The suspect responsible for a fatal hit-and-run crash in Brooklyn is already negotiating his jail term.
“I don’t want to do life,” a teary-eyed Robert DeCarlo, 26, whined to The Post during a jailhouse interview on Saturday.
When asked how much time behind bars would be appropriate for the horrific Wednesday crash that killed 12-year-old Joey Sellers, left her 9-year-old sister Charlie Sellers in a coma, and injured their mom Marsha Landias, DeCarlo thought for a moment before answering.
“A good amount of time. Fifteen years,” he said.
DeCarlo — who had scabs and cuts dotting his forehead and tattooed arms — apologized to the family — all while denying the devastating incident was his fault.
“As a man, as a human being, I want to say ‘I’m sorry,’” he said, nervously tapping his leg inside his gray prison jumpsuit.
Then the excuses began.
Police say DeCarlo, who was out on bail after allegedly mugging an elderly woman when the accident happened, was high and speeding in the stolen vehicle when he lost control and jumped a curb on Flatlands Avenue.
But DeCarlo claims he wasn’t on drugs at the time of the accident.
“I’ve done a lot of drugs in my life. I wasn’t high. I wasn’t high that day,” he says. “I wasn’t going a hundred and twenty miles an hour. I was going fifty. Someone blew a light at Schenectady and I swerved to avoid the car.”
“I saw them,” DeCarlo said of Landias and her girls. He paused, then stared ahead and added, “I tried to swerve but it’s a van, it flipped. I tried to help her…She was under the van.”
DeCarlo said he bolted from the scene after someone yelled, “Get him!”
He eventually turned himself in but spent the days beforehand “praying she wouldn’t die.”
DeCarlo, the father of a 7-year-old girl, learned of Joey Sellers’ death from news reports.
“Joey Sellers,” he said aloud. Then added, “She’s beautiful.”
“There are no words,” the teary DeCarlo said. “I can only make amends with God. I have to live with this for the rest of my life.
“I took a life. I have to pay for that,” he said.