Woman gets jury summons for brother, dead for 14 years
Peter DiBenedetto’s name hadn’t been removed from system.
LAKE WORTH — A suburban Lake Worth woman was perplexed as to why she received a jury duty summons in the mail requesting that her brother serve May 4, 2018.
Her brother has been dead 14 years.
When Serafina Sprague explained to the Palm Beach County Clerk and Comptroller’s Office that her brother, Peter DiBenedetto, died at Bethesda Hospital 14 years ago, and is buried in the Gardens of Boca Raton cemetery, she didn’t like the response.
Sprague said she was asked to provide a death certificate.
“I told them ‘Like hell I’ll send you anything,’” said Sprague, recalling the phone call. “‘I’m not sending you anything. He’s not dead two years, he’s dead 14.’”
Despite Sprague’s objections to the request, interim chief commu-
nications officer of the Clerk and Comptroller Office Susan Lugar says the employee was just following procedure.
“That’s the standard procedure because we can’t just remove people from the jury database without evidence,” Lugar said. “In this case, we’ve looked it up ourselves, because we know this is something that happened a long time ago and she might not even have a copy of the death certificate anymore.”
Lugar’s office gets a file each month from the Division of Motor Vehicles of people who have died in Palm Beach County, and those people are removed from the system, but because her office didn’t inherit the jury system until 2004, when they took it over from the courts, she was unsure of why DiBenedetto wasn’t removed.
“At some point, back before we took over the system, that information was not received for Peter DiBenedetto, so he was never removed from the system,” Lugar explained.
Lugar talked to the jury managers, who confirmed that DiBenedetto passed away, and he was removed from the system.
She said that, because he hadn’t been removed at the time of his death, DiBenedetto had been in the system since the last time he was summoned for jury duty, which was in 2002.
Despite the seemingly logical explanation of a clerical error, Sprague was also curious as to why the summons was sent to her address, considering she and DiBenedetto had not had the same last name since 1991 and he never lived at her address. In fact, her current home was not built until after DiBenedetto died.
“My home was built the same year that he died, and I wasn’t even in it,” said Sprague. “He died in March, I moved in October or November, and that was 14 years ago.”
The Clerk and Comptroller’s office reached out to the DMV to get clarification as to why and how Sprague’s address was pulled for DiBenedetto’s jury summons, but because his death was so many years ago, the DMV was unable to determine how that address was obtained and linked to him.
“As far as somebody getting a summons at a different address, I’ve never heard of that before,” Lugar said.
In an odd coincidence, Sprague discovered that someone else named Peter DiBenedetto lives in the same area of Boca Raton her brother lived in, and was concerned that the mistake could be a signal of a stolen identity.
Lugar insisted that was not the case, and that the jury duty summons was simply the byproduct of DiBenedetto not being removed from the system and that someone with the same name lived in the same area was coincidental.