Bronx family of boy, 4, killed in crash with dad on stolen scooter furious over no-jail plea deal

Every morning before she goes to work, Jennifer Adorno puts the urn with her grandson’s ashes on her bed with his toys and turns the TV on to cartoons.

“I put cartoons on for him because that’s what he used to do,” she said. “He used to sit on my bed and watch cartoons. So now I feel like when we leave, we don’t want to leave them alone.”

Since Mario Rosario Jr. died in an August crash on a stolen scooter driven by his dad, Adorno, the boy’s mother and everyone else in the family say time has been frozen — they’ve been unable to forget their 4-year-old boy.

And unwilling to forgive his father.

On Thursday morning, Mario Rosario Sr. will plead guilty as part of a negotiated deal with Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark and state Supreme Court Judge Linda Poust Lopez.

Rosario agreed to a no-jail punishment of five years of probation and 500 hours of community service.

“I think this is the right outcome. The judge was very considerate of all the facts,” said the dad’s defense lawyer, Ali Benchakroun.

“This was a very tragic accident, quite frankly,” the attorney added. “The family knows Mr. Rosario has suffered. He lost a son. He did everything for him. He did everything with him. He’s living with a very high burden from the loss of his son.”

The boy’s mother, Najie Roberts, 25, the grandparents and his aunts and uncle grieve for Mario Jr. everyday and say they were an afterthought in the legal process.

“He gets to get five years’ probation and pick up some pieces of garbage on the side of the street and eventually move on with his life and probably have more kids in the future,” said Adorno, 44.

“He killed my daughter’s only child, our only grandson. It’s not fair. And it’s not fair to the future Mario Jr.s of the world because you’re saying that, ‘Hey, you don’t have a criminal record. It’s OK. It’s just a smack on the wrist if you kill your kid by accident.”

The crash happened on August 15, while Mario Sr. was celebrating the Dominican Day parade.

He put an adult helmet on his son, sat him on his lap and then took off southbound on Bailey Ave. when he collided with a Toyota Camry making a U-turn near W. 193rd St. at 9:20 p.m., according to his lawyer and cops.

The force of the crash sent the scooter onto the sidewalk, with both father and son thrown to the ground.

The oversized helmet on the boy’s head provided little protection and he suffered a fatal head injury in the crash. The child died about an hour later at St. Barnabas Hospital.

The driver’s brother-in-law, who rushed to the scene, said he will never forget the aftermath.

“I have that image stuck in my head, seeing the child lying there,” the man told the Daily News. “They were trying to revive [the boy]. The father was very upset, crying, banging on the car.”

The scooter, police said, had been stolen from a man at gunpoint in Queens. It’s unknown how the dad came to be riding it that day.

But this was not a one-off for the boy’s father, according to Adorno, who said he had done the same thing a year before and gotten away with it.

In June 2021, a year prior to the fatal crash, Mario Sr. was stopped by police for driving several blocks on the sidewalk with his son, then 3 years old, sitting on his lap without a helmet, according to Roberts, who said she witnessed the interaction.

“It got a little chaotic because Mario was resisting arrest,” she said. “That’s what kind of made it a little bit worse. I don’t think they were really going to charge him with child endangerment, but then he started resisting arrest and fighting back with the officers.”

The DA’s office confirmed the incident but couldn’t provide details about the penalty, if any, for Mario Sr.

Adorno said what hasn’t been taken into account is the fact that the Aug. 15 crash wasn’t a one-off error in judgment and that the prior arrest shows it was part of a pattern.

“He was ordered to go to a parenting class which he never attended. He also signed a statement with Child Protective Services that he acknowledged what he did was wrong and that he would never do it again. And he then did it again and he killed my grandson,” Adorno said.

The defense lawyer pushed back on the family’s anger, saying that the driver bore some blame in the child’s death.

“The guy’s U-turn set this in motion,” Benchakroun said. “My client has suffered a lot and he will continue to suffer for the rest of his life. Everyone recognizes that — it was not intentional.”

For Adorno and her family, the accident has left their lives in limbo. Beside the ritual of the TV cartoons every day, the family has left the boy’s room as it was when he died in August. There’s a tree planted in their frontyard in Westchester dedicated to little Mario.

Adorno said her daughter is barely able to keep it together.

“She’s not doing well at all. She’s a walking dead person,” the grandmother said. “She’s sad all the time. She’s angry all the time. She’s depressed all the time.

“It’s been very traumatic on my family. My 7-year-old constantly cries because she misses him and you know, they grew up together. She sees a counselor at school, my son was just taken a week ago to the hospital to be evaluated by a psych because he wants to kill himself because he, misses him and he has nightmares about him.”

Adorno said she herself is on medication for depression and anxiety, adding that “we’re a mess.”

The boy’s father should be in prison for what happened, she insisted

“I think he should be punished the proper way,” the grieving grandmother said.

On Thursday morning, the family will give their victim impact statements to the court.

The boy’s mother said she’s just happy that she won’t ever have to return to court and be remindedof what happened to her son.

As for her ex, she says that he has to live with the burden of what he did.

“At the end of the day, he has to live with the fact that he was the one responsible behind his son’s death,” Roberts said. “I don’t know how one can live with himself. I don’t know how one can sleep at night.”