STUART — Nine years ago, a drunk Donald Flewellen drove a stolen van across the center line, causing a collision that killed two people and left illegal Guatemalan immigrant Luis Jimenez permanently brain damaged.

Less than four months after his December release from prison for two counts of DUI manslaughter, authorities say Flewellen, 52, was behind the wheel of a borrowed car and caused a hit-and-run crash with property damage in Fort Pierce.

Already charged with two counts of violating his supervised release, court papers show when Flewellen returns to court Aug. 17, he’ll face additional charges of leaving the scene of a crash with property damage and driving on a revoked driver’s license related to an April 5 traffic collision.
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Opinion Zone Sound off on this story Editorial The illegal vs. the hospital

STUART - By the summer of 2003, Martin Memorial Medical Center patient Luis Alberto Jimenez spent his days lounging by the nurse’s station on the fourth floor, eager to talk to passers-by and tell them how he missed the wife, kids and family he had back in Guatemala.

He refused to use the bathroom on his own, saying he would only do so when he went back to Guatemala. He told nurses he was sad and wanted to go home. Angry outbursts led doctors to put him on medication to control his behavior.

It was for these reasons, Martin Memorial attorney Scott Michaud told a jury Tuesday, that hospital officials devised a plan to send the undocumented immigrant back to his homeland more than three years after he suffered severe brain injuries and broken bones in a car accident.

But William King, an attorney for Jimenez’s legal guardian who subsequently sued the hospital, told the jury that hospital officials forcibly removed Jimenez from the country to shirk mounting costs they had to bear with little reimbursement.

“Martin Memorial’s actions were carried out through a thorough series of calculated decisions made at the highest level,” King said, later adding: “They tried to make an end run around immigration laws.”

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STUART — Opening arguments are expected to begin Tuesday in the civil trial surrounding the case of a brain-damaged Guatemalan immigrant privately deported by Martin Memorial Hospital.

Opinion Zone Sound off on this story Editorial The illegal vs. the hospital

Attorneys for the hospital and for the guardian of Luis Alberto Jimenez seated the eight-member jury panel Monday, including two alternates, after a week of jury selection.

Jimenez was injured in February 2000 after a drunken driver in a stolen van hit the car he was riding in. Jimenez was heading home to Indiantown after working a landscaping job.

Hospital officials won approval in 2003 from Circuit Judge John Fennelly to privately deport Jimenez. Jimenez had cost the hospital more than $1.5 million, officials there said, costs they paid largely without government help because Jimenez was an undocumented illegal immigrant.

A nurse accompanied Jimenez on a hospital-chartered flight back to Guatemala as guardian Montejo Gaspar appealed the decision.

An appeals court later ruled that Fennelly did not have authority to approve Martin Memorial’s request, clearing the way for Gaspar to file a lawsuit against the hospital for false imprisonment.

By then Jimenez had been kicked out of two hospitals in Guatemala and had moved back to a remote village, where his attorneys say he lives today with virtually no medical care.

The trial is expected to last at least two weeks.