Former Croton firefighter pleads guilty to leaving the scene of a fatal accident. Victim's mother accuses village of coverup. [Updated September 13]

In a plea deal, Nicholas Edwards-Ambos will avoid jail time. His attorney says he was not responsible for the death of Richard Lent. Mayor Pugh defends the integrity of Croton’s police investigation.

Richard Lent/ Courtesy of Lent’s mother, Raquette Thompson

At about 2:30 pm on Saturday, July 15 of last year, Peekskill resident Richard Lent, Jr. died in a fiery motorcycle crash on Route 9 near Senasqua Road in Croton. Initial media reports, citing Croton police, suggested that Lent had been struck by a car, whose driver then fled the accident. However, in combing over the scene, investigators from the Croton police, Westchester County police, and New York state police found pieces of a side mirror that allowed them to identify the vehicle and arrest its driver two days later.

At first, the name of the driver was not publicly released. But a number of weeks later, News 12 Westchester identified the driver as Croton firefighter Nicholas Edwards-Ambos. This week, Edwards-Ambos pled guilty in State Supreme Court to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident, after a police investigation found that he was not at fault for Lent’s death. The charge can bring up to seven years in prison. But in a plea deal with Westchester county prosecutors, he will spend five years on probation and have a felony conviction on his record.

Lent’s family, which did not find out the name of the driver until News 12 revealed it to them, has accused Croton police of “covering up” the crime to protect a village firefighter. “They kept it from me for six weeks,” Lent’s mother, Raquette Thompson, told the Chronicle. “I can’t understand how a firefighter, a first responder, can leave the scene of an accident. They protect their own.”

But Mayor Brian Pugh defends the police investigation, and Edwards-Ambos’s attorney argues that the police report of the accident—which the Chronicle has requested but not yet received—found that his client was not responsible for Lent’s death, even if he did illegally leave the scene.

Lent was one of two Peekskill residents to die in hit-and-run accidents on the Croton stretch of Route 9 last year. In December, a Newark man was charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident by a Westchester grand jury, after striking a Peekskill man. His case is still pending.

Richard Lent, Jr., who was 34 years old when he died, was the father of two daughters. He is survived by the mother of the girls, along with his parents, two brothers, and a host of other family members. Much of his funeral expenses, which his mother Raquette Thompson says amounted to about $16,000, were raised in a community GoFundMe.

Thompson and a number of family members were present in court this week when Edwards-Ambos pled guilty, and she was still seething with anger when she spoke with the Chronicle.

“How could it not be a bigger charge?” she asked, adding that she will “never know what really happened. I am angry and I am devastated.” One reason for her anger, she said, is that Croton police did not tell her who the driver was, and she had to be told by the News 12 reporting team. Thompson says that the family has filed a lawsuit against Edwards-Ambos’s insurance company, because it only offered $50,000 in compensation.

“He is walking the streets and my son is dead,” she says. “I am doing this for my grandchildren.”

But Edwards-Ambos’s attorney, Aaron Wallenstein, told the Chronicle that the accident was “a tragedy on all ends,” and that his client is not getting off lightly. Although he will not go to jail, Wallenstein says, he will have to live with a felony conviction on his record. Wallenstein insists that his client was not responsible for the accident, citing the police investigation which found that Lent was traveling more than 100 miles per hour on his motorcycle when he crashed into Edwards-Ambos’s car.

As for why his client, a first responder, did not stay to help at the scene, Wallenstein says that he was probably in a state of shock, confused about what had actually happened, and scared. “My client has been portrayed a bit unfairly,” he concludes. “He had an unblemished record.”

(The Chronicle has found that Edwards-Ambos has been in trouble with the law before. He was arrested in 2017 in Alfred, New York on charges of aggravated unlicensed operation of a vehicle and driving an unregistered vehicle, and, the same year and in the same town, on charges of possession of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of marijuana.)

Croton fire chief Joshua Karpoff/ CFD

As for a coverup, Croton officials deny that anything like that happened. Croton fire chief Joshua Karpoff confirms that Edwards-Ambos was relieved of his duties as a volunteer firefighter shortly after his arrest last year, for a variety of reasons, not all of which were related to the accident. But he says his department had nothing to do with the investigation. Karpoff adds that the fire department took the initiative when it discovered that former fire chief Gerald Munson had stolen more than $300,000 from the department, and helped send him to jail in 2018.

“We’ve been open about our problems in the past,” Karpoff said. “If we didn’t cover up for [Munson] there’s no way we would cover up for [Edwards-Ambos.]”

Croton police chief John Nikitopoulos did not return our telephoned requests for comment, but we did receive a statement from Mayor Brian Pugh:

“I’m reminded of Mr. Lent’s tragic death every time I pass the makeshift memorial to him on the Expressway—which is almost daily. I cannot pretend to fully understand the pain of the family that lost a child so suddenly and so young. This is one of at least two fatal hit-and-run crashes investigated by the Croton Police Department last year. In both cases, the Police followed the evidence without bias or favor and made an arrest, enabling the District Attorney’s office to file charges against the respective defendants. It’s a testament to the professionalism of our police that they were able to successfully resolve both investigations. This is an awful situation for everyone involved, including the first responders (some from the Croton Volunteer Fire Department) that attended the scene of a terrible accident, and especially those that will have to deal with this for the rest of their lives. I hope the guilty plea will allow some healing to take place.”

Nicholas Edwards-Ambos will be formally sentenced on September 12 in the courtroom of State Supreme Court Justice James McCarty.

Update September 13: A judge sentenced Nicholas Edwards-Ambos to five year’s probation.

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