Orlando Fraga-Seruti had spent much of that Saturday night watching baseball with a friend on the jumbo screens that line the walls at the back of the Wild Wild West casino in Atlantic City, N.J. The Giants had beaten the Phillies by one. The Yankees lost to the Rays.
By the time Mr. Fraga-Seruti, 76, left the casino, Saturday had turned into a humid Sunday morning. He was walking along Atlantic Avenue in the dark toward his favorite Dunkin’ Donuts when he was struck from behind by a Toyota 4Runner. The impact thrust him into the air, snapping his neck.
“The guy’s laying out here. He’s twisted up, man,” a passerby shouted at a 911 dispatcher at about 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2022. A medical examiner would later describe it as a “hangman’s fracture.”
The driver of the vehicle, Harris Jacobs, was 26. He was headed home after a night of barhopping in nearby Margate, according to trial testimony. He pulled over and parked. But after hunching over Mr. Fraga-Seruti’s body twice, he took off, video showed, setting in motion a four-year ordeal for the dead man’s family.
The police used surveillance video from area businesses to track the S.U.V.’s circuitous route through the heart of the city, locating Mr. Jacobs seven hours later in his apartment, just a few blocks north of the crash.
Too much time had elapsed to conduct tests to prove whether Mr. Jacobs was intoxicated. He was charged with fleeing the scene of a fatal accident and faced years in prison.
His first trial ended last May with a hung jury, but in January prosecutors pressed ahead with a second.
Seth Levy, a county prosecutor, told jurors that Mr. Jacobs had been at a birthday party, where his friends testified to taking a shot of alcohol, before heading to two bayside bars, Memories and Maynard’s. Mr. Levy stressed that those details were relevant to help explain why Mr. Jacobs might have chosen to flee before the police arrived.
“It’s to make sense,” he said, “of the way the defendant decided to write the ending of his story.”
Then he told jurors it was up to them to assess the evidence and decide how Mr. Jacobs’s story would ultimately end.
But the jury would not have the final word.
‘Cuba’
Mr. Fraga-Seruti was 34 when he fled Cuba in 1980 in a mass exodus known as the Mariel boatlift, federal court records show. He lived briefly in California before settling in Atlantic City, where relatives said he worked as a security guard at the Sands and Claridge casinos, during the seaside resort’s heyday.
“You could find money in the floor,” recalled Hector Vazquez, who came to Atlantic City from Puerto Rico as a boy and had known Mr. Fraga-Seruti for decades. They shared a love of sports, and their paths often crossed at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Mr. Fraga-Seruti had been in and out of trouble as a younger man, court records show. He was held in a federal prison in Texas even after completing a sentence for drug sales — a penalty common for Mariel refugees until 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that open-ended detentions like Mr. Fraga-Seruti’s were illegal. He was freed that year.
For a time, he volunteered at an Atlantic City church that distributed clothing and food to the city’s large homeless population, in exchange for a place to sleep, several of his friends said. In recent years, he lived mainly on the streets and got by doing odd jobs for area businesses, including the Dunkin’. “Sweep, mop,” Mr. Vazquez said. “He’d even clean the bathrooms.”
Among the homeless people who congregate near the city’s bus station, across the street from where Mr. Fraga-Seruti was killed, he was known by his nickname: Cuba.
Mr. Vazquez, 62, said he left Mr. Fraga-Seruti at the Wild Wild West about six hours before the crash. He had to work the next day, and Mr. Fraga-Seruti stayed to watch more of the games, he said.
When he was struck, Mr. Fraga-Seruti’s pockets held only two $1 bills, two pennies and two nickels, according to the medical examiner.
His son, Ckenny Fraga-Seruti, 42, said he saw his father regularly. He smiled as he explained their good-natured quarrels over their competing allegiances to professional sports teams. The younger Mr. Fraga-Seruti attended both trials with his mother and fiancée.
“The hardest part was the autopsy,” he said.
Mr. Jacobs, the driver, had grown up in the area and had worked as a real estate broker after graduating from the University of Maryland, before following his father into the billboard advertising business. At the time of the crash, he was sharing an apartment with his cousin at an upscale complex three blocks from the beach.
Listening to testimony from the parade of witnesses who attested to Mr. Jacobs’s good character was difficult, Mr. Fraga-Seruti’s son said: “If he’s such a law-abiding citizen, why was he here?”
‘Fair, impartial’
In the years that the case against Mr. Jacobs was winding its way through the justice system, the state’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, had begun to rethink his approach to crime, punishment and mercy.
Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, had granted no pardons in his first six years in office. Then, in June 2024, he embraced a novel approach.
He set up an online portal to streamline pardon applications and created a clemency advisory board, which weighed cases on their merits and made recommendations to the governor. Certain categories of offenders became eligible for expedited reviews, including victims of domestic violence and sexual assault who were convicted of crimes against their abusers and defendants who declined plea offers, only to wind up with far lengthier sentences after trial.
People who took steps toward rehabilitation and contributed to society while in prison were celebrated during news conferences in which Mr. Murphy stressed his goal of taking a “fair, impartial and balanced approach.”
It was a methodology praised by many criminal justice advocates, including the state’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and by academics, who rushed to set up clemency projects at area colleges and law schools. At Princeton University, dozens of students helped to interview inmates, review prison records and prepare applications.
Amol Sinha, executive director of the state’s A.C.L.U., called it “the most ambitious clemency agenda we’ve seen in any state.”
In less than two years, Mr. Murphy awarded pardons or commutations to 455 people, more than all New Jersey governors combined since the state started tracking such data. For people like Joe Krakora, the state’s former public defender who led the clemency project at Princeton, the high number underscored the need to “rethink our draconian sentencing laws that result in the warehousing of individuals who have been sufficiently punished for their crimes and pose no risk to public safety as they age.”
The governor’s new interest in granting clemency would not seem to have much to do with the case of Mr. Jacobs. At least not at first.
‘Simply snaps’
Last fall, as Mr. Murphy’s second term was nearing its end, a frenzy for last-minute pardons was intensifying. Advocates for people who had been accused of crimes or had served time in prison petitioned the state, hoping for consideration before a new administration took over.
In December, before his second trial began, Mr. Jacobs’s name appeared for the first time on lists of potential clemency candidates that were circulating among county prosecutor’s offices for feedback. Prosecutors in Atlantic County emphasized their objections in bold, italic lettering.
“This case is still open and pending,” Erik Bergman, Atlantic County’s first assistant prosecutor, wrote on Jan. 13 to the governor’s pardon lawyer. “In fact, Mr. Jacobs, as I write this letter, is currently on trial.”
The trial continued.
Jurors learned that the sidewalk nearest to where Mr. Fraga-Seruti was struck was blocked during the construction of an area hospital’s new dialysis center. He was walking in the right-hand lane of the roadway, wearing dark clothing, when he was hit.
They also watched a video that traced Mr. Jacobs’s decision-making in the minutes after the crash. As the 911 caller spoke to the dispatcher, Mr. Jacobs climbed back into the Toyota and steered away from the main road, veering through a narrow alleyway before turning onto a side street. He and his father exchanged 10 phone calls, testimony showed, but neither one contacted the police. A lawyer who is friendly with Mr. Jacobs’s father told jurors that the young man had planned to turn himself in, but was arrested first.
Dr. Gary Glass, a psychiatrist who evaluated Mr. Jacobs, testified that the trauma of the fatal crash caused the defendant to slip into a dissociative state that left him briefly unaware of his actions. “It is the kind of scene, the kind of circumstance, where an individual like Harris Jacobs simply snaps,” his lawyer, Louis Barbone, told jurors, adding that his client’s history with attention deficit disorder would have intensified his stress.
Among the facts that jurors did not learn was the driver’s connection to state politics.
The car Mr. Jacobs was driving was registered to his father, Joe Jacobs, a Democratic power broker who had held prominent political jobs in Atlantic City and was a prodigious campaign fund-raiser. The year after the crash, Joe Jacobs posted a photo online of himself with the governor and noted that he was holding a fund-raiser the next week for the first lady, Tammy Murphy, who at the time was running for U.S. Senate.
The elder Mr. Jacobs, who is a lawyer, asserted attorney-client privilege and did not testify in his son’s trial.
But he was a regular presence in the courtroom in Mays Landing, about 20 miles west of Atlantic City, where he once worked as a lawyer for both the housing authority and the board of education.
Kaleem Shabazz, vice president of the City Council in Atlantic City, described the elder Mr. Jacobs as “an entrepreneur of government and politics and relationships.”
“He moves around in moneyed circles,” Mr. Shabazz said in an interview. “He’s where the action is.”
Campaign finance records show that Joe Jacobs has donated about $88,000 to New Jersey politicians and political organizations since 2020. His son also began making political donations after graduating from college in 2018, chipping in $4,900 to Mr. Murphy’s re-election effort in 2020.
The fund-raiser that Joe Jacobs held for Ms. Murphy’s Senate campaign pulled in roughly $100,000. Harris Jacobs’s mother contributed $6,600 that day, federal election records show.
Mr. Murphy and Ms. Murphy declined requests for comment, and the former governor has never spoken publicly about how he assessed Mr. Jacobs’s request for clemency. Harris Jacobs and Joe Jacobs also had no comment, and Mr. Barbone, the lawyer for Harris Jacobs, did not return calls.
The verdict
Mr. Murphy’s last day in office was Jan. 20. That was also the day that jurors in Mr. Jacobs’s weeklong trial returned to court for a second day of deliberations. Almost immediately, they told the judge, Ralph A. Paolone, that they had reached a verdict.
One juror, Kathleen Friedel, recalled crying as she and her fellow jurors shuffled back into the third-floor courtroom, her eyes fixed only on the judge. Other jurors were also visibly emotional, she said.
“It was draining — just to listen to everybody, their views,” she said. “Nobody just made a quick decision.”
“It was somebody’s life that you’re affecting,” she added.
Jurors were never told about Mr. Jacobs’s first trial. Neither did they know that he had applied for a pre-emptive pardon. But it was obvious that the stakes were high.
“You know that person is young,” Ms. Friedel said. “It was just very stressful.”
Six months before the crash that killed Mr. Fraga-Seruti, another driver struck and fatally wounded a pedestrian, Talmadge Franklin, 67, in a neighboring town, Absecon, and then fled under similar circumstances. That driver, Mathew Cademartori, who is 28, is serving a seven-year prison term.
The foreman announced the verdict against Mr. Jacobs just before 10:05 a.m.
“Guilty.”
Then the judge polled each juror, one by one, before thanking them for their service.
“The function you have performed is one of the most important duties you will ever fulfill,” he said.
“It is truly remarkable witnessing the reality, and it demonstrates that the criminal justice system works,” Judge Paolone added. “And it does so magnificently to preserve our constitutional right to a trial by jury.”
After jurors left the courtroom, he called the lawyers to the bench. They began speaking in hushed voices.
‘Insanity’
Mr. Murphy had been expected to grant a seventh and final round of clemencies before the new governor, Mikie Sherrill, was sworn in just after 11:30 a.m. on Jan. 20. And Mr. Jacobs’s lawyer had indicated to the court that he had reason to believe his client would be among those pardoned.
But nothing official had arrived, and Judge Paolone said the severity of the crime, and the guilty verdict, mandated that Mr. Jacobs be held in jail.
“I’ve got to put him in. There’s no reason to keep him on the street right now,” Judge Paolone said, according to an audio recording of the trial. “Let’s find out what the governor’s doing. Please.”
The lawyers began to walk away. Then an aide refreshed a website that included the governor’s latest news releases and showed it to the judge.
“Hold on,” the judge said. “Insanity. Talk about timing. Unbelievable.”
“This is nj.gov,” Judge Paolone went on to explain to the lawyers, “and then I go to the ‘news and events’ and then I hit refresh and what popped up is two new things. The second one — not the very first one, the second one — is this.”
Then he shared what had happened to all those still gathered in the courtroom.
“I’ve never had a situation like this before, but I believe the governor has pardoned” Mr. Jacobs, he said.
“Mr. Jacobs — good luck to you, sir,” Judge Paolone said before stepping down from the bench.
“Thank you,” Mr. Jacobs replied.
Less than 15 minutes after the jury had found him guilty, he walked out of the courtroom a free man.
The governor’s news release announced Mr. Jacobs’s pardon along with 147 other grants of clemency. “Each pardon and commutation,” it read, “represents a story of accountability, growth and redemption.”
Mr. Fraga-Seruti’s son was not in the courtroom. He learned of the verdict, and the instantaneous pardon, from a member of the Atlantic County prosecutor’s victim advocacy unit.
He had sued the Jacobs family and the company that had blocked the sidewalk, and his lawyer, J. Peter Veloski, said they settled the case for an undisclosed sum about a month before the start of the trial. But Ckenny Fraga-Seruti said the defendant never said a word to him about his father’s death. Neither had the governor’s office.
“Take accountability. You made a mistake. Instead of calling for help or turning yourself in, you call your parents,” he said. “It just comes to show that money and power is a very powerful influence in our country.”
The county prosecutor’s office, led by William E. Reynolds, who was appointed by Mr. Murphy, issued a statement soon after the pardon that said much the same thing.
“Justice must be blind to status, relationships, power and expediency,” the statement read. “When it is not, the community loses faith in the very system meant to protect it.”
Georgia Gee contributed research.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
The post How a Driver in a Fatal Hit and Run Walked Free appeared first on New York Times.
