A jury in Ocean County has convicted former Hillside police officer John P. McClave III of two counts of vehicular homicide in a 2021 crash that sent his pickup off a Garden State Parkway overpass and into a married couple’s car below.
The verdict closed the trial stage of a case that drew attention across New Jersey because McClave was on his way to work as a police officer when prosecutors said he drove recklessly while under the influence of intoxicating substances. Angel L. Acevedo Jr., 40, and his wife, Daniela Correia Salles, 35, were killed at the scene. McClave, now 38 and living in Toms River, is scheduled to be sentenced May 8 and could face as much as 20 years in state prison.
The crash happened shortly before 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 9, 2021, on Asbury Avenue near the Garden State Parkway overpass in Tinton Falls. Prosecutors said McClave was driving a 2018 GMC Canyon pickup when it left the elevated Parkway lanes, hit an embankment and flew into the road below. The Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office said investigators found that the truck “did not change direction or slow down significantly” after it left the highway. On the road below was a 2020 Toyota Corolla driven by Acevedo, with Salles riding beside him. Tinton Falls police officers and members of the Wayside Fire Company reached the scene and found both victims with severe injuries. They were pronounced dead there. McClave was taken to Jersey Shore University Medical Center with serious, but not life-threatening, injuries. Prosecutors said he had been heading to his shift at the Hillside Police Department when the crash happened.
Public records released after the collision gave a fuller picture of how investigators described what happened. An internal discipline report later said McClave “left the elevated roadway and landed on a vehicle on the roadway below.” The same report said the Tinton Falls Police Department suspended him without pay after Monmouth County prosecutors filed two vehicular homicide charges. Media reports on the case, citing an affidavit filed in court, said a blood sample taken after the crash tested positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, while his blood alcohol concentration was below New Jersey’s legal limit. Four years earlier, when the charges were announced, then Acting Monmouth County Prosecutor Lori Linskey said McClave’s actions had “far crossed the line” from negligence into criminal conduct. Traffic summonses filed with the criminal case included reckless driving, failure to maintain lanes, failure to wear a seat belt and having an open container of alcohol in a vehicle.
The case carried extra weight because it involved a police officer driving to work, but the victims’ names and histories kept the story centered on the people who died. Acevedo and Salles were living in Baltimore at the time of the crash. In an obituary, their family described them as kind, funny and positive, a couple who loved travel, hiking, photography, skiing and gatherings with friends and relatives. Acevedo grew up in New Jersey, earned an engineering degree from Dartmouth College and later a master’s degree from the Naval Postgraduate School. He went on to work for the U.S. Army and rose to a communications leadership job at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Salles grew up in Salvador, Brazil, became a pathologist and moved to the United States to continue her medical career. Their obituary said “the simplest pleasures in life” brought them joy, a line that stood out because the case had so often been told in the language of crash reports and court records.
The legal path to the verdict took years. Prosecutors charged McClave in March 2022, about five months after the crash, after investigators from the Monmouth County Serious Crash Analysis Response Team, the prosecutor’s Fatal Accident Unit and the Tinton Falls Police Department completed their work. The case was later transferred to Ocean County Superior Court on Nov. 13, 2024, because of what the prosecutor’s office called a potential conflict of interest. A jury heard the case this month before Judge David M. Fritch after a weeklong trial. Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond S. Santiago announced the guilty verdict on March 12. His office said Assistant Prosecutors Joseph Cummings and Sarah Mielke handled the case. The prosecutor’s release also identified Anthony Cherry of Eatontown as McClave’s attorney. Under New Jersey’s No Early Release Act, prosecutors said, McClave would have to serve 85% of any prison sentence before he could become eligible for parole. The maximum penalty on the two second-degree counts is 20 years.
For the families of Acevedo and Salles, the verdict marked a public milestone in a loss first measured in private routines and plans that ended on a dark stretch of road. The obituary remembered a couple who made time for family no matter the distance and who found beauty in local hiking trails and ordinary weekends together. That language sat in sharp contrast to the technical terms that came to define the case, words like toxicology, embankment and vehicular homicide. It also explained why the prosecution was followed closely long after the first headlines faded. The victims were not anonymous names in a double fatal crash. They were a husband and wife with careers, siblings, parents, nieces, co-workers and friends on both sides of the East Coast and in Brazil. By the time the jury returned its verdict, the case had become both a criminal prosecution and a long-delayed public accounting of how two lives ended in seconds beneath an overpass.
McClave remains convicted on both counts, and the next major step is his sentencing hearing, tentatively set for Friday, May 8. Unless the schedule changes, that hearing will determine how much prison time he will serve and whether the families finally hear the court’s final judgment in a case that began on Oct. 9, 2021.
Author note: Last updated March 21, 2026.