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Marc Dern on the day of his arraignment last winter.
Marc Dern, the 35-year-old Springs man accused of killing his boss after an afternoon of boozing last winter, pleaded guilty on Thursday, January 5, to manslaughter in the first degree.
Suffolk County Criminal Court Judge John Collins promised to sentence Dern to five years in state prison in return for the plea deal, which Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney’s office agreed to.
During questioning by Elena Tomaro, the assistant district attorney on the case, before Dern entered his guilty plea, he admitted that he intended “to cause serious physical injury” to Kevin Somers, 45, of Amagansett, leading to his death.
Dern and Somers were both employees of the Maidstone Club at the time of the incident. Dern worked as a caddy, and Somers, a longtime employee of the club, was the caddymaster who oversaw the caddy staff.
The two men were close friends and had been watching a professional golf tournament on TV prior to the incident. They had been drinking for several hours, it has been previously reported.
Dern’s wife, Amanda, told police that the altercation between the two men started in the late evening when she told Somers he had to leave sometime so that she could put the couple’s two young children to bed.
What started as a minor tussle between the two intoxicated men appears to have turned more aggressive at some point, and Dern ended up with Somers in a headlock as the two tumbled out of the house and onto the front porch.
When EMTs arrived on the scene, they found Dern administering CPR to Somers. A paramedic used an automatic defibrillator in an attempt to restart Somers’s heart.
A firefighter who responded to the scene told police in a statement that when he arrived at the Derns’ house in Springs, Dern was performing CPR and pleading with Somers to wake up.
“I grabbed the oxygen and ran back to where the victim was lying, I then set up the [bag valve mask] and began ventilating the victim,” Springs Fire Department EMT Nicholas LaValle told police. “As I’m doing this, I heard the male say something along the lines of ‘Kevin, it was just a headlock, come on, Kevin.’”
In his guilty plea allocution on Thursday, Dern admitted that his actions caused what Tomaro described as “neck compression with evidence of a fracture of the hyoid bone.”
Dern remained free on $150,000 bail following the entry of his plea on January 5. He will be formally sentenced in April and taken into custody at that time to begin serving his sentence.
State sentencing guidelines require that he serve about 85 percent of the sentence issued by the judge before being released.
