A spineless hit-and-run killer showed no emotion in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday as his victim’s loved ones bared their grief and rage – with one saying, “I hope you rot.”
The slaughtering coward, Gurpreet Oberoi, 26, of Queens – who caught a bus to Atlantic City instead of stopping to help his victim – was sent away to serve a 3- to 9-year term for manslaughter, but not before the victim’s only brother angrily spoke his piece.
“I hope you rot and experience all that prison has to offer,” Brian Epstein said in a prepared statement as he stood facing Oberoi in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“You left him battered and bleeding to die on the street. What the hell is wrong with you?”
The victim, Peter Hornbeck, was a world traveler at 26. He worked as bakery manager at a gourmet store in TriBeCa, but he planned to become an earth-sciences teacher, and had recently signed up for the required graduate studies at Hunter College.
Hornbeck was mowed down in January, while walking across Park Avenue at 96th Street with his fiancée and friends.
They watched in horror as Oberoi’s green SUV, traveling at more than 75 mph, dragged his body a block up the avenue.
“Peter won’t get up! He can’t get up!” a frantic friend shouted in a cellphone call to Hornbeck’s mother, Nancy, the mother recounted yesterday.
As Hornbeck’s loved ones mourned, Oberoi ditched the car and hopped a bus to Bally’s, where cops said he tried to win enough to flee the country – only to lose his stake. Oberoi turned himself in after the guilt-stricken pair of friends who’d been in the SUV with him refused to send him his passport.
He pleaded guilty to manslaughter, avoiding up to seven years in prison had he been convicted at trial.
“No parent should hear the hysterical cries of children over a cellphone,” Nancy said in a post-sentencing press conference held to urge lawmakers to tighten penalties for fatal hit-and-runs. “No mother should have to identify her son’s body on a Sunday afternoon at the Bellevue Hospital morgue.”
Also yesterday, the Hornbeck family sent letters to Gov. Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno urging that the penalties for leaving the scene of a fatal accident be upped to a maximum of up to seven years from the current maximum of up to four years.
Since the Hornbeck slaying, both the state Senate and Assembly have passed differing bills to increase felony penalties for those who leave the scene of a fatal accident. But the measures are languishing until both houses can agree on a compromise bill.