More than 200 people gathered at East Hills Park in Nassau County on Saturday, April 18, for the second annual Drunk Driving Community Awareness Walk, organized by Roslyn High School students to honor two teenagers killed in a 2023 crash.
The event was held at the East Hills Village Theatre and drew residents, community leaders, and advocates united around a message that hasn’t dimmed three years after the collision that killed Ethan Falkowitz and Drew Hassenbein, both 14 years old at the time.
The walk was organized by Roslyn High School juniors Summer Rosenbaum and Marielle Streiner. That two high school students built this into a recurring community event, pulling 200-plus people to a park on a Saturday morning, tells you something about what that crash did to this part of Nassau County. It didn’t just kill two kids. It reshaped a neighborhood.
The crash happened in May 2023. Amandeep Singh was driving under the influence of alcohol and cocaine when he struck the vehicle carrying Falkowitz and Hassenbein, traveling the wrong way at high speed. Singh later pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including aggravated vehicular homicide and manslaughter. In February, he was sentenced to eight and one-third to 25 years in prison.
A sentence handed down. A community still walking.
Village of East Hills Deputy Mayor Brian Meyerson spoke at the event and acknowledged the weight the tragedy still carries. “This event obviously, unfortunately, changed the lives of these families forever, but also shook our community to its core,” Meyerson said, according to Long Island Press, noting that residents continue to come together years after the crash.
Gary Falkowitz, Ethan’s father, addressed the crowd directly. His remarks weren’t about the sentence or the legal process. They were about what talking publicly can actually accomplish. “Talking about him, sharing his stories and the terrible, unfortunate incident that happened, maybe that creates change where everyone thinks twice before doing something they’re going to regret,” he said.
That’s the whole argument for events like this one, made plainly by someone who earned the right to make it.
Speakers included representatives from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Nassau County Office of Victim Services. A firefighter also addressed the crowd, drawing on his own experience responding to fatal crashes and personal loss tied to impaired driving. These aren’t abstract statistics to the people who show up to events like this. The firefighter’s presence put a name and a face on what the data looks like from the receiving end.
After the remarks, participants walked across Glen Cove Road holding signs aimed at passing drivers. It’s not a complicated action. You walk. You hold a sign. You make the public space briefly uncomfortable with a fact people would rather not think about. The directness of it is the point.
The Nassau County Office of Victim Services and Mothers Against Drunk Driving both maintain resources for families affected by impaired driving crashes, and their presence at Saturday’s walk reflects a broader effort to connect community grief with practical prevention work. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles also maintains impaired driving prevention resources available to Nassau and Suffolk County residents.
Rosenbaum and Streiner started this walk as juniors building something out of loss. The first edition ran last year. The second drew 200 people. They’ll be seniors next fall, and the question worth watching is whether the infrastructure they’ve built holds after they graduate. Student-run memorials often don’t outlast the students. The ones that do require the adults in the community to pick up the weight.
Meyerson’s presence and the involvement of Nassau County-level organizations suggest there’s institutional support behind this one, not just student energy. That matters for whether April 2027 produces a third walk or just a quiet anniversary.
What Saturday made clear is that Roslyn hasn’t moved on from May 2023 and doesn’t intend to. Ethan Falkowitz was 14. Drew Hassenbein was 14. A driver made a choice, and two families have spent three years living inside the consequences of that choice. The walk across Glen Cove Road won’t undo any of that, but 200 people holding signs in traffic is not nothing, and Gary Falkowitz stood at a microphone in a park and asked people to think twice, and some of them will.