A Long Island woman was sentenced to seven years in prison for deliberately hitting a 63-year-old woman with her minivan during an argument nearly a year ago, officials said Friday.
Philomena Mistretta, 51, of Coram, was accused of running over the victim in the parking lot of Miracle Plaza, a retail shopping center off Montauk Highway in Bellport, in the early hours of Oct. 26, 2024.
Mistretta was sitting in the driver’s seat of a 2004 white Toyota Sienna when she got into a verbal dispute with a woman standing next to the passenger side of the minivan, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release.
When the argument escalated, Mistretta got out of her vehicle and got into a physical altercation with the woman. She then returned to the Toyota, backed up, turned the vehicle toward the victim and “drove over her, dragging the victim for a short distance,” prosecutors said.
The victim, identified only as a 63-year-old woman, was transported to Long Island Community Hospital in Patchogue, where she was treated for skull lacerations and survived. Suffolk County police arrested Mistretta at the scene.
She was indicted in November on multiple felony charges, including attempted murder and assault, for using her vehicle as a weapon in what District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney called “a shocking disregard for human life.”
After pleading guilty to all the charges last month, Mistretta was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in prison, followed by five years of post-release supervision.
“What began as a disagreement should never have escalated to this level of violence,” Tierney said in a statement Friday. “The defendant made a conscious choice to harm another person, and today’s sentence reflects the gravity of that decision.”
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