The skid marks near Exit 32 on the Southern State Parkway were a daily reminder of his family's loss, said Richard Hare, of Lindenhurst.

Months earlier, an aggressive driver who weaved through traffic at 93 mph while high on marijuana crashed, killing his daughter and two of her friends.

Ciara Hare, 18, was driving east on the Southern State in November 2022 when a 2018 Subaru WRX driven by Matthew Whyte, of Laurelton, Queens, struck her 2004 Honda Civic, forcing the car off the parkway and into a traffic camera pole. Hare, a Nassau Community College student who loved to cook, sang in the church choir and hoped to become a radiologist, died in the crash, along with passengers Florence Oprisan, 18, of Lindenhurst, and Jean-Marc Miller, 22, of West Babylon.

"It's just been a nightmare since that day," the grief-stricken father told Newsday through tears in a recent interview. "I think about my daughter every day; my wife thinks of my daughter every day. It's just been horrifying."

Two-thirds of the nation’s traffic fatalities and one-third of injuries, according to Arizona State University’s Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, are the result of the same kind of aggressive driving that led to the death of Ciara Hare and her friends.

Excessive speeding, frequent lane changes, tailgating, running red lights, passing on shoulders, distracted driving, driving while impaired — aggressive driving is a broad category and sometimes difficult to define. But it is disrespectful and dangerous, according to law-enforcement officials, traffic experts and Long Island motorists. And they all agree it has been on the rise in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic.

High School graduation photo of Ciara. Ciara was killed in a car cash in November of 2022 on The Southern State Parkway by a driver who according to the Nassau District Attorney was traveling almost 100 MPH and was impaired by marijuana. May 27, 2025.

"People are not driving normally," Hare said. "When I am on the Southern State Parkway, I am worried because cars are flying by me, people are crawling up behind you — everybody wants to go fast."

Ciara Hare and her friends were among the more than 2,100 people who died as a result of crashes on Nassau and Suffolk roadways during the decade ending in 2023, according to the Institute for Traffic Safety Management, a University at Albany-based agency dedicated to improving highway safety.

The damage from aggressive driving, said Robert Sinclair, senior public affairs manager at AAA Northeast, doesn't just include premature deaths, life-altering injuries and wrecked vehicles. Aggressive driving forces up auto and health insurance premiums, he said, and it costs victims time they would otherwise spend with their families, building businesses or pursuing their careers.

"The societal costs are just enormous," Sinclair said, "because some person decided, took it upon themselves, to engage in this bad behavior. It is just selfish. It is selfish, bad behavior — 'I am more important, I have to do this, I am going to speed down the road, I am going to weave in and out, I am going to cut people off. It’s all about me.' It is absolutely totally selfish behavior."

Increased enforcement

Long Island police agencies have responded by beefing up enforcement, officials told Newsday. The number of traffic tickets issued for aggressive driving in Nassau County has increased more than 59% between 2020 and 2024, from 29,224 to 46,456, according to ITSMR data. The number of aggressive driving tickets issued in Suffolk County during the same period increased 88%, from 19,577 in 2020 to 36,855 last year.

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The 83,311 aggressive driving tickets issued last year is a 70.7% increase over 2020, although it is still below the 85,796 issued in 2019, the year before the pandemic. Suffolk agencies wrote nearly 19% more tickets last year than in 2019 (29,857). Nassau law enforcement officers issued 20% fewer tickets in 2024 than in 2019 (55,939).

"Most people in Suffolk County are not going to be victims of a violent crime, but everybody is affected by road safety, and everybody is affected by someone who drives 100 miles per hour on the Long Island Expressway," Suffolk County Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina said.

Aggressive drivers pose unique challenges to law-enforcement officials, Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly said. Drivers call 911 to report excessive speeding or weaving in and out of lanes, but by the time police show up, the aggressive driver has exited the highway.

"Unfortunately, the ones that we do catch are the ones that cause an accident, and you come upon a scene where there is a car wrapped around a tree," Donnelly said.

Matthew Whyte is brought into the Nassau County Courthouse on Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023 in Mineola.

"Some young people forget that they are driving a machine that can easily kill somebody," the district attorney added.

Whyte, 29, pleaded guilty earlier this year to aggravated vehicular homicide, three counts of second-degree manslaughter and other charges related to the crash that killed Ciara Hare and her friends.

He was sentenced to 4½ to 13½ years in prison in April.

"She was my only daughter," Hare said. "This man, because of his reckless actions, took away the love of my life, of my best friend."

'Everybody is rushing'

It didn’t take very long for New York State Trooper Charles Weilminster, whose patrol territory includes the portion of the Southern State Parkway where Ciara Hare and her friends were killed, to spot motorists engaged in aggressive driving on a recent Thursday.

"Everybody is rushing home from work, trying to get to their kids' games, so they go as fast as possible and put everybody else in danger," the trooper said.

Weilminster, accompanied by Newsday journalists during a recent tour, stopped a half-dozen vehicles during a 90-minute period. The first person stopped, a college student in a white Honda Pilot Weilminster clocked driving 86 mph in a 55 mph zone, received a speeding ticket.

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The trooper later issued a summons to a limo driver whose black Infiniti had veered into the neighboring lane. The limo driver was texting on his phone when his vehicle began its drift, and the driver, who was not wearing a seat belt, said he did not see the officer's vehicle approach his — even though the marked state police vehicle was adjacent to his Infiniti.

Weilminster later issued a citation to the driver of a black Honda who was going 78 mph on the Wantagh Parkway, where the speed limit is 55. The driver told Weilminster that he didn’t know the speed limit or how fast he was going.

"I’m a sucker for a good excuse, but not knowing your speed or the speed limit is not one of them," said Weilminster, a state trooper for 22 years.

Most motorists who engage in the kind of aggressive driving Weilminster stops people for every shift understand they pose a danger to themselves and others, according to a December report by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. According to the annual Traffic Safety Culture Index, 89% of drivers surveyed said aggressive driving is dangerous, while 81% said running red lights puts themselves and others at risk.

Yet 27% acknowledged running at least one red light in the previous 30 days. Nearly half — 49% — admitted driving 15 mph over the speed limit on a highway in the previous month. More than a third — 36% — said they had driven 10 mph above the speed limit on a residential street.

No easy answers

So why do motorists drive in ways that put themselves and others in harm’s way? It’s a complex question, law enforcement officials and traffic safety experts say, one with many answers and one that defies easy explanations.

"It’s like, why do people engage in gambling or substance abuse?" said Dr. Joseph Squitieri, division director for adult ambulatory psychiatry at Northwell Zucker Hillside Hospital in Queens. "Sometimes people are drawn to risky behaviors because of a personality disorder."

Those motorists, Squitieri added, may be looking for something they are missing. "They are unhappy in their lives," he said, "and they are looking to fill that void."

Sinclair said AAA’s research suggests some people may be wired for aggressive driving. The same traits that make Type A personalities successful in business, he said, also tend to make them aggressive, reckless drivers.

"Go-getters, impatient, get-it-done yesterday, those kinds of people, they engage in that kind of behavior," Sinclair said.

A 2016 study published in the journal PLOS One also suggests there is a biological reason for aggressive driving. The study, which sought to identify common personality traits among drivers who engage in dangerous roadway conduct, recruited men ages 19 to 39 to study their driving habits.

The researchers divided the men into four groups, including drivers who had been convicted of driving while intoxicated, drivers who had been ticketed for speeding, and motorists with both alcohol and speed-related violations. The fourth group consisted of men without a history of reckless driving.

The study found few common traits among the groups, but one link did suggest a biological factor behind aggressive driving. The participants in the risky driver groups had lower levels of cortisol — a hormone that rises with stress — when placed in challenging situations.

Traffic experts and police said offenders tend to be young and male, but aggressive drivers can be found in all demographics.

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"Two years ago I had an encounter with a middle-aged woman who was driving 95 miles per hour, with a 2-year-old in the backseat," Catalina said. The woman’s license was suspended for 6 months as a result of the incident.

"It is rude. It is disrespectful. It is dangerous," Catalina said of aggressive driving.

The COVID-19 pandemic, Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said, was a big contributor to the rise in aggressive driving.

Traffic on Long Island practically vanished after businesses and schools were shut down in March 2020, emboldening those who took to the highways to drive fast and recklessly. At the same time, Nassau police and other departments, worried that officers might contract the deadly virus during traffic stops, eased back dramatically on enforcement.

Law enforcement agencies in Nassau issued 55,939 tickets for aggressive driving in 2019, according to ITSMR. In 2020, the number of aggressive driving tickets dropped to 29,224. Agencies in Suffolk issued 29,857 aggressive driving tickets in 2019, and more than 10,000 fewer — 19,577 — in 2020.

"So that is how it kind of started," Ryder said. "Our numbers [of tickets] went down and our problems started to go up, accidents and so forth."

Traffic enforcement gradually increased as Long Island and the rest of the nation emerged from the pandemic, according to the Nassau commissioner.

"That’s good, the enforcement is there, but the driving is still bad," Ryder said. "The drivers haven’t learned the lesson; they haven’t gotten the message."

Bad behavior on the roads

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The COVID-19 pandemic amplified economic anxieties and political divisions that had been percolating on Long Island and beyond for years, and that has fueled increased aggressive behavior on and off the roads and highways, law enforcement officials and traffic experts said.

"We live in a very divided country, and there’s a lot of stress in the world, and a lot of worries," Suffolk police chief of patrol Gerard Hardy said. "People are worried about their families and things like that, and that’s got to contribute to overall stress and overall bad behavior on the roads."

The anonymity of the highway emboldens drivers to take out their frustrations on the road — and other drivers, experts said.

"They might not be able to release it at the office or with family or with other ways, but when they get on the road, it feels like carte blanche time," AAA’s Sinclair said.

Aggressive driving is closely linked to drinking and drug use, which can lower motorists’ inhibitions, cloud their judgment and dull their reflexes, officials said. Donnelly said her office is seeing an increase in drugged driving due to the legalization of recreational cannabis. "We’ve seen a little bit of an increase in that, with the marijuana," Donnelly said.

Long Island’s roads encourage dangerous driving habits, added Michael Lewyn, the director of the Institute on Land Use and Sustainable Development at Touro Law Center.

"The worst environments for aggressive driving are major arteries, where people drive fast enough to kill you, but there are also intersections where people are making turns or pedestrians are crossing the street," said Lewyn, who cited portions of Jericho Turnpike as one example.

There is also more competition for space on streets and highways, Hardy said.

"We live on an island — it’s a finite space," Hardy said. "Populations have increased. Our roads were designed about 100 years ago, when we were an agricultural community of about 40,000 residents. Now we have population of 1.4 million. ... Now we have crowded roadways, we have aggressive driving, we have distracted driving."

Larger, more powerful cars may give some drivers a false sense of personal security, experts and officials said, while increasing danger to those around them.

"If there is a crash, it means it is more likely to cause a serious injury," Lewyn said. "It is like getting run over by a tank."

The human toll

Aggressive driving is especially dangerous for traffic-enforcement officers like state trooper Weilminster, who often have tense roadside conversations with violators while cars whiz by just a few feet away at 70 mph. NYPD Officer Anastasios Tsakos was killed when an impaired driver struck him on the Long Island Expressway on April 27, 2021.

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Tsakos and other officers had responded to a crash on the LIE ramp from the Clearview Expressway, authorities said. Tsakos was directing traffic near the crash when Jessica Beauvais, of Hempstead, struck him in a 2013 Volkswagen Passat while speeding. A Queens jury convicted Beauvais, whose blood alcohol content was nearly double New York State’s legal limit of 0.08%, of second-degree manslaughter and other charges in October 2023. She was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison in February 2024.

The pain and grief caused by Tsakos’s death continues to ripple through his family, friends, colleagues and community. The NYPD lost a police officer, said Irene Tsakos, his widow. His children, now 10 and 7 years old, lost a father; his parents lost a son.

"I lost a husband," Irene Tsakos said. "We lost the future that we were supposed to have. This isn’t something that goes away after a year. The loss is felt every single day — and forever."

The Suffolk County Police Department nearly lost one of its officers earlier this year to aggressive driving. Officer Brendon Gallagher was severely injured in January when a Brentwood man driving more than 100 mph in a Mustang struck his police vehicle, officials have said, causing it to flip on its side and hit a tree.

Suffolk County Police Officer Brendon Gallagher, right, was seriously injured in a crash, left, on the Long Island Expressway near Exit 55 in Brentwood.

Gallagher was a member of the Street Takeover Task Force, which was formed in November to crack down on speeding, illegal racing and illicit car gatherings.

Defendant Cody B. Fisher pleaded not guilty to assault on a police officer, second-degree assault and other charges in a 10-count indictment. The case is making its way through the courts.

"The injuries he sustained were horrific," Catalina said of Gallagher. "He’s lucky to be alive. But he is a strong, strong guy, and he is continuing work on healing and getting better."

Catalina, a former Suffolk undersheriff and NYPD veteran who became the county’s police commissioner in February, said improving traffic safety will be a top priority for his administration. Declining crime rates allow the department to shift staff and resources to Suffolk’s highways and roads.

In April, Catalina announced that Suffolk police were bolstering traffic enforcement by adding nine officers to the Highway Patrol Bureau. The officers will be trained to identify motorists impaired by cannabis and will be directed to crack down on distracted driving. The additional staff allows the department to beef up enforcement on the Long Island Expressway and Sunrise Highway.

"I notice them when I’m driving the expressway and Sunrise Highway, there’s more cops out there, there’s more of a presence. ... I’m happy with the enforcement they are doing so far, but listen, there is more to do, there’s still aggressive drivers out there," Catalina said.

The commissioner also said the department was extending the Street Takeover Task Force, which began as a pilot program, at least until the end of the summer. The team issued 4,652 summonses, made 26 arrests and impounded 46 vehicles from its creation in November through June 11, Suffolk police said.

The penalties

New York State Trooper Charles Weilminster makes a traffic stop on the Southern State Parkway while on patrol in May.

Nassau police have also beefed up traffic enforcement, Ryder said, and his officers wrote dramatically more tickets for aggressive driving in 2024 than in previous years. Enforcement has been especially bolstered in areas where there is heavy truck traffic and young people are known to drive recklessly, including Sunrise Highway, Hempstead Turnpike and Jerusalem Avenue.

"These young kids with these hopped-up cars who are flying down the street, jumping to the side, driving on the side, we are focused on them," Ryder said. "We are focused on getting them off the road, and we will impound your car."

Young drivers too often lack the experience to handle more powerful models of cars, Ryder said, but traffic tickets are often not enough to get them to change their bad habits. Seizing the car, he said, gets their attention.

"I towed your car, it is a minimum of $150 just for the tow," Ryder said. "Every day it’s in storage, it’s not my storage, it’s private storage, it is over $30 a day."

It can take up to a month to recover a seized vehicle, Ryder said.

"So you can do the math — it adds up very quickly," he added. "But sometimes that is the only way you’re going to send a message, to teach this person to slow down."

Under New York State law, reckless driving is a misdemeanor that could result in up to 30 days in jail for the first offense and revocation of driving privileges. Sentences could also include fines of up to $300 for the first offense, $525 for the second and $1,125 for the third. It could also result in five points on a driver's license. Drivers who accrue 11 points during an 18-month period could have their licenses suspended, according to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles.

Nassau police have also been sending officers from the department's Overwatch program, an initiative rolled out in 2023. The 20 or so uniformed officers in the program patrol areas near schools and houses of worship to deter criminal activity around high-profile locations, but when the threat level is low, those officers can be diverted to traffic enforcement.

"You get a double bang for your buck," Ryder said. "You see a large presence of cops so if you are a bad guy, you’re thinking, ‘I’m not going there,’ and we’re also teaching our drivers, hey, if you are going to speed, we are going to give you tickets."

Those efforts, however, won’t bring back Ciara Hare, Florence Oprisan and Jean-Marc Miller. Richard Hare and his wife maintain a roadside memorial on the Southern State, near the site of the crash that killed their daughter.

"There's three new graves [memorials] just before hers on the Southern State Parkway," Hare said. "Three other children died. I see new markers every day of the week."

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