ST. LUCIE COUNTY — St. Lucie County Health Department officials confirmed Thursday the county’s first death from H1N1 flu, commonly called the swine flu.

Jason Christopher Schenck, 23, of Port St. Lucie, died Tuesday at St. Lucie Medical Center from the H1N1 virus, his family said.

“He had more friends than I knew he had, and he was just a good kid. He was a good all around kid. He was very polite,” father Clifford Schenck said. “They’re (Jason’s friends) calling me and telling me that Jason was the only one they could talk to and they know he would listen.”

Schenck suffered from asthma his entire life, Clifford Schenck said. And that condition along with several bouts of pneumonia left scars on the young man’s lungs and made him susceptible to the virus, his father said.

Clifford Schenck said his son, who had been in the hospital since Aug. 15, became ill after attending a concert with friends in West Palm Beach. None of his friends have reported feeling sick, his father said.

“When we took him in on the 15th, when he got admitted, his fingers were turning purple and his toes from lack of oxygen,” Clifford Schenck said. “I don’t care if you’re 23 or 70 years old, you don’t need to go out with this because it eats you up.”

The public shouldn’t panic with the county’s first death from the swine flu but practice good hygiene skills, said Arlease Hall, St. Lucie County Health Department spokeswoman.

“It’s imperative that if you sneeze or cough, to do so in your sleeve and not in your hands,” she said. “Wash your hands, and if you are sick, please, just stay home.”

Known as swine flu, H1N1 is a unique strain of the influenza virus that emerged this spring first in Mexico and now is widespread throughout the United States.

“I can tell you, if someone has flu symptoms, it is almost certainly H1N1,” said Karlette Peck, epidemiologist for the St. Lucie County Health Department.

Symptoms include fever, chills, aches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and fatigue.

People most at-risk: pregnant women, infants and children and those with chronic health conditions, including morbid obesity.

People born before 1957 seem to have some immunity to the H1N1 strain.

Like any flu virus, H1N1 is spread person-to-person through droplets.

Staff writer Hillary Copsey and WPTV contributed to this report.

By Keona Gardner, TCPalm.com

MARTIN COUNTY — Almost two weeks after her apartment building caught fire, Karen Diaz’s second-floor apartment still smells of smoke.

The fire that briefly displaced Diaz, 21, and her family from their lodgings at The Crossings at Indian Run never entered the apartment, but the smell still greets her when she wakes and when she walks out the damaged front door.

“It feels like it’s on fire again,” said Diaz, who lives in the apartment with her mother, 4-year-old son, older sister and infant niece.

The fires that struck the building at 3740 Southeast Gatehouse Circle and a condo in Port Salerno on Independence Day weekend are over, but the task of recovering is not. The American Red Cross of Martin County has spent a little less than $1,000 aiding those affected by the fires.

On July 4, fire broke out at one of building’s three columns and spread up its interior to the building’s attic, where it was contained.

The fire department accused two juveniles of starting the fire with fireworks. The juveniles are not being charged, but they are being put into a fire safety program, said Frank Lasaga, community safety coordinator for the Stuart fire department.

Diaz and her family were the only ones relocated after the fire, estimated to have caused $80,000 in damage, and have since returned home.

The Red Cross spent a little less than $200 for the family’s food and alternate lodgings while repairs to the ceiling were made, said Sam Yates, a spokesman for the organization. Diaz said the family stayed at Molly’s House in Stuart from July 6 to July 8.

Earlier on July 4, a fire in a waterside condo on the 4000 block of Manatee Lane ended with one dead and one injured. The next day, firefighters with Martin County Fire Rescue returned when another fire broke out in a different area of the same building. None were injured in the second fire.

Yates said the Red Cross spent more than $300 helping the survivor of the first Manatee Lane fire. It has also spent $550 helping a family displaced in the second Manatee Lane fire and will contribute more to help to help them find a place to stay.

After the fire, dust from the attic covered the apartment floor and furniture, Diaz said. The front door was damaged and cut from when firefighters broke into the apartment. The apartment and outside stairwell still smell, and the storage closet on the balcony smells of mold and smoke.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get in there with that smell,” Diaz said.

Parts of the apartment’s ceiling have been repaired, and the dust has been cleaned from the apartment floor. Diaz is still waiting for the apartment complex to replace the front door and damaged air conditioning equipment. Diaz said the complex told her the door would be repaired next week.
By Alex Tiegen, TCPalm.com

PORT ST. LUCIE — A lock on the door was the only notice Jessica Rufo got that Hayes World Day Care & Learning Center had closed.

Rufo, a St. Lucie County School District employee, is keeping her 3-year-old daughter at home for the summer, but had left Hayes World about $500 to hold a spot for Elizabeth in the fall. Driving by the Darwin Boulevard center this weekend, Rufo noticed locks on the door.

A message on Hayes World’s phone service said the day-care center is “temporarily closed,” but offered no other information.
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Before incoming seventh-graders step into their first classes this fall, they must brave the sting of a newly required vaccine against whooping cough and two other diseases.

Local health departments are offering the Tdap vaccination against tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis (whooping cough) this summer at health clinics or at residents’ request so students can be prepared for the start of school.

The new state requirement for students to take the vaccine before entering the seventh grade stems from concerns that adolescents and adults immunized against whooping cough in infancy are contracting the disease when they’re older. Before this year, the vaccine for adolescents, licensed in 2005, was suggested but not required. Counties have offered the vaccine every year.
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MIAMI — After a long and exhaustive investigation, the deaths of two infants and the sickening of a third at Miami Children’s Hospital is a medical mystery.

The infants, born extremely prematurely, their immune systems compromised, were in the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit when two of them died of a common yet lethal bacterium in March. (more…)

STUART — Martin County’s lowest-paid workers will keep fighting the county’s furlough program because they can’t afford a 5 percent pay cut, a union leader said Tuesday.

Teamsters Local 769, which represents 275 of the county’s clerical and blue collar workers, will ask the Public Employees Relations Commission to resolve the contract dispute through binding arbitration, said Mavis Curley, the union’s chief steward in Martin County.

The furlough program requiring all county employees, except fire rescue workers, to take one unpaid day off per month starting Friday violates the Teamsters contract, Curley said. Under the contract, a workweek is 40 hours.
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PORT ST. LUCIE — A 22-year-old Port St. Lucie man has been charged in federal court with transporting child pornography after authorities found more than half a million child pornographic images on his computer hard drive, according to a news release Friday from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Jason David Bingham was detained Friday in Miami without bond and his arraignment is set for April 28.
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Marlins pitcher Scott Proctor (left), plays with his 3-year-old daughter, Mary Elizabeth, and wife, Carrie. Photo by Sarah Grile

JENSEN BEACH — There’s no disputing Scott Proctor’s passion for baseball. After a tough loss, the new Marlins reliever once burned his glove on the dugout steps at Yankee Stadium — “a sacrifice to the baseball gods,” he explained.

Proctor persuaded his wife to name their first child,  5-year-old Camden, after Baltimore’s baseball yard.

Their youngest, 18-month-old Cooper, got his name from the New York town that’s home to the Hall of Fame.

“It helped me understand what really matters,’’ he said. (more…)

Eric Fletcher is pictured with his daughter Jocelyn.

FORT PIERCE — A 21-year-old Port St. Lucie man will spend the next 51 months in prison for shaking his 6-week-old daughter to death.

Eric Patrick Fletcher pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges in the July death of his daughter Jocelyn Marie and received the four-year, three-month sentence Thursday from Circuit Judge Cynthia Cox.

In addition to the prison sentence, Fletcher will have to serve 10 years on probation and complete 200 hours of community service by speaking a high schools and working with the Department of Children and Families to talk to young parents.

Jocelyn Marie Fletcher died July 6, two days after paramedics rushed her to the hospital after her father called them and said she had stopped breathing. (more…)

Landen Read

Killed in the Sunday crash in Palm City were Juno Beach Police Officer Tiffany Russell and Port St. Lucie resident Lynda Kruse, fiancée of Stuart police Officer Jeff Read. The two had a 4-month old son, Landen Read.

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