State attorney Mike McAuliffe: DUI death suspect’s Haiti permission wasn’t a good idea

Roberts, in a trial last year (Damon Higgins/The Palm Beach Post) Longtime prosecutor Ellen Roberts , the Palm Beach County state attorney’s traffic homicide specialist, said allowing teenage DUI death suspect Beruch Zegeye to travel to Haiti wouldn’t have been much of a risk. Roberts said she doesn’t believe Zegeye, 19, would have fled if he went to Port-au-Prince to help with the earthquake rescue efforts. “If he was going to flee, he’d have done it a long time ago,” Roberts said. “He certainly has the resources.” Besides, she said, she thought Zegeye could be “of help” in Haiti with his neurosurgeon dad, St. Marys Medical Center’s Yonas Zegeye . “The earthquake there certainly was a part of my thinking,” she said. Said Sarah Horak , the niece of the man killed in Beruch Zegeye’s accident: “Sure, Haiti needs help. But (Zegeye) murdered someone. And he’s living life like nothing happened.” Zegeye is facing more than 20 years in a state prison for his alleged role in the September 2008 crash that killed a pizza delivery man and injured another motorist. Zegeye, then a student at the swanky Benjamin School, was returning from a day a partying, partly on a yacht owned by golfer Jack Nicklaus . Zegeye (photo to the right) may have been high on pills and booze at the time of the 80 mph crash. Under house-arrest at first and freed on a $200,000-bond, Zegeye was eventually

allowed to travel to New York City to attend Pace University. Hearings on his case have been postponed time and time again , and a plea conference is scheduled for April — a year and a half after 45-year-old pizzaman Paul Krommendyk was killed. For more, and the poll, look below or click Then, last week, Zegeye asked Judge Karen Miller to travel to Haiti. Defense attorneys often try to show to a jury and/or a judge that a defendant could be a productive member of society. Both Miller and Roberts signed off on the order allowing Zegeye to travel, even though Haiti’s down-and-out government would have been incapable to track down Zegeye if he were to decide not to return to the United States. Miller eventually changed her mind and rescind the permissions. Miller gave no explanation, and didn’t return my calls. State Attorney Mike McAuliffe , Roberts’ boss, said he disagreed with the decision to allow Zegeye to leave in the first place. “Ellen is one of our most senior prosecutors and I trust her,” he said. “But this is a defendant in a felony case and it involved overseas travel. In the end, though, he never left.” Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

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State attorney Mike McAuliffe: DUI death suspect’s Haiti permission wasn’t a good idea

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