.

Sicon-Porix was employed by Rosemar for 20 years, and leaves behind a wife and three children, Garone said.

"It's just an awful tragedy," he said. "You go to work, you expect to go home at the end of the day."