Widow of Officer Leads Bid to Deny Parole for His Killer

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The New York Sun

The numbers have added up for Linda Sledge.


Twenty-four birthdays, 24 Christmas mornings, 24 wedding anniversaries since the winter night in 1980 when a convicted robber out on parole, Salvatore “Crazy Sal” DeSarno, shot and killed her husband, decorated policeman Cecil Sledge, then dragged the officer’s body in the undercarriage of his car for a half mile while trying to flee.


Now, the cop’s killer is up for parole this November and Ms.Sledge, 55, along with law-enforcement agencies across the country are fighting to make sure DeSarno, serving a 25-years-to-life sentence at the maximum security Sullivan Correctional facility in upstate Fallsburg, is denied any chance for release.


On Friday Ms. Sledge plans to address officials from the state parole board to discuss the enduring impact of her husband’s grisly murder.


“Twenty four years have gone by since [DeSarno] violently and viciously killed my husband with no remorse,” Ms. Sledge told The New York Sun in a telephone interview from her home in Canarsie yesterday. “Time hasn’t taken away what he has done to us.”


She described her husband, a 12-year veteran working his beat from the 69th Precinct in Canarsie, as a role model to indigent teens and a playful father to her son Richard, 28, and daughter Corinne, 25.


“The message,” Ms. Sledge added, “is simple. If you take a life, you shouldn’t get a second chance.”


A spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said “it would be difficult to conceive of a stronger case where [a convicted murderer]” should not be eligible for parole.


DeSarno was first incarcerated for robbing a woman at knifepoint when he was 20 years old. While on parole, he admitted to violating his terms by carrying a firearm and shooting Sledge, but claimed his shots were fired in self-defense after he enraged Sledge by muttering an obscenity at him. De-Sarno suffered two bullet wounds in the shoulder.


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