From left, Marie McSweeney’s husband Tyrone, her mother Mary Pulicicchio, and an unidentified family spokesperson at the 2004 wake. (freelance)
Alberto Plasencia (Westchester County DA’s office)
A nine-year hunt for the fiend who hurled a boulder from a Yonkers overpass, killing a Queens woman driving her elderly mom to Mass, ended today in a murder indictment, authorities said.
Alberto Plasencia, 26, was charged with second degree felony murder and faces up to 25 years if convicted in the 2004 death of Marie McSweeney, Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore said.
Plasencia was arrested by cold case detectives, who reopened the case in 2009 after getting new information, the DA said.
Devoted daughter McSweeney, 48, had been driving south on the Sprain Brook Parkway on April 24, 2004, taking her 86-year-old widowed mother Mary Pulicicchio to St. Theresa’s Church in Pelham Bay after a day of shopping when a football-sized chunk of asphalt shot like a missile through the driver’s side windshield of her 1993 Oldsmobile around 4:30 pm.
The rock, tossed from the the Kimball Avenue Bridge overpass, fell 30 feet and slammed into McSweeney’s head as her horror-stricken mom watched helplessly. The car careened out of control for about a third of a mile. It then crashed into a guardrail, veered back onto the shoulder and across the Bronx River Parkway split before coming to rest in the bushes near the Desmond Avenue off-ramp.
McSweeney was killed instantly. Her pendant of Saint Padro Pio, the Italian Capuchin friar who bore the stigmata, was found on her blood-spattered car seat.
Pulicicchio told reporters at the time that the women had been talking about where to have dinner after church when the rock struck. “I heard this awful noise,” the older woman told reporters in 2004. “She was gone after that. I tried to bring her back, but no response.”
DeFiore yesterday described the scene as “every motorist’s nightmare, traveling under a roadway overpass wondering if an object will be thrown from it. “
“This defendant did just that, throwing a large chunk of asphalt into traffic, ending the life of a 48-year-old woman as surely as if he pulled a trigger.”
Several witnesses came forward at the time of the incident to say they had seen a gang of thugs throwing debris from the overpass just minutes before McSweeney’s car was hit. Sources said at the time that cops were looking for a teenager who may have been involved.
It is unclear if Plasencia, who would have been 17 at the time, is that teenager.
Bronx-bred McSweeney, a married administrative assistant for Pfizer drugs, was her widowed mom’s only child, and spent every Saturday with her. Mary Pulicicchio died in 2006.