54-year-old Ganesh Shenoy who fled to India after causing a deadly crash in Hicksville in 2005 pleaded guilty to manslaughter and has been sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. Just 14 days after the crash, Shenoy boarded a plane at John F Kennedy International Airport to Mumbai, India and stayed in India for the next 20 years. In September 2025, Shenoy was extradited back to the US for his trial. Shenoy was seen smiling as he entered the Nassau County court for his sentencing. “You took my hero from me, the one person that I looked up to,” Krystina Morrone, the daughter of slain motorist Philip Mastropolo, told Shenoy. “I had to graduate high school without him, get married without him, and have two children that will never know their grandfather,” she said, adding that her brother was suffering from leukemia. “My dad worked two jobs so my mother could stay home with my brother with leukemia,” she said. “He was a man who deserved to grow old with his family.”“Sorry to the family,” Shenoy said as he was handed the verdict of upto 10 years in prison. On April 11, 2005, Shenoy missed a red light and smashed Mastropolo’s car so hard that the car went skidding 65 feet into the opposite direction. Shenoy was also hurt but as he was taken to hospital, he refused treatment as he knew he would be arrested. His passport was seized but he left the US. He was officially indicted in August 2005 and Nassau County was trying to get him back since then. “For two decades, Philip Mastropolo’s wife and children have carried the weight of his loss and the burden of knowing this cowardly defendant hid half a world away,” Nassau County district attorney Anne Donnelly said. “They waited for accountability and for the day when Ganesh Shenoy was finally brought to justice. Today was that day,” Donnelly added. “When this defendant fled to India in the aftermath of the destruction he caused, he tried to outrun the law and responsibility. But justice does not have borders or an expiration date, and last year he was brought back to answer to the charges he had evaded so long. Now, a jail cell awaits him.”
