Husband kills wife in front of police station, later kills self

By wire services
Published July 6, 2004

OCALA - A Central Florida Community College professor was fatally shot in front of Police Department headquarters by her husband, who fled and later took his own life.

Debra Allen Vazquez, 50, had argued with her husband, Jose, 50, near a Wal-Mart supercenter Sunday, investigators said. When she drove away, with the couple's 8-month-old granddaughter in her car, Jose Vazquez followed in his pickup truck and attempted to get her to stop by ramming her car.

Debra Vazquez drove to the Ocala Police Department headquarters, but the police station was unstaffed at the time. Her husband shot her outside the car and dragged her body to the side of the building and left, witnesses and investigators said. The baby girl was unharmed.

Jose Vazquez went to a friend's house to pick up some ammunition and tell him he had shot his wife and was going to end his life, said a spokesman for the Marion County Sheriff's Office. The friend tried to stop him from driving away but could not.

Vazquez was found in his truck on the side of a road with a self-inflicted fatal gunshot wound, investigators said.

There were 12 officers on duty Sunday but some were trying to catch a suspect and others were responding to different calls, a police official said.

GAINESVILLE - Surgeons at the University of Florida recently performed a rare "ex-vivo" liver operation, in which they removed a cancerous tumor from the liver while it was outside the body. Doctors then put the liver back in the patient.

The eight-hour operation at UF's Shands Hospital is thought to be the first time in Florida, and one of only a few times in the country, that doctors have cut away a tumor from a liver outside the body and successfully reimplanted the organ.

The unidentified patient went home two weeks after the April surgery. While he has had some complications, he is still alive, said Dr. Alan Hemming, director of hepatobiliary surgery and associate professor of surgery in UF's College of Medicine.

Hemming has performed the surgery in Canada before.

The procedure would only be performed when a liver tumor is too difficult to remove, because of how it is affecting the blood vessels in the organ. The liver is taken out of the body and the tumor is removed. Then the doctor must reconstruct the blood vessels to restore the normal blood flow to the organ.

Putting it back in, the surgeon must connect the blood vessels to those in the patient's body, the most complex part of the surgery.

"It typically takes two to three hours to remove the liver, two hours to remove the tumor and reconstruct the blood vessels on the back table, and another two hours to reimplant the liver," Hemming said.

According to information from Shands, Hemming is one of only a handful of surgeons worldwide who have performed the out-of-body liver surgery.

MIAMI - Two children were killed Monday when thrown from a tumbling sport utility vehicle and falling 60 feet from an interstate overpass to a city street, the Florida Highway Patrol said. Two other people were critically injured.

No one in the red Chevrolet Suburban was wearing a seat belt, troopers said, when it went out of control on Interstate 95, hit another vehicle and skidded through a light post and along the top of an interstate barrier wall before it started tumbling.

The children, ages 6 and 11, died on the downtown Miami street where they landed, troopers said. One bounced off a traffic signal before hitting the pavement.

Their 29-year-old mother and a 10-year-old girl were in critical condition at Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital. They also were thrown from the vehicle, but remained on the interstate.

[Last modified July 5, 2004, 23:31:38]