Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Doctor's return has everyone guessing

Attorneys for the man accused of assaulting a patient say that he's in Syria caring for his mother and that they don't know when he'll be back.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published August 25, 2005

SPRING HILL - Dr. A. Hussam Armashi isn't hiding. His attorneys and the state's attorneys know where he is. They just don't know when he's going to come back.

Or if.

"I'd say the odds of that," Jimmy Brown, his Brooksville lawyer, said earlier this week at the courthouse, "are like a snowball's chance in hell."

Armashi, 58, was arrested in February after a female patient said he had injected her in January with a powerful dose of medication before touching her in places he shouldn't have - the fourth time in the past five years, court records show, that he has been accused of assaulting a patient in that way.

But he didn't show up at his pretrial date in July.

Circuit Judge Jack Springstead ordered that he appear at his Aug. 5 pretrial.

He did not.

His attorneys - Brown and Orlando's Jackson Brownlee - said that day that Armashi was in his native Damascus, Syria, tending to his sick mother.

Springstead was unmoved: He issued a warrant for the doctor's arrest and set bail at half a million dollars.

"He is the only living son," Brown said. "He says he has a moral obligation to be with his mother, which supersedes any practical or technical obligations. He has stressed to us that when his moral obligations are complete, he will return to the state of Florida."

When that might be is anybody's guess.

"This," prosecutor Bill Catto said Tuesday from his office in Inverness, "was our concern."

Armashi's home in the Lake in the Woods gated community off U.S. 19 is up for sale. It has been on the market since the middle of April. The asking price: $649,000.

"It's being showed very regularly," said Jason Hahn, the listing agent at A-1 Realty on State Road 50.

The rest of Armashi's family - his wife and kids - are still there, according to Hahn and Brown. The 6,345-square-foot home has five bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms, a two-car garage, marble floors and custom Italian woodworking. There's a pool in back.

On hernandomls.com, Hernando County's multiple listing service real estate Web site, the ad for Armashi's home says: "PRICED $100K BELOW APPRAISED VALUE!!"

Hahn thinks it will be sold by the end of the month.

"They priced it competitively for a reason," he said.

Meanwhile, at Armashi's office, Active Pain Control Center at 12228 Cortez Blvd., a woman who answered the phone Tuesday afternoon said the practice had "nothing to do with Dr. Armashi anymore" before hanging up.

The phone number has been changed. It is no longer 597-PAIN.

But Armashi, who says on his Web site that he got his degree in anesthesiology in 1983 from the German Medical Board, still owns the practice, and the signs at the far end of Building A of the Hernando Medical Park still bear his name.

"It's an ongoing business," Brown said, even though the Florida Department of Health suspended Armashi's license to practice in February after the latest set of charges.

One of the previous three charges was dropped in May 2003 after prosecutors discovered the alleged victim had given conflicting testimony during mediation for her civil suit. The other two women opted to go the civil settlement route from the get-go.

When the accuser in the most recent incident showed up for an appointment in Armashi's office at 6:30 on a Saturday evening, he gave the woman large quantities of medication, according to Department of Health records, lifted her shirt and bra after her eyes closed, then pulled down her pants and underwear. When she came to, he ripped an IV out of her arm and fled.

Armashi has denied all of it.

At the pretrial earlier this month, Brown and Brownlee appeared on his behalf, citing five cases dating to 1979 in which the defendant didn't have to be on hand for pretrials.

"There's good reason," Catto said that day, "for the court to want to see his face."

Springstead agreed.

So the warrant for his arrest still stands.

And Armashi is still in Syria.

Brown, who says he stays in touch with his client via e-mail, said that Armashi has asked him and Brownlee to file an appeal with the 5th District Court of Appeal in Daytona Beach.

"We think the case law is on our side," Brown has said.

As for the prosecution?

"We've got a bench warrant out for his arrest with a bond of a half a million dollars," Catto said this week. "I don't know where else you go from there."

The Hernando County Sheriff's Office is working with the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Office of International Affairs, sheriff's spokeswoman Deputy Donna Black said Wednesday.

"All the proper people have been notified," she said.

On www.realpagessites.com at the "Meet Dr. Armashi" section of the Active Pain Control page, which is still online, the calendar is blank.

The main page promises a "warm, friendly atmosphere" and "evening hours available by appointment."

E-mails this week to Armashi's Hotmail address went unreturned.

On Tuesday night, past the guard at the gate at Lake in the Woods, the Armashi house was dark. An A-1 Realty sign was on the lawn in front of a hedge. The wide circular driveway was empty. No one answered the door.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified August 25, 2005, 00:52:33]