In March of 2022, a famous Broadway singing coach named Barbara Maier Gustern was randomly pushed to the ground in New York City. She was 87 years old and died of her injuries.
Authorities in the city quickly began looking for the assailant.
The attacker turned out to be a 27-year-old event planner from Long Island named Lauren Pazienza who did not know the victim, but was angry and had been drinking.
Pazienza was sentenced this week to 8.5 years in prison as part of plea deal. If the case had gone to trial, she was looking at 25 years.
FOX News reports:
New York woman, 28, sentenced to 8½ years in prison in fatal shoving of 87-year-old singing coachA 28-year-old former event planner, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in August, has been sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for the unprovoked shoving of an 87-year-old Broadway voice coach onto a Manhattan sidewalk last year.Manhattan state Supreme Court Judge Felicia Mennin on Friday added six months to the eight years already agreed upon in Lauren Pazienza’s plea deal, saying she didn’t believe Pazienza had taken responsibility for her actions.Pazienza left Barbara Maier Gustern bleeding on a Chelsea sidewalk soon after the woman cracked her head March 10, 2022, as a result of Pazienza’s shove. She suffered a “massive hemorrhage” on the left side of her brain and died after five days in a hospital.The defendant could have faced 25 years in prison if she hadn’t taken the plea deal and had been found guilty by a jury.As part of a plea deal, Pazienza admitted to hurling profanities at Gustern and intentionally shoving her to the ground. Her motive remains unclear.
Pazienza reportedly wept at the sentencing.
The Daily Mail has more details:
Pazienza, who is the heiress to a large cesspool draining empire in Long Island, has been held at Rikers Island for over a year since the motiveless attack…Prior to the apparently random attack, Pazienza had downed several glasses of wine with her fiancé while celebrating 100 days until their wedding. She may also have taken a Xanax…When she was told the park was closing, she allegedly became enraged and charged Gustern on the street, shoving the 87-year-old to the ground and calling her a ‘b****’.She is then said to have watched as an ambulance crew took the frail older woman away with blood seeping from her head.Pazienza, prosecutors claim, then spent the next two weeks trying to cover her tracks. She quit her job, deleted her social media pages and even stashed her cell phone at her aunt’s house in Long Island after fleeing her Astoria apartment, where she lives with her Microsoft-employee fiancé.After several weeks, she eventually handed herself into the NYPD after the force released footage of her as a suspect in the attack.
The Daily Mail report goes on to interview one of Pazienza’s former classmates who said that she is a child of privilege who was given everything she ever wanted by her parents.
What a waste.
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