A family rebuilding from a tragedy

Posted

On Feb. 11, Denise DeCrescito and her husband, Christopher, would have celebrated the 32nd anniversary of their first meeting. On Feb. 17, the couple would have celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary.

On Feb. 27, Denise and her three children — Amanda, 15, Sabrina, 12, and Nicholas, 11 — will simply try to get through the day. That will be the third anniversary of the night Chris was killed by a drunken driver.

On that cold Wednesday in 2013, Denise had last heard from her husband when he was on his way home from work. Chris was the head of regulatory reporting for UBS, the United Bank of Switzerland, and commuted from the Valley Stream train station to New Jersey. Though the commute was long, he felt obligated to provide for his wife and children, especially since Denise was in poor health. Fourteen years earlier, she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Her condition, while manageable, still came with mobility limitations, as she needed a wheelchair to get around.

While he was waiting for his connecting train in Jamaica at around 8:30 p.m., Chris called his wife to let her know that he would be home soon and not to worry about dinner. He would pick something up from King Umberto’s. Denise hung up the phone and went back to corralling their kids for bed.

As the night went on, she didn’t hear from him. She thought nothing of it, as Chris was a gregarious guy and had likely run into a friend or a neighbor at Umberto’s. But eventually she began to worry, because her texts and calls were not being answered. She asked her father, who lived in the apartment on the second floor of their home, to go out and look for Chris.

“He must’ve gotten a flat tire,” Denise recalled telling her father.

Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Two Nassau County police detectives were standing at the front door.

“I figured there was an accident,” Denise recalled. “Obviously something was wrong. Two detectives don’t show up at your door for no reason.”

The detectives told Denise that Christopher had been involved in a terrible accident. Her first thought was to leave her house and to go and be with him in the hospital. She asked what hospital he had been taken to.

Page 1 / 4