The driver whose car crashed head-on into an NYPD detective's SUV on a Westchester highway in 2015 was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison Wednesday for causing the fatal crash.
Efren Moreano, 20, of Yonkers, was sentenced Wednesday in a Westchester County court.
"I don't think I'll ever be half the man Paul Duncan was," Moerano said in a five-minute apology during sentencing. "I've always been really hard-headed, doing dumb things."
Duncan's widow also spoke, bringing the courtroom to tears as she spoke of her husband's character and how her family has been left devastated.
"He was my rock and we've been through a lot, good and bad, a lot of many, many years," she said.
"My daughter has no father. There will never, ever be a replacement, ever."
Investigators say Moreano was intoxicated at the time of the crash; tests showed he had a blood-alcohol content of 0.11 percent, .03 above the legal limit in New York.
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Police say he was driving a 2013 Honda Civic the wrong way on the Sprain Brook Parkway when it slammed into Paul Duncan's Honda Pilot.
Duncan, who was headed to work in Queens, was pronounced dead at the scene. The crash backed up traffic on the highway for hours. Duncan's wife was among the drivers snarled in the traffic as she tried to take their 13-year-old daughter to school in New York City.
She told NBC 4 New York it took her two hours to get to the city that morning and didn't know the traffic was from the wreck that killed her husband of more than 20 years.
Rechelle Duncan told reporters after Moerano's sentencing, "He took my husband's life. That is permanent. And I think his punishment should be permanent and it won't be, and that's really unfortunate."
