Holbrook man gets 4-12 years in fatal crash

Tears of sorrow flowed Wednesday as a Holbrook man who killed one man and seriously injured another while driving drunk was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison.

Robert Watson, 24, had pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter, vehicular assault and aggravated driving while intoxicated in the October crash on Veterans Highway in Ronkonkoma.

He drove into the back of a car making a left turn, killing passenger Kevin Mead, 26, of Patchogue, who was being dropped off at Long Island MacArthur Airport for a trip to Disney World with his girlfriend, Stephanie Collins.

"I lost my hero, my brother, my best friend," said Mead's sister, Karen Mead, 20, as her mother, Kathryn, put her hand on her back. "It has severely affected my life. There is not a day that I don't cry and think about my brother."

Kathryn Mead said the awful irony of her son's death was that he was always the designated nondrinking driver when he went out with his buddies while serving in the Air Force.

"He did this because he knew I lost my first love at age 17 to a drunk driver," she said.

She said that Hunter, Kevin Mead's 6-year-old son from a previous relationship, still asks where his father is.

"Can Daddy come home from heaven now?" she said he asks. "I don't want my daddy to be dead."

She said her daughter Karen is "totally lost without her brother . . . My son, my daughter and I were the three musketeers. This should not have happened."

Karen Mead cried as she told State Supreme Court Justice Mark Cohen about her brother's reaction a few months before his death when she crashed his car in March 2010. "He said, 'It's OK. A car can be replaced, but a sister can't.' "

To Watson, she asked, "Mr. Watson, did you think you had more rights than the rest of us? Did you think you were invincible? You need to get on your knees and repent."

Later, Watson said he has done just that.

"I can never say it enough -- I'm sorry," he said. "I have never been more thoroughly disgusted with myself . . . I am always praying for the Mead and Collins families."

When he pleaded guilty last month, Watson said he'd been having beers at a Smithtown bar before continuing to drink vodka with a friend, whose name he couldn't recall. He said he hit Mead's Mazda and fled the scene. He was arrested almost two hours later while hiding behind a telephone pole. When found, his blood-alcohol level was 0.21 percent. The legal limit is 0.08 percent.

Collins told Watson she replays the crash "every single day of my life, and I hope you do, too."

Collins' father, Alan Collins, who was driving the car Watson crushed, suffered injuries to his legs, kidneys and ribs.

Watson also apologized to his family, many of whom sobbed in the courtroom as he spoke. This was not their first brush with violent crime. In 2007 Watson's grandmother, Martha Watson, was stabbed more than two dozen times and killed in her Nesconset home by a heroin addict searching for drugs.