CT town sees life-altering loss of generous, compassionate and quiet teen with bright future

The sun was setting over the outfield when Luke Roux waved goodbye to his coach after winning a summer league baseball game last June.

Coach Aaron Jainchill, who had lived next door to the Roux family for Luke’s entire life, congratulated the 17-year-old on a good game as Roux got into his car. Roux had a short drive home, a few miles, but he made it only to the five corners intersection in Farmington when a drunken driver sped through a red light and struck his car, ending his life and forever changing the lives of the people who loved him.

Many of those people were on hand this week as the driver, Jacob Coffey, was sentenced to 5½ years in prison.

For hours Wednesday, the heartbreak of Luke’s loss emanated through a Hartford courtroom. Friends, family members, teammates, classmates, neighbors and coaches all described the life-altering grief that Luke’s death imposed on them and their community.

Judge David P. Gold said the sentencing hearing, which lasted more than four hours, had the most moving tributes he had heard in his 23-year career.

He said he received more than 30 letters about Luke leading up to the sentencing all describing him as a generous, compassionate, quiet, gentle, rule-abiding teen with a bright future ahead.

On the night of June 25, 2022, Carri Roux was waiting for her youngest child to walk through the door. She left the game in a separate car and drove straight home where she waited and waited. But Luke never came home.

In an unimaginable twist of events, Carri Roux went from beaming with pride on the sidelines of the baseball game to standing in a hospital clutching her youngest son’s lifeless hand.

Jainchill’s phone rang not long after Carri Roux got the news of Luke’s death, he told Gold on Wednesday. It wasn’t possible, he recalled telling his wife. He had just seen Luke.

Stephen Roux, Luke’s father, and his two other sons, Nathan and Edison, were en route from New Hampshire that night. At first, all they knew was that there had been a crash and they needed to come home. Then came a text from Carri asking them to pull over. And they knew.

For the next three hours, they sat in silence, as they wound through the darkness on their way to the hospital.

Stephen, through tears, told Gold that it was “the longest ride of my life leading to the darkest time of my life.”

Stephen Roux was just one of the more than a dozen people who described how Coffey’s decision to drive drunk after being turned away from a country concert at the Xfinity Center that night wrecked their lives.

Carri Roux was the first to speak, recalling the ache of the first moments after the accident and the complete disbelief, regret and despair, she felt then. Now, she said, “the numbness is slowly waning away and the grief is unbearable.”

Carri Roux said that she is nothing like the person she was before the accident, her grief has swallowed her up in so many ways, preventing her from doing the things she once loved like volunteering and caring for her church’s pastor.

Her sons, she said, struggle every day with the impossible task of learning how to live without their brother. Their calendar is filled with missed milestones now, and the silence in their house is deafening without “the pitter patter of Luke’s electronic drums,” she said.

“We are not who were were before last summer,” she said.

As Gold went through the list of letters he received about Luke ahead of the sentencing, ranging from his parents’ descriptions of heartbreak to Luke’s college recommendation letters, he said what impacted him most was the letters sent in by the young men who went to school and played sports with Luke.

“It was hard to read with a dry eye the letters from Luke’s many friends,” Gold said.

Michael Sama, Luke’s best friend since first grade, described a friendship that anchored and inspired him. The two had grown up just one street away from one another and had just graduated from Farmington High School with plans to head off to college at the end of summer.

He recalled afternoons spent writing short stories, Wiffle Ball practices that they pretended were World Series games and bouts of burning through the knees of their sweatpants playing indoor hockey as kids.

And he shared their last memory, laughing until they were in tears at a graduation party as they read through a story they had written when they were young.

“I can’t wait for when we get older and read this again,” Sama had said to Luke.

Instead, a few days later, his mother told him his best friend was gone.

“It felt as though a chunk of me was taken,” Sama told the judge. “Our last conversation we had was wishing for a future we wouldn’t have.”

Sama said that his once fond childhood memories are different now: “All my memories have been corrupted by the fact that the person in all of them is no longer here.”

Jonathan Blore, who was Roux’s classmate and friend from pre-kindergarten through high school, described Luke as “a man of few words” and the “embodiment of an exemplary student and the pinnacle of a well-rounded man.”

He told Gold he had never met anyone with a personality as gentle and kind as Luke’s, and said he was heartbroken that Roux wouldn’t live to see his dreams come true.

Collin Tharpe, another friend, remembered playing yard games with Luke at a graduation party and said Luke was always willing to try new things. He told the judge he will miss him most when a new Star Wars movies premiers and during summer pickleball tournaments.

While Sama mourns the loss of the friend in all his memories, Tharpe said what hurts him the most is that Luke will never get to make new ones.

Carri Roux said their family will never be complete, and they will never be the people they once were. She told the judge that she had spent the last 17 years teaching her son how to someday live without her, but that she never imagined she would have to learn to live without him and wasn’t sure she could ever learn.

Coffey was sentenced Wednesday to a total of 15 years, to be suspended after 5½ years served, for the charge of first-degree manslaughter. He also was sentenced to six months in prison for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs and 90 days in prison for reckless driving.

Gold imposed a five-year probation period with conditions that include requiring him to receive substance abuse evaluations and treatment as necessary, that prohibit him from driving a motor vehicle that is not equipped with a breathalyzer. Coffey will be required to participate in a victim’s impact panel run by Mothers Against Drunk Driving twice each year during his probation.

Carrie Roux asked the judge to impose a sentence for Coffey that would honor the magnitude of the life that was lost but said that she knew there was no sentence that could do that.

“Whatever you decide will be merciful because Jacob Coffey gets a second chance,” she said. “But there will never be another Luke Matthew Roux.”