Drunk driver who killed cyclist in FDR Park is sentenced to up to 21 years in prison. Father says that isn’t enough.

Mario D’Adamo Sr. slipped his work ID around his neck out of habit.

For nearly 30 years, he has walked into the city’s courthouses as a lawyer and administrator for Philadelphia Family Court.

But when he arrived at the Criminal Justice Center Thursday morning, he was there as a grieving father.

Nearly three years after his 37-year-old son and namesake, Mario D’Adamo III, was fatally struck by a drunk driver while riding his bike through FDR Park, D’Adamo sat across from the man who killed him and listened as he admitted to the crimes.

He gripped a manila folder as Thomas Ford, 69, pleaded guilty to homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence and related crimes in the crash that killed the younger D’Adamo and seriously injured another cyclist in August 2023.

Prosecutors said Ford was drunk and high, driving roughly 60 mph in a black Tesla around 6:15 p.m., when he swerved into an unprotected bike lane, struck the cyclists, and fled the scene before crashing into a tree.

At the time of the crash, Ford was on probation for a host of crimes he’d committed in the decades before — robberies as a teen in the 1970s, burglaries in the 1990s, and theft and drug dealing between 2007 and 2019. He has been in and out of jail for most of his life, court records show.

On Thursday, the elder D’Adamo faced the judge and said Ford never should have been on the street, and that he resented a system that allowed a man like him to repeatedly offend.

He detailed the night of his son’s death — how his boy was meant to come over for dinner that night, and that when he heard he’d been hit by a car at the park, he thought, “It can’t be that bad.”

The scene of two doctors walking toward them solemnly at the hospital — of watching them try to revive his son over and over.

His son was so strong, so healthy — a baseball player, boxer, cyclist, runner. Born and raised in South Philly, he was known for walking through his neighborhood and talking to people of all ages as they sat on their steps. A graduate of St. Joe’s Prep, La Salle, and later Widener University’s law school, he worked as a probation officer, assistant city solicitor, and family and criminal lawyer.

And now he was dead, he said, because this man made one more bad decision in a string of bad decisions in his life.

For his part, Ford, 69, balding and with a graying beard, apologized for what he had done. He said he prayed for D’Adamo’s family. And, in a moment of levity, he said that D’Adamo had come to him in a dream and told him he should have hired him as his lawyer.

That made the elder D’Adamo laugh, he said, because that was his son — confident, playful, omnipresent.

Common Pleas Court Judge Diana Anhalt sentenced Ford to 6 ½ to 21 years in prison.

After the hearing ended, Ford was led away in handcuffs toward a familiar place.

And D’Adamo and his wife, Paula, returned to South Philadelphia, riding through FDR Park as they do nearly every day — and as their son had, too.

There, they stopped at the place where he was struck and killed. D’Adamo straightened up the memorial, said a prayer, and went home.

And the next morning, he woke up, slipped his courthouse badge around his neck like he always does, and returned to work.