Johnson Kokozian, 23, was driving a Mercedes-Benz AMG at double the 50km/h speed limit when he crashed head-on into a car containing siblings Alina Kauffman, 24, and Ernesto Salazar, 15, at Heckenberg in southwest Sydney in September 2023. Both died at the scene. He was jailed for nine years this week, with a minimum non-parole period of six years and six months.
After the crash, Kokozian fled the scene and focused on his destroyed uninsured car, proclaiming that losing the vehicle meant $300,000 was gone. Judge David Arnott said the driver's conduct amounted to "an abandonment of moral responsibility", noting he was more concerned about his financial loss than the wellbeing of the occupants of the other car, which he walked past as he left the scene.
The judge found that Kokozian had shown no remorse immediately after the crash but now experienced "overwhelming guilt". His father, Kagadour Hanna Kokozian, 63, pleaded guilty in 2025 to hindering the police investigation; after his son told him he had been driving, the father called police to report the vehicle as stolen rather than revealing the truth. The passenger, Cruz Pamoana Davis-Tuka, received a 15-month intensive corrections order in 2025. Kokozian's girlfriend Tiana Savignano, 24, is contesting similar charges of trying to cover up the crash.
Angelina Kauffman exited the courthouse wearing a jumper bearing photos of her children, and said the prospect of Kokozian's release on parole within three years was unjust. Her anger reflects a fundamental question in criminal justice: whether the penalty adequately reflects the harm caused.
The victim's mother has continuously advocated for justice and gathered more than 20,000 signatures on a petition requesting that NSW Parliament increase the maximum penalties for serious road crimes. However, a Law Reform Commission review concluded in February 2025 that existing penalties were appropriate, higher maximums were unlikely to deter offending further, and that introducing a new vehicular manslaughter offence would be unnecessary and could cause confusion.
The law reform position reflects a broader evidence-based argument: that certainty of punishment deters crime more effectively than severity alone. Yet this conclusion offers little comfort to a mother facing the reality that the driver who killed her two children will walk free within years, having shown a callous disregard for their lives in the critical moments after impact.
The case raises an uncomfortable tension in criminal justice. Kauffman said she had high hopes for a strong penalty after the lengthy legal proceedings but was shocked by the driver's sentence. The question of whether nine years appropriately punishes the act of driving dangerously and then abandoning two dying teenagers is one reasonable people might answer differently. What is certain is that for their mother, the sentence represents a choice the system has made about how much a young person's life is worth.