By Brian Zanzonico
For those stories, this column will serve as a way to look back at the last 12 months.
Update on Vito's battle
The story that illicited the biggest response from readers was about Vito Valenti, an Elmont man who volunteered at the World Trade Center site in the days after the attacks of 9/11, grew sick and was eventually diagnosed as having pulmonary fibrosis, scarring of the lungs, which, without a double lung transplant, is a death sentence. Valenti had no health insurance, because officials from his union, Local 372, told him they had no documentation of 40-plus hours he said he spent at ground zero. It ran out before he completed a series of tests that would have put him on the lung transplant list. With no health coverage, he was living on oxygen donated by a company.
That was, until a judge ruled changes to a law last Wednesday that Valenti, and others suffering with health effects from working at ground zero, are now eligible for health care. With that news, it looks as though 2007 will get off on a positive note.
Tragedies mar summer
What is supposed to be one of the happiest time's of a high school student's life turned tragic as popular Floral Park High School senior Kevin McArthur, 18, was killed along with Michael Richardson, 20; Max Lesly-Auguste, 19 and Nyana Adingupu, 16, when Auguste crashed his 1998 Toyota Avalon on Plainfield Avenue after midnight June 14 on the way home from a popular pool hall in New Hyde Park Road. One of the emergency responders to the accident, McArthur's fellow Floral Park senior Kevin Getschel, who suffered his whole life from heart ailments, died in his sleep a day after the fatal crash. Classmates said Getschel organized the makeshift memorial for the crash victims.
Just weeks later on July 18, Monsignor William Costello, a former St. Catherine of Sienna pastor, was struck and killed by an alleged drunk driver while walking near his sister's house in the Hampton. Karen Fisher, 42, was charged with 10 crimes, including manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving, but Suffolk County D.A. Thomas Spota decided not to seek a murder charge, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years to life. The penalty for manslaughter is 5 to 15 years.
'Fake cop' guilty of murder
Reginald Gousse was found guilty of the 2005 murder of Garden City South father of three James Gottlieb on March 22 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Gousse, a career criminal, posed as a police officer and pulled over Gottlieb, who worked at a bank, and shot and killed him on a Franklin Square street.
