Case Explained: Farmingville’s Frank Labidi was driving double the speed limit before Hicksville crash that killed 2 teens, prosecutors say – Legal Perspective

A Farmingville man hit 82 mph — double the speed limit — while driving down Old Country Road in Hicksville, prosecutors say, before he lost control of his BMW M5 in January, crossing into oncoming traffic before crashing into a tree and killing his passengers, two 19-year-old women.

At his arraignment on Thursday, Frank Labidi, 23, pleaded not guilty to two charges of second-degree manslaughter and two charges of second-degree assault for the deadly crash that took the lives of Lindsey Parke and Ashley Duryea, high school friends and volunteer emergency medical workers who relatives said were looking forward to bright futures.

Prosecutors say Labidi’s speed, along with the modifications that undermined the stability system on his luxury German car, were contributing factors in the crash that ended the women’ lives.

“These vehicles are fast and powerful, but that performance just wasn’t enough for [Labidi], because in 2024 and 2025 he poured more than $35,000 into performance enhancements for his already high-powered BMW M5, souping up the car’s engine and transmission, modifications that can produce higher horsepower capabilities, allow a car to shift quicker, to get up to speed even faster, to handle more force and more torque,” Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly said after the plea hearing. “He wanted a more powerful vehicle, and he got it.”

Labidi’s attorney, Peter Menoudakos, did not comment on the case.

Prosecutors said Thursday that Labidi’s social media page was filled with images of fast cars. Racing was such a fascination for him that he had raced the same BMW on a track in the Poconos months before the crash.

He still had the racing sticker on his at the time of the crash, Donnelly said.

Labidi, whose license has been suspended pending the outcome of the case, holds a commercial driver’s license and has experience racing cars.

“He knows his way around a performance vehicle,” the district attorney said. “This was no mistake. It was a series of deliberate, reckless and deadly actions. Those actions cost two promising young women their lives.”

The night of the crash, Parke, Duryea and Labidi had gone to Round 1, an arcade in the Broadway Commons in Hicksville around 9 p.m. on Jan. 23, investigators say. They played pool and had some ice cream, Parke’s sister Haley said, before leaving in separate cars around 11:30 p.m.

Labidi and Parke had been hanging out and shared a common love of car racing.

They spoke of driving to New Jersey to go to a Wawa, but prosecutors charge that the driver’s speed and the upgrades in his car were more than he could handle and he lost control, drifting into oncoming traffic then slamming into a tree.

The force of the impact killed the two young women instantly, Donnelly said, and ripped the car’s muffler from the vehicle, sending it through the window of a nearby orthopedic doctor’s office.

“What our investigation revealed after the crash was a series of grossly reckless actions made by a man looking for cheap thrills,” the prosecutor said. “A review of the vehicle’s crash data recorder showed that in the three seconds before the crash, the defendant was allegedly driving 82 miles per hour in a 40 mile an hour zone, and in those seconds he was still accelerating, which means all gas, no brakes.”

The families of both women have come to every hearing since Labidi’s initial arrest in January.

Parke and Duryea both graduated from BOCES and were volunteer EMTs, their families said. Parke had recently started a job working in the hyperbaric chamber at Plainview hospital and wanted to open a shop selling her own cupcakes, her parents said. Duryea enrolled at John Jay School of Criminal Justice and wanted to be a forensic investigators, her parents told Newsday.

Parke regularly pulled victims from car wrecks as part of her job as an EMT, her father, Edward Parke, said.

Her family said that they want to see Labidi take responsibility for his actions.

“He was driving the vehicle. His foot was on the gas. He was in control of that vehicle. He chose to do it,” Parke’s mother, Annette Parke, said after the hearing. He chose to drive the speed that he was driving. Nobody else made that decision except for him. He needs to be held accountable and responsible.

Labidi will return to court on April 28.