Two-year-old Austen Mark Alward died Tuesday after getting struck by a hit-and-run driver in Key Largo. Really just a horrible story all around.
The driver said he knew he hit something but didn’t think it was a person. So he drove 74 miles towards Key West. His name is Edward Krajewski.
Krajewski, 63, is described in a 1996 Inquirer article as “a former police officer who turned against the law to finance a South American treasure hunt.” Steve Ritea’s story continues…
Krajewski, 47, a thin man with a bushy moustache, sat motionless as the jury delivered guilty verdicts on 14 of 18 charges, including conspiracy to rob a Philadelphia drug dealer and a Pennsauken, N.J., storage locker. His wife, Christine, cried softly. …
Krajewski’s partner in the plot, Joseph DiGirolamo, the son of the Bensalem township mayor and a “wacko goofball moron,” in the words of Krajewski’s attorney and Rubenstein, pleaded guilty to the same charges last August.
Posing as a police officer, DiGirolamo planned to rob the dealer’s house, on Huntingdon Street in Philadelphia, on April 18. Krajewski provided him that morning with a phony search warrant, handcuffs, a defunct badge and a police T-shirt.
But authorities, tipped off early, stopped DiGirolamo while he was driving to Philadelphia. He was arrested and agreed to wear a wire when he met Krajewski in a 7-Eleven parking lot that night.
After Krajewski’s arrest, detectives found tickets for an American Airlines flight to Ecuador, scheduled to leave the next morning.
Krajewski, who has four children and was a commercial diver in Singapore and Indonesia before joining the police force in 1979, said National Geographic had expressed an interest in filming their recovery of the treasure.
There’s an AP story, too. Well worth reading.
Driver accused of hitting toddler an ex-cop [Keys News]
Oh, according to the LA Times piece, he was searching for the same treasure Pat Croce’s currently after: