A Hempstead man who drove drunk the wrong way down the Long Island Expressway on a holiday-weekend morning — barreling westbound through the eastbound lanes for several miles before slamming head-on into another driver near Exit 37 in Roslyn — was sentenced on Friday, June 12, 2026, to five to nine years in state prison.
Jorge Arias Reyes, 49, had pleaded guilty in April 2026 to aggravated vehicular assault, assault, and aggravated driving while intoxicated. The sentence closes a case that, in the words of Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly, “could have easily turned deadly.” It very nearly did. The driver Reyes hit — a 51-year-old motorist in a Toyota Prius — was left with a fractured leg and a dislocated hip, but survived. On a road where wrong-way drunk-driving crashes routinely kill, that outcome was a matter of inches and luck.
This report traces the full arc of the case: the crash, the victim, the nine-count indictment, the guilty plea, the sentence, and what those charges actually mean under New York law.
What happened on the morning of May 18, 2025
It was just before 7 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 2025 — Memorial Day weekend, when the Long Island Expressway carries heavy early traffic toward the East End. According to the Nassau County District Attorney’s office and contemporaneous reporting, Reyes was behind the wheel of a 2009 Honda Odyssey, and he was severely impaired: prosecutors put his blood alcohol content between 0.24% and 0.26%, roughly three times New York’s 0.08% legal threshold.
Reyes entered the Long Island Expressway traveling in the wrong direction and continued westbound in the eastbound lanes for several miles — a nightmare scenario on a limited-access highway, where oncoming drivers have almost no time and nowhere to go. At approximately 6:54 a.m., near Exit 37 in Roslyn, the sequence reached its violent end. Reyes first sideswiped one vehicle, then collided head-on with a 2014 Toyota Prius.
Head-on collisions are the most dangerous crash geometry on any road, because the two vehicles’ speeds combine at the point of impact. On a highway, where speeds are highest, a wrong-way head-on is among the deadliest events that can occur in surface transportation. That this one did not produce a fatality is the single most important — and most fortunate — fact of the case.
The victim
The person who paid the price for Reyes’s decision to drive was the 51-year-old driver of the Toyota Prius. He was doing nothing wrong: traveling in the correct direction, in the correct lanes, on a Sunday morning. The head-on impact left him with a fractured tibia and a dislocated hip — serious orthopedic injuries that typically mean surgery, immobilization, and months of rehabilitation, and that can carry lasting consequences for mobility and chronic pain.
He was transported to a hospital in Manhasset for treatment. He survived. But the phrase prosecutors and judges use in cases like this — “serious physical injury” — is a legal term of art that understates the human reality: a stranger’s drunken choice, made miles away and minutes earlier, reached out at highway speed and broke his body.
A timeline of the case
The case moved through the Nassau County criminal-justice system over roughly 13 months, from crash to sentencing:
- May 18, 2025 (~6:54 a.m.): Reyes, driving a 2009 Honda Odyssey the wrong way on the LIE near Exit 37 in Roslyn, sideswipes one vehicle and strikes a 2014 Toyota Prius head-on. The Prius driver, 51, is seriously injured. Reyes is also injured. Police determine he was driving while intoxicated.
- July 25, 2025: Reyes is indicted on nine counts and arraigned in Nassau County Court. Bail is set at $90,000 cash, $180,000 bond, or a $900,000 partially secured bond. A next court date is scheduled for August 7, 2025.
- April 2026: In a resolution of the case, Reyes pleads guilty to the top counts — aggravated vehicular assault, assault, and aggravated DWI.
- June 12, 2026: Reyes is sentenced to five to nine years in state prison.
The nine-count indictment, and what the charges mean
When a Nassau County grand jury indicted Reyes on July 25, 2025, it returned a nine-count indictment that stacked the most serious applicable charges. As reported, the counts included:
- Aggravated vehicular assault
- Vehicular assault in the first degree
- Assault in the second degree
- Vehicular assault in the second degree
- Reckless endangerment in the second degree
- Reckless driving
- Aggravated driving while intoxicated
- Driving while intoxicated (two counts)
The headline charge — aggravated vehicular assault — is a Class C felony in New York. It applies when a driver causes serious physical injury to another person while committing aggravated DWI or DWI with additional aggravating circumstances (such as driving the wrong way or with a child in the car). It is the charge the state reserves for impaired drivers whose conduct crosses from negligent into dangerous-to-life, and it carries the prospect of years in state prison.
Aggravated DWI is itself a specific New York offense: it applies when a driver’s BAC is 0.18% or higher — more than double the standard 0.08% limit. Reyes’s reported 0.24%–0.26% sat well into that range. The stacking of vehicular-assault counts (first and second degree), reckless endangerment, and reckless driving reflects prosecutors building a case that could withstand trial while preserving leverage for a plea — which is ultimately how it resolved.
The plea and the sentence
In April 2026, Reyes pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicular assault, assault, and aggravated driving while intoxicated — accepting responsibility for the top of the indictment rather than going to trial. Two months later, on June 12, 2026, the court imposed a sentence of five to nine years in state prison.
That “five to nine” structure is an indeterminate sentence, standard in New York for felonies of this class. It means Reyes must serve at least the minimum — five years — before he becomes eligible for parole consideration, and can be held up to the nine-year maximum. The precise release date will depend on parole decisions and conduct in custody. In practical terms, a man who got behind the wheel at three times the legal limit and drove into oncoming highway traffic will spend a significant block of years incarcerated.
”Could have easily turned deadly”
Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly framed the case bluntly, saying Reyes’s “reckless, criminal actions could have easily turned deadly.” The numbers behind that statement are stark. A blood alcohol content above 0.24% represents profound impairment — well past the point where reaction time, judgment, lane-keeping, and the basic ability to recognize one is traveling against traffic are all severely degraded. Driving the wrong way for several miles at that level of intoxication is not a momentary lapse; it is a sustained, miles-long hazard imposed on every driver in those lanes.
The distance between this case and a fatal one is uncomfortably short. The DA’s office prosecutes the fatal versions regularly — and the only structural difference between a serious-injury aggravated vehicular assault and a vehicular-manslaughter case is often the speed, angle, and vehicle involved in the final impact, none of which the drunk driver controls.
Wrong-way drunk driving on Long Island: the bigger picture
This case is not an outlier. Wrong-way crashes are a persistent and especially lethal category on Long Island’s high-speed roads, and impairment is the common thread. The mechanics are consistent: an intoxicated driver enters a limited-access highway — the Long Island Expressway, a parkway, or a divided highway — via an exit ramp or a turnaround, fails to perceive the wrong-way signage and oncoming headlights, and continues until a collision stops them.
Long Island has seen the deadly version repeatedly. In March 2026, a wrong-way crash on the Southern State Parkway killed two people in a six-vehicle pileup, with an Oceanside driver charged with DWI. The pattern — wrong-way entry, high closing speed, multiple vehicles, impaired driver — repeats because the underlying conditions repeat: wide, fast, divided roadways; ramp and turnaround geometry that a sober driver reads automatically but an impaired one misses; and the simple fact that a person willing to drive at 0.24% is willing to drive anywhere.
For other drivers, the defensive lessons are narrow but real. Wrong-way crashes disproportionately happen late at night and in the early-morning hours, and disproportionately in the left (passing) lane, because a wrong-way driver perceives it as their right lane. Staying right and alert during high-risk overnight windows buys reaction time. But the deeper truth of the Reyes case is that the victim did everything right and was hurt anyway. The only reliable prevention is keeping the impaired driver off the road in the first place — which is exactly what aggravated-DWI prosecution and sentences like this one are designed to do.
Engineering and the law: two lines of defense
Transportation agencies have spent years trying to engineer the wrong-way problem down, because the human cost is so high relative to how rarely it happens. The countermeasures are now familiar to anyone who has driven an off-ramp at night: oversized, lowered “WRONG WAY” and “DO NOT ENTER” signs placed at headlight height so impaired or drowsy drivers see them in their low beams; red retroreflective pavement markers that glow red to a driver going the wrong direction; and, increasingly, radar- or camera-triggered detection systems that flash LED-bordered warning signs and automatically alert police and post messages to highway boards when a vehicle enters a ramp the wrong way. New York’s DOT and the Thruway Authority have deployed versions of these at higher-risk interchanges.
They help — but they have a ceiling, and that ceiling is exactly the Reyes case. A detection system can flash, an alert can fire, a message board can light up, and a driver at 0.24% to 0.26% can sail past all of it, because the impairment that put him on the wrong side of the highway is the same impairment that blinds him to every warning designed to get him off it. Engineering reduces the number of wrong-way entries; it cannot reliably stop a driver who is three times over the limit and has already traveled miles against traffic.
That is why the second line of defense — the one that operated in this case — is the law. New York’s vehicular-assault and aggravated-DWI statutes exist precisely because signage and pavement markers cannot reach a 0.26% driver in the moment. They reach him afterward, through indictment, conviction, and a five-to-nine-year sentence, and through the general deterrent that every prosecuted case adds: a public, on-the-record reminder that driving at that level of intoxication is not an accident waiting to happen but a felony waiting to be charged.
What this means
Jorge Arias Reyes will serve five to nine years for a crash that injured one person and could have killed many. The 51-year-old he struck survived a head-on highway collision and a long recovery. The case is a clean illustration of how New York’s vehicular-assault statutes are meant to work: a heavily intoxicated wrong-way driver, a seriously injured innocent victim, a nine-count indictment, a guilty plea to the top charges, and a multi-year state-prison sentence.
Long Island Traffic will update this report if an appeal is filed or parole proceedings produce news. For drivers, the takeaway is the one the Nassau DA’s office returns to after every case like it: there is no version of getting behind the wheel at three times the legal limit that ends well — only versions that end in injury, and versions that end in death.
Reporting compiled from the Nassau County District Attorney’s office and contemporaneous coverage by Long Island Press and News 12 Long Island. Charge definitions reflect New York State law as of June 2026. This is a news report; see our Know Your Rights guides for legal-process explainers.