VERO BEACH — Minor League Baseball officials hope their plans for the former Dodgertown will bring year-round business to local hotels, restaurants, stores and health clubs.

Craig Callan, the vice president of MiLB Vero Beach, updated the Taxpayers’ Association of Indian River County at its monthly membership meeting Wednesday on the future of the former spring training home of the Los Angeles Dodgers. (more…)

FELLSMERE — Sometime in the 1920s, a Fellsmere student may have flipped a penny, hoping for heads. But he never found out how it landed.

Andy Davis knows.

As project superintendent with Doug Wilson Enterprises Inc. of Cape Canaveral, his crew is restoring the Old Fellsmere School, a 1916-era building, on a $2.97 million city contract. They’re hoping to be done in January, City Manager Jason Nunemaker said.

One of the workers recently found the 1920 penny on top of a door frame. Davis envisioned a student flipping the coin and losing it. And he was lucky without knowing it.

“It flipped heads up,” Davis recalled. “We also found a young girl’s homework from 1920 behind a baseboard. It was still kind of legible math homework.”

Such finds, which he has turned in at City Hall, provide a rare glimpse into the lives of everyday people back when the school was built.

The 27,000-square-foot building, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, was built in 1916 for about $40,000 and housed classrooms for kindergarten through 12th grade for more than 60 years, local historian Clarence “Korky” Korker has said.

After the School Board relocated classes in 1982 to a more modern building, City Hall used the Old Fellsmere School into the mid-1990s. Then storm damage and public-access problems forced the city staff to relocate into the current modular buildings provided by the Harris Corp.

But now City Hall is coming back. Nunemaker said plans call for the Boys & Girls Club to move into the basement and the south part of the first floor, while city staffers relocate into the second floor and the north part of the first floor.

The northernmost section of the basement, meanwhile, will become a kitchen devoted to the city’s specialty: frog legs. Organizers of the annual Fellsmere Frog Leg Festival, who started raising money in 1990 for the restoration plans, will have a permanent headquarters.

Davis said the challenge has been taking a structure that was built before building codes and retrofitting modern wiring and plumbing — including an elevator and central air conditioning — without interfering with the 1916 glory. The result is various square holes cut into the old brickwork for new shafts and ducts. They will be covered by grills.

“This is my first real restoration job to this extent,” Davis said. “I really don’t mind coming to work everyday. This is a rare opportunity.”

Davis and Dean McMurphy, with Door & Window Systems Inc. of Cocoa Beach, said they have a keen respect for tradesmen who had to do everything by hand and built a structure that has withstood every storm and hurricane since 1916.

Replacing a broken brick or wood timber from 1916 means making it anew, McMurphy said. It’s not ready on the shelf at the home-improvement store.

“You can’t get parts for this,” McMurphy said. “Everything we need has to be custom-built. … Everything has to fit right back together or there are gaps. That’s the hardest part about restoration.”

More than 200 businesses on the Treasure Coast and in Okeechobee County have been cited for selling alcohol to underage people, according to state records from January 2004 to August 2009. Some of those businesses were repeatedly cited.

“It’s a widespread problem,” Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar said.

A Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers review of five years of citations from the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco show some stores stores have been cited three times. (more…)

FORT PIERCE — After Julia Rolon-Estrada died of a gunshot wound to the artery in her leg on July 26, 2006, she was wrapped in a blue tarp and again in a green blanket before being buried in the yard of her Port St. Lucie home, near a rear sliding glass door.

A dog trained to find cadavers helped authorities locate the newly tilled grave, which was covered with a wooden pallet holding 20 mulch bags stacked on top.

Rolon-Estrada’s jailed husband, 43-year-old Albert Estrada, state prosecutors say, is the man guilty of killing his wife and high-school sweatheart, who had walked out on him the night before she died at age 39.
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FORT PIERCE — A man who police have said could be responsible for 20 burglaries or attempted burglaries of occupied homes since March was arrested Tuesday afternoon.

Police, with the help of a U.S. Marshals Service task force, apprehended Derrick L. Hickman, 33, for whom investigators obtained an arrest warrant in connection with a May attempted burglary in the 1600 block of Havana Avenue.

Investigators suspect Hickman could be responsible for 19 other burglaries or attempted burglaries, Fort Pierce police Sgt. Dennis McWilliams has said.
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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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FORT PIERCE — Some city commissioners are questioning why city manager David Recor didn’t include a job he held in Alaska on his resume and city application when he applied for deputy city manager in Fort Pierce.

But Recor said issues surrounding his Alaska job are misunderstandings.

Recor worked as a planning and land-use director for Matanuska-Susitna Borough, AK, from March 12, 2003, to April 14, 2003, according to Borough’s Human Resources Manager Rob McFerron. Recor was hired as Fort Pierce deputy city manager in April 2005 by former city manager Dennis Beach. Recor was then promoted to city manager in October when Beach retired.

Three days before Recor resigned from his job in Alaska, the Palmer Police Department arrested and charged him with shoplifting. The charges were later dropped and the case was dismissed, court records show. (more…)

Asked in a questionnaire by Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers for TCPalm.com’s “Ask the Candidates” page whether they had been convicted of a felony, both candidates on the ballot for state Senate District 28 seat wrote “no.”

The answer from one of the candidates isn’t accurate, according to a Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers investigation.

According to court records and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Eastern Pennsylvania, Democrat Bill Ramos, a mortgage broker from Jensen Beach, pleaded guilty to a single count of embezzlement of postal funds — accepting a three-year probation and repaying the missing money — in 1989. That charge is a felony.

Ramos said Thursday he didn’t consider pleading “no contest” the same as a conviction.

“I answered specifically as it was asked,” Ramos said. “It just said have you ever been convicted of, and I answered no. I plead no contest.”

The court documents show Ramos pleaded guilty.

Assistant State Attorney John Cannizzaro, of Florida’s 19th Judicial Circuit in Fort Pierce, said judges advise defendants before they enter a guilty plea that the action is the same as being convicted at a jury trial.

“There is no difference,” he said. (more…)

STUART — More than a century ago, shipwrecked sailors who washed up on the Treasure Coast immediately looked for mile markers nailed to trees and posts to direct them to safety.

These markers were designed to be easily understood by men from every country and education level. Over time they were lost to history, but replicas are currently on display at the House of Refuge at Gilbert’s Bar. (more…)

VERO BEACH — Local amateur fossil collector James Kennedy appears to have made an unprecedented archaeological discovery that might help confirm a human presence here up to 13,000 years ago.

A prehistoric bone fragment found near Vero Beach contains a crude engraving of a mammoth or mastodon on it.

“It is humbling to realize that we are seeing what the hunter saw more than 13,000 years ago,” Purdy said.
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