Catalani

RIVERVIEW - The road home had always tested Joseph J. Catalani's nerves.

Riverview felt eerily familiar, like a canvas for a nightmare.

Then, Feb. 9, 1997, Catalani killed someone by accident. His courage failed. He fled.

``I was raised a Catholic,'' says the 45-year-old father of three, who works for a beer distributor.

``That's the one commandment you hope never to cross.

``But it wasn't a kill. It was an accident.''

Catalani had left an Ice Palace hockey game with Brian Lynch, a friend who drove up from Fort Myers in a Ford Explorer. They stopped at a pub in Ybor City. They both drank but decided Catalani should drive.

The Explorer rumbled down U.S. 41, stereo blasting.

Enter David ``Benny'' Hicks, a Gibsonton roofer.

Hicks walked most places. He'd lost his license for driving drunk. Deputies caught him driving, anyway, and he'd been to jail a few times, but that night, he was on foot.

``He was a free-spirited person,'' says his father. ``Everyone seemed to be his friend.''

It was 1:15 a.m. when Benny Hicks' desire for cigarettes collided with a 5,360-pound Explorer.

He stepped across southbound lanes of U.S. 41.

His body crumpled the hood and cracked the driver's side windshield. He rode the hood for 123 feet until Catalani hit the brakes, hurling Hicks onto the asphalt.

Hicks had enough alcohol in his blood to put three men in jail for drunk driving.

	Hicks

``He was one of God's children,'' Catalani says. ``It doesn't make it easier, but it relieves a little burden that he staggered onto the road.''

Catalani's blood alcohol wasn't so easy to gauge.

Because he fled, deputies couldn't get a blood sample for two hours: It was .05. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement could only guess that Catalani's crash-time blood alcohol ranged from .074 (legal) to .110 (illegal).

He had a pretty good driving record.

Had he stayed, he might have avoided criminal charges.

He says he feared for his safety.

``We did pull over, stop and look around, and in fact, did some yelling,'' Catalani says. ``But a crazy drunk man pulled behind us and thought we threw something at his car. I said, 'No, something hit us too.'

``We got in the car, drove to the house and immediately called police.''

Deputies don't recall the urgency.

Minutes after the crash, blue lights tailed the Explorer. A trooper had noticed a bad headlight. Catalani and Lynch greeted the trooper behind their vehicle. He didn't see the buckled hood.

Neither man brought up the crash.

``It's not my vehicle,'' Catalani reportedly told the trooper.

It was a leased company car. Lynch wasn't supposed to let anyone else drive. Catalani figured it was up to Lynch to tell the trooper what had happened, he says.

But Catalani paid the price.

Later that night, deputies arrested him, charging him with leaving the scene of a fatal crash. Within a week, the investigator and prosecutor added charges of DUI manslaughter and vehicular homicide.

``Everything went downhill,'' Catalani says. ``I was in disbelief. All of a sudden, it was, `Do you know you have to go for blood alcohol test?'

``I've had one traffic ticket. I've never had an accident. I drive defensively as heck. And it wasn't my car. When you're driving somebody else's car, you're even more aware.

``The police, they think you're automatically guilty.

``I'm the one guy that never ever, gets drunk. I just don't do that.''

Investigators say he drove 68 miles per hour in a zone posted 50.

He says he drove 45 to 50 miles per hour.

In retrospect, he'd do things differently.

``Under no circumstances do you ever leave that scene,'' he says. ``I don't care if you think your life's in danger.''

He pleaded no contest to leaving the scene of a fatal crash.

Prosecutors dropped the other two charges.

Judge Cynthia Holloway sentenced him to eight weekends in jail, five years probation and 50 hours community service.

The judge withheld adjudication. He kept his driver's license.

``They let him off easy as far as I'm concerned,'' says Hicks' father, Frank Hicks.

Catalani doesn't view it as easy.

In his nightmares, he sees a face in the windshield.

``There's not a day goes by I don't think about it,'' he says. ``Not a day I don't say a prayer. I go from anger toward him to praying for him.

``It never stops. I should go get counseling, I guess, but it's cost me so much money already.

``My kids' college funds are gone.

``All of our retirement money.''

He shakes driving past Orient Road, knowing it leads to a jail, he says.

``I was absolutely a basket case. I had never been in jail. Not only did I find out a man's life was gone, but I was in jail.''

There's also the embarrassment.

He hopes people forget.

``It's changed the way I live,'' he says. ``Everything I do. I don't like to drive at night anymore. You second guess everything.

``A quiet, peaceful night is all it was.

``It was the worst night of my life.''