Former Neptune police sergeant Philip Seidle, who shot and killed his ex-wife in a domestic dispute, was sentenced today in Monmouth County Superior Court. His eldest children spoke in heartfelt pleas to the judge to make his sentence as lengthy as possibly could. The two said the acts of their father destroyed their life.
“I am now an orphan”, Philip Seidle Jr. said.
Philip Seidle was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the brutal murder that was caught on film by several bystanders on a street in Asbury Park, NJ. Seidle must serve 24 of those years before he becomes eligible for parole.
During the sentence, his daughter Kristen Seidle detailed the abuse of their father towards their mother long before he would kill her in a rage in broad daylight.
“It was my father who abused my mother – constantly and relentlessly.” – Kristen Seidle
“I heard screaming and hitting behind closed doors, yet all nine of us felt so helpless,” she said.
She described one time when she heard her mother calling her for help, and then she heard her father yell, “If you come down, here both of you are dead.”
Monmouth County prosecutor LeMieux said the Seidle children told investigators of their father often pushing their mother into walls in their Neptune home.
“We’d wake up and see holes in the walls, ” he said one of the children told investigators. “We would have to hang pictures over the holes to hide them.”
LeMieux said the Seidle’s youngest daughter is permanently damaged by watching her father chase her mother through the streets of Asbury Park and then fatally shooting her. The 7-year-old wrote in her diary that day, “Dad shot Mom and almost got me into a car accident,” LeMieux said.
Seidle, then a sergeant for the Neptune Township Police Department in New Jersey, was off duty when he chased down his ex-wife with their youngest daughter in the car. He forced her Volkswagen Jetta into a parked car near the intersection of Sewell and Ridge avenues in Asbury Park, NJ. He got out of his Honda Pilot and fired a total of 12 shots from his .40-caliber Glock service weapon into his ex-wife’s car, shortly before noon, as his young daughter and a crowd of horrified bystanders watched.
LeMieux said that as Seidle aimed and fired the 12 shots at his ex-wife, he was heard saying, “Take this, b****.’’
The rounds of shots came twice, authorities said. After shooting into Tamara Wilson-Seidle’s car, he then pointed the gun at his head and threatened suicide.
Witnesses reported hearing Seidle yell before the shooting, “I’m tired of going to court.’’
The couple’s divorce was finalized 20 days earlier.
Tamar Seidle, Facebook
Wilson-Seidle, 51, whose nine children then ranged in age from 7 through 24, was pronounced dead at Jersey Shore University Medical Center, Neptune. She was a soccer coach, devout Catholic, religious instructor at Mother of Mercy Parish in Asbury Park and a five-year breast cancer survivor.
Seidle appeared in court before Oxley on March 10 and admitted firing 12 shots at his ex-wife on the same day he had planned to take his youngest daughter to the Monmouth Mall to buy her a dress for a father-daughter dance.
In a plea deal, Philip Seidle pleaded to aggravated manslaughter that spared him life in prison. He also pleaded to child endangerment for exposing his daughter to the fatal encounter.
