Nesconset Man Charged With DWI After Dix Hills Crash Seriously Injures Driver

Maxx Waite, 21, of Oakdale was transported to Huntington Hospital with serious injuries after a 2:20 a.m. crash at East Jericho Turnpike and East Deer Park Road in Dix Hills on April 3, 2025. Wesley Sitar, 45, of Nesconset, whose 2016 Dodge Ram struck Waite's 2010 Volkswagen, was charged with driving while intoxicated.

According to the Suffolk County Police Department, Sitar was driving the Ram eastbound on East Jericho Turnpike when it hit Waite's Volkswagen as Waite attempted a left turn from the westbound lanes onto East Deer Park Road. Sitar was taken to Huntington Hospital alongside Waite and treated for minor injuries before being charged. He was arraigned Saturday, April 4. Both vehicles were impounded for safety checks.

The collision shut down East Jericho Turnpike for nearly eight hours, with the road remaining closed until approximately 10 a.m. Friday, disrupting the morning commute along one of Dix Hills' primary east-west corridors and rippling outward to drivers who had no connection to what happened before dawn.

The crash arrived at a moment when Suffolk County is recording a dramatic spike in alcohol-related driving incidents. Underage DWI arrests in Suffolk have climbed 110% from 2023 to 2025, a surge that has placed the county's enforcement apparatus on a record-setting pace. The Sheriff's Office STOP-DWI unit logged 116 arrests through early July 2025, compared to 209 in all of 2024, putting the unit on track to surpass the prior year's total well before December.

Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon, Jr. launched a 2025 Summer STOP-DWI Campaign alongside County Executive Ed Romaine, DA Vehicular Crimes Bureau Chief Carl Borelli, STOP-DWI Coordinator Caroline Flynn, and MADD Regional Executive Director Paige Carbone, deploying increased overnight patrols and sobriety checkpoints from Huntington to the Hamptons. Officials backing the campaign have cited data showing alcohol kills more people annually than fentanyl, a figure intended to reframe impaired driving as a lethal public health crisis rather than a traffic infraction.

Nassau County has recorded a parallel 13% rise in DWI arrests from 2024 to 2025, extending the trend across Long Island's two major counties.

The April 3 crash on East Jericho Turnpike is precisely the scenario those patrols are meant to intercept: a driver accused of intoxication striking another motorist at a late-night intersection, with consequences that closed a major commuter road for the better part of a business morning and put a 21-year-old from Oakdale in the hospital with serious injuries before sunrise.