FORT PIERCE - St. Lucie County parents, teachers and students brought a message to school board members Tuesday: Don’t close our schools. Don’t cut our teachers or school resource officers. And don’t get rid of our sports programs.

Their pleas were impassioned, indignant and teary.

“It’s stressful as students to have to deal with it,” Tyosha Matthews, a senior at Fort Pierce Central High School, said of proposed budget cuts.

About 800 people packed the auditorium Tuesday at Fort Pierce Central High School for a town hall meeting about a proposal to cut $30 million from the St. Lucie County School District’s $297 million operating budget for the 2009/10 school year. The school district cut about $23 million from this year’s budget.

Superintendent Michael Lannon has proposed a variety of measures to reach $30 million, including laying off 331 employees, implementing a 1 percent across-the-board pay cut, cutting junior varsity and middle-school sports, and closing two schools, Port St. Lucie Elementary and Southbend K-8 School. (more…)

Family slain

Jose and Yessica Escobedo with sons Luis Julian (left) and Luis Damian (right). Husband, wife and two children from Greenacres found shot to death off Florida’s Turnpike in northern Port St. Lucie. More news, photos

WEST PALM BEACH — In the end, jurors decided, the murders of 4-year-old Luis Julian Escobedo and 3-year-old Luis Damian Escobedo were too much to forgive.

They unanimously condemned Ricardo Sanchez Jr. and Daniel Troya to pay for the boys’ lives with their own today, marking
the first time in decades that a federal jury in Florida has handed down a death sentence.

The children, shot to death in October 2006 along with their parents on Florida’s Turnpike, became the focal point of outrage as among the only purely innocent faces during a months-long trial and sentencing hearing that pushed jurors into the world of drugs, guns and violence.

After four days of deliberating, the jury decided that Sanchez and Troya should receive life sentences for the killings of the boys’ parents, Jose Luis Escobedo, 28, and Yessica Escobedo, 25.

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PORT ST. LUCIE — Ripe strawberries are dangling in the yard at the lone house on Westcliffe Lane. Tomatoes, onions and corn are sprouting, too.

The porch of the Home & Garden Television's Green Home in Tradition.

No green thumb is necessary: A solar-powered pump shuttles water from two nearby rain barrels to the hydroponic garden. To find out if the rain will fill the barrels today, step inside the house, where a flat-screen monitor greets you with the forecast.

No showers predicted? That’s OK. Sunshine powers rooftop solar panels. The monitor shows how much energy they’re generating, too.

“It doesn’t provide all the electricity, but it sure helps,” the home’s architect, Michael Carlson, said of the 2-kilowatt system.

This is Home & Garden Television’s Green Home, the network’s second ever and first in Florida. It’s a $750,000 collection of eco-friendly must-haves and green novelties that HGTV will give away in a drawing in June. (more…)

Matt Fritchie, with the Martin County Sheriff's Office K-9 Unit, follows his dog, Bella, while looking for a suspected illegal immigrant at the Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge on Jupiter Island on Tuesday. Photo by Sarah Grile.

JUPITER ISLAND — Martin County Sheriff’s deputies, Jupiter Island police and federal agents scoured parts of the Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge looking for a man running from authorities.

At about 11:45 a.m., sheriff’s deputies and police responded to the north end of Beach Road where workers doing mosquito control reported seeing a suspicious man in the area, officials said. The witnesses reported to Jupiter Island Public Safety that when they approached the man on an all-terrain vehicle, he fled, according to sheriff’s office spokeswoman Rhonda Irons.

Initially, it was believed the man might have been a migrant crossing the ocean to get to U.S. soil, so crews from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection also arrived to the scene.

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TC Palm

The St. Lucie County kindergarten teacher who held a vote to oust 5-year-old Alex Barton from his classroom lost her appeal for reinstatement.

Administrative law judge Claude Arrington upheld the St. Lucie School Board’s decision to suspend Wendy Portillo for a year without pay and remove her tenure.

Schools Superintendent Michael Lannon, who testified at the hearing that he would not recommend she be allowed to teach in a district elementary school, said he had not yet read through the order and declined to comment.

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Danny Ford

The dog’s owner told Martin County Sheriff’s deputies that he saw Danny K. Ford in his yard in the 8400 block of Southeast Eucalyptus Way where he was stabbing the homeowner’s pit bull in the eyes.

The homeowner said Ford, 48, was known as a local in the Banner Lake area. When he saw Ford with the rebar shortly before 6:30 p.m. on Friday, he rushed into his yard.

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Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing

A jury has sentenced Ricardo Sanchez Jr. and Daniel Troya to death for killing the Escobedo family of four along Florida’s Turnpike in St. Lucie County.

The federal death penalty is different from the state of Florida’s death sentence in many ways.

Only 51 inmates are on federal Death Row in Terre Haute, Ind. Florida houses 392. Crimes punishable by the federal death penalty include genocide, killing witnesses, in a trial, terrorism and murder committed as part of a drug enterprise.

Florida has executed 67 men and women since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976. The feds have executed three men since Congress reinstated it in 1988. Some of the more famous of those executed were Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of sabotage for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

Here’s some of those executed since 1927:

James Horace Alderman

1927: James Horace Alderman, known as “King of the Rumrunners,” was intercepted by a Coast Guard vessel 30 miles off Florida’s coast. His boat was laden with alcohol during the era of Prohibition. As Alderman boarded the vessel, he pulled out his pistol. When two Coast Guardsmen and a Secret Service agent rushed him, he shot them all dead. Later, his execution was scheduled for the Broward County Jail, but the county wanted it to occur on federal property. So a makeshift gallows was erected at the Coast Guard hangar.

“When this is read I will have passed over the brink of eternity into the Great Beyond. “I would like to state through the medium of The Miami Herald that I am feeling fine, physically, mentally and spiritually. With the wonderful comfort and strength that I received from Jesus Christ, I am assured that when tomorrow comes I will go with smiles of comfort on my face. … “As I sit here in my cell I can look back and see just what caused me to be where I am today. Drunkenness first starts a young man to gambling — and swearing grows on him — and from that step he becomes hardened in his heart in envy and hatred toward mankind. Then, as he grows up, he becomes what you would call educated to crime. Bootlegging and smuggling is the next step. And there are other angles of downfall that lead to the devil. “The money I made neither did me nor my dear family any good. We thought it did, but no. You can see what it has done — a death sentence by hanging — and a broken-hearted family.”

Read the 1929 Time magazine account of his hanging, here. (more…)

Demand for emergency shelter for battered women along the Treasure Coast is up 27 percent — partially due to economic stress, officials say.

“Our area is suffering horrifically from the loss of employment and homes,” said Jill Borowicz, chief executive officer of SafeSpace, a nonprofit agency with shelters and counseling programs serving Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin counties.

Economic problems increases stress. When combined with cutbacks in local social service, “it spells a dangerous situation in families.” she said. “Some people turn to violence.”

From July 2008 to February, her two shelters in Stuart and Vero Beach housed 124 women and 137 children. Women increased 27 percent. Children increased by 14 percent.

Calls for counseling and assistance jumped 20 percent. SafeSpace has an outreach center in Port St. Lucie.
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ST. LUCIE COUNTY — Library building hours are shortened, pools are closing temporarily and park hours are limited, as the county completes its early retirement program for employees designed to save taxpayers $4.5 million in 2009.

St. Lucie County is down to 676 positions, including 91 part-time employees, marking a 31-percent decrease in staffing since the 2006-07 budget year. The county had 984 employees for 2006-07 and had a salary freeze for the 2007-08 budget year.

At least 11 jobs are expected to be filled, but the increase is not enough to bring the county back to its 2000-01 staffing level, even though the population has increased to 265,108 in 2008 from 192,695 in 2000 according to the U.S. Census.

Commissioner Chris Craft said staff is in a difficult position.

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FORT PIERCE — La’ziea Skinner had been was alive for three weeks, all of them spent in Miami Children’s Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, when her family got the call on March 15.

La’ziea, who seemed to be getting better despite being nearly three months premature, was sick.

But by the time the family made the drive from Fort Pierce to Miami, the infant’s condition had improved. They went home, only to receive another call on their way.

La’ziea was dead.

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