Verdict likely today for DUI-death suspect
Boca Raton man is accused in crash that killed cyclist in 2014.
WEST PALM BEACH — A Palm Beach County jury today is expected to decide the case of the Boca Raton man who has exchanged blame with his ex-girlfriend for the 2014 Boca Raton crash that left a 66-year-old bicyclist dead.
Testimony ended Wednesday in the DUI manslaughter trial of 32-year-old Paul Maida, who prosecutors say was driving his girlfriend’s Ford F-150 truck while his license was suspended when he plowed into George Morreale on Yamato Road near Interstate 95. They say Maida temporarily left the scene of the crash and, when he returned, told police his girlfriend had been driving.
Maida’s now former girlfriend, Bianca Fichtel, went from facing charges herself to being the prosecution’s pivotal witness against Maida this week. She began testifying Tuesday and ended her time on the witness stand Wednesday after the prosecutor took her through hundreds of pages of emails she had exchanged with Maida while she was on house arrest awaiting trial.
In the emails, Maida repeatedly told Fichtel that he would turn himself in and tell police he was driving. Eventually, however, it was Fichtel who went to prosecutors, told them Maida was the driver and gave them the emails as proof.
At the start of the trial Tuesday, defense attorney Robert Resnick told jurors that the only thing the emails proved was that Maida was so desperate to get back together with Fichtel that he allowed his former girlfriend to manipulate him into saying whatever she wanted to hear.
If Maida had really been the driver, why did Fichtel’s parents allow Maida to visit her and spend intimate time alone with her at their home even after she was arrested, Resnick asked Fichtel on the witness stand.
“He kept promising me that he would do the right thing,” Fichtel said. “I was gullible.”
Maida emailed Fichtel so frequently, she told jurors, that she would often wake up to find 15 to 20 new emails from him in her inbox daily. In them, he repeatedly asked to see Fichtel, told her he loved her and once said he thought about killing himself “because I couldn’t live with what I hadn’t done” — a reference not to Morreale’s death, but to his false promises that he would turn himself in.
“It scares me more than anything that after I do this that you and your family (will) just forget about me,” he wrote.
At one point, toward the end of their exchange, Fichtel told him she did legal research and found out that he was unlikely to face prosecution if he turned himself in.
She told jurors Wednesday under questioning from Resnick that she’d lied about having done the research but said she was trying everything to get him to turn himself in.
“By that time, you just wanted him to say what you wanted?” Resnick asked her.
“Yeah. Well, actually that’s wrong,” Fichtel replied. “It wasn’t about what I wanted him to say. I wanted him to come in and tell the truth.”
Because Maida was originally believed to be the passenger in the car at the time of the crash, investigators never tested his blood. But an officer said that he appeared to be so inebriated after the crash that he had to be led by the arm into a waiting car.
Fichtel said that before the crash she had taken him to a friend’s house, where she believed he took oxycodone.
Aside from the DUI manslaughter charge, Maida faces charges of leaving the scene of an accident involving a death, driving on a suspended license and making a false police report.