Anthony Stinson death: Suffolk cop will not face charges in crash that killed 13-year-old bicyclist

The Suffolk police officer who fatally struck a 13-year-old Shirley bicyclist in 2023 while responding to a medical emergency, was driving just over 87 miles per hour at the time of the crash, but won’t face any criminal charges, the state Attorney General’s Office said in a report Thursday.

The officer, Sarah Tryon, did not intentionally hit the victim nor was she reckless, elements that would be required in order to charge her in the Sept. 9, 2023, death of Anthony Stinson, the report said.

"In this case, while the officer caused A.S.’s death, the evidence does not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer’s conduct was a gross deviation from the standard that would have been observed by a reasonable officer in the same circumstances, or that the officer consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death," the office of Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement with the report.

"The officer was speeding because she was responding to an emergency. She took precautionary measures by activating her vehicle’s emergency lights and siren, and when the officer saw A.S., she attempted to swerve around him. There was not any evidence that the officer was impaired by drugs or alcohol, or that she was otherwise distracted at the time of the crash," the report said.

"Officer Tryon said she saw A.S. a few seconds before the collision and tried to avoid hitting him by swerving around a stopped car," the report said.

The car's event data recorder indicated that the police car was traveling 87.1 mph five seconds before it was triggered, the report said, and 44.1 mph at the moment it was triggered. After the collision, the police car "veered right, struck a car in the roadway, jumped a curb onto the lawn of a house, and collided with two cars parked in front of the house," the report said.

"Officer Tryon first applied the brakes three seconds before the triggering event, when the car was traveling at 87 mph," the report said, adding she said she did not recall how fast she was traveling, but said she slowed down as she entered the intersection.

An expert told the office the crash with the parked cars, not the impact against the boy, was what triggered the car's recording device, the report said.

The 21-page report from the attorney general's Office of Investigation recommended that the police department equip its police cars with dashboard cameras that automatically record when the car’s emergency lights are activated.

Tryon, a Suffolk officer since 2022, did not activate the dashcam on her police car, the report said. She had been dispatched to help a 66-year-old woman who was having difficulty breathing.

"Had Officer Tryon activated the dashcam there would have been a clearer picture of the collision, which would have greatly facilitated the investigation of this case and provided the public with greater transparency of events," the report said.

The report also noted that Tryon, while not exhibiting signs of intoxication, was not given a breath test, even though department policy mandates that a driver involved in an accident involving serious injury or death be breath-tested.

The police department declined to comment on the report Thursday.

The victim's mother, Claudia Stinson, who filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the police department, disputed the report's findings in an interview.

"They said she was doing her job. I think justice was not on Anthony’s side. This investigation is not quite right to me," Stinson said.

Stinson said she was standing on her deck that evening and heard the collision, but did not hear sirens prior to the crash. She said police relied too heavily on the officer’s account of the crash and witnesses on the street, saying "Something doesn’t sound right."

She said: "This investigation seems to be covering a mistake. This investigation did not go deep enough... She’s still human and can get distracted. You still can make mistakes, and it makes me angry that the cop may not be accepting that she made a mistake."

The report added that the department's Internal Affairs Bureau probe into the crash is still ongoing and noted that the then-police commissioner Rodney Harrison did not forward the case to the department's Critical Incident Board. That board reviews police incidents at the discretion of the commissioner and issues reports on where more training is needed.

Anthony’s father, Anthony Stinson Sr. said in an interview: "I want to see justice here. She’s a professional driver and trained to do this. I’m sure she’s not trained to do 85 mph through a busy intersection when he was in the crosswalk ... I don’t need her to go to jail, but don’t come back to me and tell me it wasn’t her fault. It should have never happened, and it could have been avoided."