State prosecutors on Tuesday appealed what they called the lenient sentence imposed on Carol Fesler, the 82-year-old convicted of abandoning four-year-old Rafael Edna after a fatal 2023 road crash in Netanya, asking the Central District Court in Lod to significantly increase both her prison term and the compensation awarded to the boy’s family.
In its filing, the prosecution said the lower court had failed to properly apply the Supreme Court’s repeated call to toughen punishment in hit-and-run abandonment cases.
Fesler was sentenced in February by the Petah Tikva traffic court to 12 months in prison, a suspended term, permanent revocation of her driver’s license, and NIS 10,000 in compensation to Rafael’s family. Prosecutors had sought three years behind bars.
The sentencing followed a case that drew sustained public attention and anger, including protests from members of the Ethiopian-Israeli community and sharp criticism from Rafael’s relatives, who said the punishment failed to match the scale of the loss.
The appeal returns the case to one of its central legal and moral fault lines: not whether Fesler caused the crash itself, but what she did after it. Both the conviction and the appeal stress that she was not charged with causing the collision. Still, the trial court found, after a full evidentiary hearing, that she was aware she had hit a person and nevertheless drove home without stopping, checking the scene, or calling for help.
Rafael, who was struck while crossing with his grandfather and brother, was hospitalized in critical condition and died four days later. His grandfather was also injured.
That distinction has shaped the case from the start. The court previously emphasized that the indictment did not attribute responsibility to Fesler for the crash or for Rafael’s death, pointing instead to the circumstances of the crossing. But it also held that this did not reduce her criminal responsibility for leaving the scene after realizing someone had been hit.
Court: Driver must stop and help even if not at fault
In its February ruling, the court described abandonment after injury as not merely a traffic offense, but a profound moral breach rooted in the duty to stop and render aid, even where the driver is not at fault for the collision itself.
Now the prosecution argues that the sentence imposed did not adequately reflect either that principle or the particular severity of this case. In the appeal, prosecutors said the lower court set the sentencing range far too low, placed Fesler at the very bottom of that range without sufficient justification, and awarded compensation that bore no real relation to the magnitude of the tragedy.
They argued that when an offense involves conscious abandonment, especially where the result is the death of a young child, considerations of proportionality and deterrence should outweigh a defendant’s personal circumstances.
The filing leans heavily on both the facts of the case and the trial court’s own findings about Fesler’s conduct.
Prosecutors said she did not take responsibility, fought the case to the end, and attempted to complicate the search for the truth, citing the lower court’s own sharply worded credibility findings. The appeal notes that the trial judge found her evasive and unreliable, and said her behavior after the crash, coupled with her testimony, left no doubt that she had the required awareness under the law.
Prosecutors also singled out the compensation order, calling the NIS 10,000 awarded to Rafael’s family far too low given the circumstances. The appeal recounts the continuing devastation described by the family in court, including the trauma suffered by Rafael’s older brother, who witnessed the aftermath, and argues that the financial component of the sentence should be raised substantially, to at least NIS 100,000.
The case has remained raw well beyond the courtroom. Rafael’s death in May 2023 became a rallying point for wider public frustration over road violence, accountability, and what many in the Ethiopian community saw as failures in the treatment of the case. Family members have also continued to insist that Fesler’s daughter, not Fesler, was driving at the time of the crash, a claim investigators and the court did not accept in the criminal proceedings.
The district court will now be asked to decide whether the punishment imposed in February was merely within range or, as the state argues, fell materially short in a case whose facts have long made it difficult to separate legal judgment from public conscience. For prosecutors, the message of the appeal is clear: Where a driver knowingly leaves a badly injured child behind on the road, one year in prison is not enough.