Jury hears emails between former lovers in crash trial
Bianca Fichtel and Paul Maida Jr. had stopped being intimate, but their emails continued formonths as she lingered on house arrest, accused of driving impaired and killing a bicyclist inBoca Raton.
Fichtel testified Wednesday that she wanted and pleaded then for just one thing — for her former boyfriend to admit he was responsible for the April 6, 2014 crash.
“My life was ruined,” she said, recalling howher anxiety worsened and the prospect of prison seemed real. “Everyone thinks I killed someone I didn’t kill… I wanted him to tell the truth.”
But Maida never went to the authorities as he promised her. They came and arrested him, and dropped the case against Fichtel, mainly because of his seemingly incriminating emails.
Closing arguments are set for todayin Maida’s trial on DUI manslaughter and other felonies. He chose not to testify in his own defense.
But the Palm Beach County jury this week still heard his recorded statement to police days after the crash, in which he said he wasn’t driving. And prosecutor Laura Laurie read dozens of the emails between Maida, 32, and Fichtel, 27, during the period while shewas the one facing a trial and hewas free.
Just before the jurors listened to the correspondence, Circuit Judge Charles Burton shouted at defense attorney Robert Resnick to sit down and quit objecting to his ruling allowing the emails in the trial.
“I’m going to do the right thing … it’s what I should have done from the start,” Maida wrote to Fichtel in January 2015, adding he wanted to “step up to the plate and fix this. I’m so disgusted with myself and my actions.”
Two months later, he assuredher, “Iwasnevergoing to let you take the fall for this.”
Maida never typed a specific admission or words indicating that he drove Fichtel’s pickup truck into the victim. He wrote only that he intended to turn himself into police so she could be set free becausehelovedher.
As the star witness for the prosecution, Fichtel testified that Maida was behind the wheel when the Ford F-150 slammed into George Morreale, 65, on a bright Sunday morning along Yamato Road, west of Interstate 95.
She first took the witness stand on Tuesday, describing how she was looking down at her phone when she heard a loud bang, saw the hood of the pickup smashed and demanded that Maida turn around. Fichtel said he refused, so at the first opportunity she climbed over him in the cab and took the wheel, and drove back to the crash scene.
There, she told a cop she was driving and Maida didn’t dispute that. Days later, he told investigators Fichtel hit the bicyclist. While other motorists heard the crash, none of those witnesses can say for sure who drove the pickup.
Despite the traumatic event, and Fichtel’s arrest that July, they remained an item. The couple continued to spend some nights together and parted for good that November. Then they began emailing.
Fichtel testified she was nice at first, but as the months went on, the tone turned nasty.
“I don’twant tohear from you ever again, unless it’s an apology or youwalking in to confess to the cops that you killed that man, not me,” Fichtel wrote in a February 2015 email. “I didn’t kill him. I don’t deserve this. You’ve ruined by life.”
Sheendedthat email with an observation: “You’re not man enough to own up to what you did and accept the consequences of your actions, no matter what they are.”
As the prosecutor read the email excerpts, Maida looked at copies on the defense table.
Fichtel shot brief glances at Maida but avoided eye contact aside from when Maidawas asked to stand in the courtroom for his exgirlfriend to formally identify him.