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Around the state

Judge allows feeding tube for Cuban on hunger strike

By wire services
Published April 16, 2005

MIAMI - A Cuban exile on a monthlong hunger strike protesting his detention as a suspected spy was in a hospital's inmate ward Friday after a judge cleared the way to put a feeding tube in him.

U.S. District Judge Paul Huck agreed with another judge's order to "involuntarily administer nutrients" to Juan Emilio Aboy via the stomach or intravenously, and to restrain him if he tries to remove it. Aboy, 44, has been held for three years without criminal charges but faces immigration charges. Officials said he began his hunger strike March 13, accepting only water, while demanding release from Krome Detention Center.

U.S. investigators claim Aboy was a courier for the Miami-based and Cuban-directed Wasp Network in the 1990s and was ordered to infiltrate the U.S. Southern Command, the military command for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Aboy came to the United States in the 1994 rafter exodus. He denies the espionage claims.

OAKLAND PARK - A girlfriend is suing a clinic doctor accused of injecting himself, her and another couple with botulin toxin, causing paralyzing botulism.

Alma Hall has been making the slowest recovery of the four people afflicted in November. Her attorney said her medical bills exceed $1-million.

"Her head and neck have some mobility back, but the rest of her body is still paralyzed. This stuff absolutely wracked her," attorney Daniel Dolan said Thursday.

Hall sued her boyfriend, suspended doctor Bach McComb, the Advanced Integrated Medical Center clinic, staff members and List Biological Laboratories, a California company that federal investigators say supplied the undiluted toxin.

The Food and Drug Administration contends McComb and University of Kentucky professor Robert Baker are tied to an Arizona couple who offered injections of a diluted form of the toxin in place of more expensive, FDA-approved Botox wrinkle treatments.

FORT MYERS - An 81-year-old woman starting to take a test drive hit her husband, a salesman, a car and a tree before running into a wall at a car dealership.

"She must have panicked," said Joe Sica, sales manager at Honda of Fort Myers.

The open car door hit Dorothy Byrum's husband and the salesman. The new Honda Accord kept going backward into a parked car, tree and wall. The air bag deployed. Byrum was not injured.

Her 88-year-old husband Robert, who was knocked down, was in good condition Thursday at Gulf Coast Hospital. Sica said the salesman was treated and released but will be off work about a week.

The car was written off as a total loss.

[Last modified April 16, 2005, 01:21:18]