After pleading guilty in January to first-degree manslaughter in the 2022 death of Kevin Somers, Marc Dern of Springs was sentenced Monday to five years in prison and five years of supervised release.
Mr. Dern and Mr. Somers had been friends and colleagues at the Maidstone Golf Club, where Mr. Somers was caddy master and Mr. Dern was a caddie, before they got into an argument that turned physical — and ultimately fatal — on Feb. 5, 2022.
The five-year prison term was the minimum sentence that could be imposed; first-degree manslaughter, which is considered a violent felony under state law, carries a maximum of 25 years.
Andrew Weinstein and Brian DeSesa, Mr. Dern’s attorneys, released a statement on Monday saying they felt the sentence imposed by New York State Supreme Court Justice John B. Collins was “fair and just, and validates what we have maintained from the outset of this case — that Mr. Somers’s death, while both tragic and untimely, was accidental and not intentional.”
The Feb. 5, 2022, incident occurred at Mr. Dern’s house on Lincoln Avenue while the two friends were watching a televised golf tournament and drinking alcohol together. Mr. Dern told investigators in December 2022 that he was not acting in self-defense.
According to the prosecution’s testimony last year, after a 911 call came in at 10:40 p.m., an emergency medical technician found Mr. Somers unresponsive on Mr. Dern’s porch, with no pulse. He was rushed to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Mr. Somers’s death was attributed to “neck compression.” Kerriann Kelly, the prosecutor at the time, said his hyoid bone had been broken, which would have taken “quite a degree of strength and force.”
Mr. Dern’s attorneys said in their statement that he “looks forward to successfully completing his sentence so that he can return home to his wife and children and begin the next chapter of his life. We hope that the conclusion of this case will enable Mr. Somers’s loved ones to experience some measure of closure and solace.”
Mr. Somers, an Amagansett resident and father of a teenage girl, was 45 years old. He was a decorated three-sport athlete who in September was posthumously inducted into East Hampton High School’s Hall of Fame. The plaque installed in his honor says that “the only thing that topped his love for sports was the love he had for his family, for his parents, brothers and sisters, and for his partner, Alicia, and his daughter, Lily.”