Nassau Supreme Court Justice Dawn Jimenez dies in motorcycle crash on LIE in Yaphank

Nassau County Supreme Court Justice Dawn M. Jimenez was killed in a motorcycle crash Sunday afternoon on the Long Island Expressway in Yaphank, court officials said Monday.

Officials said the judge, who had served on the bench in both the Bronx and Brooklyn, where she was known as Dawn Jimenez-Salta, was the passenger killed when the motorcycle she was on collided with a car that had slowed for traffic near Exit 68 at about 5:25 p.m.

Suffolk County police said Jimenez, 60, of Garden City, was a passenger on a 2007 Harley-Davidson motorcycle being operated by Frederick Fischer, 65, of Bay Shore, westbound on the LIE when it struck the rear of a 2016 Lexus SUV.

The Lexus then struck a 2019 Audi SUV, Suffolk police said.

Jimenez was transported to Long Island Community Hospital in Patchogue, where police said she was pronounced dead. Fischer was taken to Stony Brook University Hospital with serious injuries.

Jimenez was appointed to the Nassau Supreme Court in 2022. In an email, Vito M. DeStefano, administrative judge of the 10th Judicial District in Nassau, said Jimenez was "a beloved friend, co-worker and colleague, widely respected for her integrity, unyielding principles and knowledge. She will be greatly missed."

Al Baker, spokesman for the state's Office of Court Administration, said “The New York State Unified Court System family is mourning the tragic loss of New York State Supreme Court Justice, the Hon. Dawn Jimenez, who was assigned to serve in Supreme Court in Nassau County. Her death has deeply impacted her friends, colleagues, and co-workers, particularly those who worked beside her on the bench, and our thoughts are with her loved ones at this sad time.”

Dov Hikind, the former Democratic Brooklyn State Assembly member who supported Jimenez when she was seeking an elected civil judgeship in New York City in the early 2000s, said she was “a very special person who cared deeply about the justice system and deeply about doing good.” Jimenez, Hikind said, was not just professionally qualified, but “a mensch.”

Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist who worked with Jimenez on an unsuccessful race for a judgeship in the early 2000s, said Jimenez had in some ways been an uneasy fit for elected office. 

“There are people in public life whose sole purpose is running for office," he said. "She was more interested in doing the work. She didn’t see the job as a sinecure.”

Jimenez presided over several high-profile cases. In May, she ordered the county to pay an estimated $100,000 in legal fees to a reporter who had filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the county police department's phone directory, holding the county and its police force in contempt for ignoring an order by an appeals court panel to turn over the directory. In 2022, she denied the Town of Oyster Bay's attempt to stop a shellfishing company from dredging Mill Neck Creek to transplant clams to Oyster Bay Harbor.

According to a biography on the state courts website, the Princeton and Temple University School of Law-educated Jimenez worked for the Manhattan-based real estate law firm Borah, Goldstein, Altschuler & Schwartz for about a decade before she was appointed in 1999 as a judge in New York City's housing court. In 2008, she was elected judge in New York City's civil court in Brooklyn. She was appointed an acting justice in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn in 2013 and was elected as a justice in 2014, before being appointed to serve in Nassau.

More coverage: Long Island traffic crashes claimed 243 lives in 2022, 29% more than in 2019, Newsday has reported. The level was the highest since 2015, as dangerous driving increased post-COVID-19 and police traffic enforcement dropped, according to a Newsday analysis of crash and ticketing data and traffic experts.