Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Grandmom ‘thrilled’ with arrest in Hvizda case
MEDIA » The last time that Linda Kleiser saw her daughter, Kimberly Hvizda, with her grandchildren was March 24, 2012. Kleiser was celebrating her 65th birthday, and Hvizda and her three children — two boys and a girl — came to visit her at her home in Drexel Hill for the occasion.
The date is burned into Kleiser’s memory because the following day, a Sunday, her 37-year-old daughter was stabbed to death outside a Wawa store in Upper Uwchlan by her estranged husband, James Hvizda, a former
minor league pitcher from whom she had been estranged for several months, and against whom she had a protective order.
That tragedy was horrific. But what happened to her grandchildren afterwards has left Klesier troubled and frustrated, she said.
The three were initially taken in by a Uwchlan couple who were friends of Kimberly Hvizda who had six children of their own and who eventually gained custody of the trio. But in June 2014, the Uwchlan couple, Stephen T. Fuimano and Kimberly Fuimano, abruptly gave up custody of the Hvizda children, splitting them apart and sending two to outof-state relatives and the third to another Chester County family. The three have essentially been separated ever since, apart from one another and as a family from their older half-sister.
Separating “those children from each other after they lost their mother is so devastating,” Kleiser said in an interview last week in the law office of her attorney, Emily Vener-Giszter of Media. “It should never have taken place.”
But Kleiser said she received some good news about the matter recently when she learned that Stephen Fuimano, a local contractor, had been arrested by the Chester County Detectives and charged with stealing thousands of dollars that had been donated by the public to care for the Hvizda children. On Dec. 6, Fuimano, a local contractor, waived his scheduled preliminary hearing before Magisterial District Judge Jeffery Vallocchi of East Caln. His case will now be transferred to Common Pleas Court for trial, where he is expected to initially plead not guilty.
“Fuimano being arrested thrills me to death,” said Kleiser, who told a reporter that she had grave concerns and doubts about the Fuimanos’ ability to care for her three grandchildren from the time the couple took them in back in March 2012.
“I am going to use two words to describe the entire situation,” she said in the interview. “Convoluted and ludicrous. This entire scenario had been convoluted and ludicrous from the beginning. Those are very appropriate words for this entire scenario.”
According to the allegations made against him in the criminal complaint by county Detective Benjamin Martin, Stephen Fuimano used money from the children’s bank account as a loan to pay personal debts; pocketed funds from the sale of a van that was to be used to transport the children bought with proceeds from the fund set up to care for them; and kept for himself a number of Social Security benefit checks meant for the trio, even after they had stopped living with him and his wife.
Fuimano and his attorney, Peter Scuderi of Philadelphia, did not comment on the allegations against him during the proceeding before Vallocchi. Fuimano remains free on unsecured bail of $50,000.
“He was selfish,” said Kleiser about Stephen Fuimano. “It’s a misuse of the money that was dedicated to my grandchildren’s upbringing. He took advantage of the entire situation from the beginning to the end. I am pleased that something is finally being done in this respect. I believe that there are a lot of things that have taken place
that have taken too long to be brought to justice.”
Kimberly Hvizda died on March 25, 2012, when her estranged husband, the father of the three children, stabbed her with a large hunting knife as she met him in the parking lot of the Wawa store in Upper Uwchlan, where she worked. He had planned the homicide in advance, according to authorities, luring her out of the safety of the Wawa store on ruse dealing with documents he said he would turn over to her. Afterwards, he walked to the nearby township police department headquarters and confessed to killing her.
James Hvizda eventually pleaded guilty to firstdegree murder charges and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He is currently housed at the State Correctional Institution at Greene. His parental rights to the three children — who are now 12, 9, and 7 years old, were terminated in September 2013.
According to Martin’s complaint, filed in September, Stephen Fuimano and Kimberly Fuimano agreed to take in the Hvizda children and to care for them after her death. (Another child, Kimberly Hvizda’s teenage daughter, went to live with her father.) Kimberly Fuimano was described as a close friend of Kimberly Hvizda. At James Hvizda’s sentencing hearing in 2012, the Fuimanos spoke about how they hoped to “love and care” for the children and not to let their mother’s memory die.
But in 2014, the Fuimano’s gave up custody of the children to other families, including relatives of Kimberly Hvizda’s in Georgia. The children, who were between the ages of 1 and 6 when their mother was killed, were eventually separated, and have since been adopted by other families in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to court records.
In his complaint, Martin alleged that Stephen Fuimano stole money from the children, both while he was caring for them and afterwards. The investigation began in August 2015, when an attorney representing one of the children in a civil case contacted Chief Deputy District Attorney Ronald Yen and expressed concern that money for the three children was being misappropriated.
Following her murder, a number of fundraising efforts were undertaken by people in the community to help the children’s future financial needs. Wawa, the regional convenience store chain, contributed $10,000 and asked customers for donations because Kimberly Hvizda was an employee and part of its corporate “family.” An event at a popular Eagle restaurant in November 2012 raised more than $19,000 for the children.
Martin discovered that Fuimano had written two checks in 2014 totaling $25,000 from the account set up for the children at TD Bank, characterizing them as “business loans.” But the funds never went into Fuimano’s business account, and instead were deposited in his personal account. Martin said the bulk of the funds was used to pay off credit card debt. Fuimano later repaid $24,000 of the “loan” to the children’s account.
In October 2012, Fuimano purchased a 12-passenger van from a Nissan dealership in Bucks County to use for transporting the Hvizda children and his own, mixing funds from his own accounts and those from the children’s account. He deposited $19,550 toward the van, plus a trade in of a van owned by Kimberly Hvizda that Martin said was illegally transferred to Fuimano by her father, Robert Kleiser. A total of $11,191 of the children’s funds was put toward the van’s purchase.
But in October 2014, five months after the Hvizda children had left his home, Fuimano sold the van to an Exton dealership for $23,490. Instead of repaying the children’s fund, the $11,191 he had used to purchase the van, Fuimano kept the money for his own use.
Finally, Fuimano acknowledged receiving Social Security checks meant for the three children from May 2014 to December 2014, a total of 14 payments amounting to $7,938. The Fuimanos had no expenses that could be tied to the children at the time, and none of the Social Security funds were given to the people who were taking care of the children at the time, Martin declared.
In all, Martin’s complaint listed $44,557 in funds that Fuimano improperly took from the children’s interests. After deducting the $24,000 that Fuimano had repaid from the “loan,” the total is $20,557.
He is charged with felony theft by unlawful taking, theft of property lost, theft by failure to make required disposition of funds, and receiving stolen property.
Kleiser said in the interview that she had tried to take custody of her three children after her daughter’s death, but that those efforts were thwarted. She has had no contact with the three siblings together for years, she said.