Woman speaks out after family is killed by illegal immigrant
Courtney Hacking is now fighting for harsher penalties for illegal immigrants.
A Texas woman is criticizing the two-year sentence an illegal immigrant received for killing her husband and two youngest children in a car crash last year.
Courtney Hacking told “Fox & Friends” Saturday that the sentence in a Texas state court doesn’t compensate her for the loss of her 36-year-old husband Peter, a volunteer firefighter, 4-year-old daughter Ellie and 22-month-old son Grayson in the accident.
“People think his crime and his punishment seem to fit because he was an illegal immigrant,” she said, referring to Mexican Margarito Quintero Rosales who pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in connection with the crash. “But to me being illegal in the country was a crime on its own so I don’t understand how he did get only two years.”
She added, “To me I take it offensively. I take it personally.”
Cops say Quintero swerved into Hacking’s vehicle which was coming the other way when he fell asleep at the wheel, WFAA-TV reported.
The sentencing took place Sept. 29. The sentence was the maximum under state law, the station reported.
Quintero has been jailed since the accident. He will complete the sentence in about another 110 days.
He is serving that sentence as he serves a two-year federal sentence for reentering the U.S. illegally after being deported. Court records show he was charged with that crime after the accident and sentenced last month.
Quintero was also arrested after the crash for having no driver’s license, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Peter Hacking was driving Ellie and Grayson home after picking them up at the babysitter, according to the paper.
“I want our laws enforced,” Hacking said on “Fox & Friends.”
“The message needs to be put across to them that when you come to this country you need to do it legally because when they come here all they’re getting is…they’re committing crimes, they’re getting a slap on the wrist and they’re going back to Mexico or they’re going back to whatever country they came from.”
Her husband was a legal immigrant from England, she said.
Hacking is now caring for her other four children alone.
She said she each day she sees Ellie and Grayson’s beautiful faces from the moment she wakes up to the moment she goes to bed.
“I miss their kisses,” she said. “I miss everything about them on a daily basis.”
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