MARTIN COUNTY — Dorothy McManus got her own personal chauffeured bus from Halpatiokee Regional Park to West Palm Beach to start her work week Monday.

The Stuart resident, who takes a train from West Palm Beach to work in Broward County, had the bus to herself on the inaugural 5:10 a.m. Palm Tran Commuter Express. McManus was the first rider on the area’s first mass transit service offered between Martin and Palm Beach counties on Monday.

Four people hopped on the bus for the service’s 6:10 a.m. departure to Palm Beach County.
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FORT PIERCE — Soon residents and visitors to South Beach’s Jetty Park will get to enjoy more waterfront views, parking and easier access to a 2 1/2-mile linear park.

The City Commission, seated as the Fort Pierce Redevelopment Agency board, Wednesday approved a $1.4 million land acquisition that will double the size of Jetty Park to 2.87 acres.

The purchase is for 1 acre on the eastern side of the vacant Mariner Bay Motel property, formerly the Days Inn, at the corner of Seaway Drive and State Road A1A. (more…)

PORT SALERNO — Ann Gunsolus can’t bear the thought of losing her home, even though it’s a makeshift campsite in a privately owned woods a stone’s throw from U.S. 1.

“Cry: That’s what I do so far is cry,” Gunsolus said, while thinking about where she will go when the authorities evict the homeless people from the woods. “When you have nothing, there’s not much you can do.”

Gunsolus and more than a dozen other homeless men and women fear sheriff’s deputies will roust them as soon as Thursday from the patchwork of tents and tarps they call home. (more…)

ROSELAND — Slabs of stucco-covered clay bricks, which had once held up a U.S. Coast Guard station and then a crab-processing house, lay in heaps around folk singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie’s contractors.

Guthrie and Melbourne builder Joseph Horschel had hoped to preserve the old walls on the outside while making a home out of the 80-year-old building, which overlooks the Indian River Lagoon, in the 13000 block of North Indian River Drive, north of Sebastian.

They were going to add stronger walls inside to stand up under hurricane winds. But they couldn’t save the walls.

“That was a disappointment,” said project designer John Anderson, from Indian Harbor Beach. “We found cracks we couldn’t see until we got all the stucco off … It was too much to work with, so unfortunately we were not able to do what we hoped to do and save the walls.” (more…)

STUART — The party hearty crowd at local bars is going to have to tone down the sound as a result of stricter new noise rules set to go into effect this weekend.

The Martin County Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to ban noise from traveling more than 150 feet beyond an entertainment venue’s property line during the day and evening.

The new rules will ban noise from crossing an entertainment venue’s property line between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. (more…)

Tristan Allegra

PORT ST. LUCIE — Students and staff at Mariposa Elementary School remember Tristan Allegra, 8, “very kind and helpful, cool and funny,” according to a counselor who helped them cope with the third-grader’s Christmas Day death.

“Tristan was a popular kid, very well-liked,” said Robert O’Neill, a St. Lucie County School District psychologist, one of three counselors who went to the school Monday and Tuesday as classes resumed after the holiday break.

Sign Tristan’s guest book.

According to a Port St. Lucie Police Department arrest affidavit, Tristan died after his mother, Eryn Allegra, of the 2200 block of Southeast Bowie Street, smothered him in his sleep early Christmas morning in a hotel room. She is held without bond on a charge of first-degree murder.

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JENSEN BEACH — A funeral Mass for Tristan Allegra, an 8-year-old boy who was killed Christmas Day, allegedly smothered to death by his mother, will be at 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Martin De Porres Catholic Church, 2555 N.E. Savannah Road, according to All County Funeral Home & Crematory.

The mother, 31-year-old Eryn Allegra, who is in the St. Lucie County Jail on a first-degree murder charge, was not listed as a survivor. Tristan was a student at Mariposa Elementary School in Port St. Lucie. (more…)

By ANA X. CERON
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
JENSEN BEACH — Morning Mass at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church was going smoothly until Communion.

That’s when John S. Ricci took one of the Communion wafers and pocketed it, not only attacking their priest, but also their faith, parishioners told Martin County Sheriff’s deputies.

Ricci was supposed to consume the wafer – considered by Roman Catholics to be the body of Jesus Christ – to accept Communion, but when he didn’t, the Rev. Marco DeLeon called after him, parishioners said.

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