10 Years in Prison for Melvin Adona for Hit-and-Run Deaths of Jacqueline Martin, 50, and Georgette Fisher, 59

On January 14, 2023, Melvin Adona was driving back from a holiday party where he’d been drinking. It was after midnight. His wife was sleeping in the passenger seat. He was driving north on U.S. 1 through the heart of Bunnell, going around 70 in a 35, Flagler County Sheriff’s Deputy Cameron Punsky, who saw him drive by, estimated.

Jacqueline Martin, 50, Georgette Fisher, 59, and Philip McClure, 48, were crossing U.S. 1 right after leaving Crossroads Tavern. Adona never applied the brakes.

“I saw the truck collide with the three pedestrians, they all went airborne,” Punsky testified in court this afternoon.

Adona drove on, but not far. He hid at Terranova, the restaurant just north of there. He said he froze, though he called his son, who came to the scene and told authorities where his father was hiding.

By then Martin and Fisher were dead, and McClure, with 30 broken bones and two punctured lungs, was barely alive. Somehow he survived. Martin and Fisher were from palm Coast. McClure is from Bunnell.

Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols this afternoon sentenced Adona, 53, to 10 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation for the hit and run. She pronounced sentence after Adona had wept as he listened to families of the victims speak about their loss, and to his own family members, among them the younger brother who idolized him and his wife of 28 years who came to court today knowing she would leave without her husband.

Aaron Delgado, Adona’s attorney, said what Adona and his wife had said: he’d frozen, knowing he’d struck the three victims but unable to go to them to help them. What would have been a mere misdemeanor drunk driving charge with a maximum of a year at the county jail or, more likely, a year on probation, ended up being 10 years in prison, Delgado said.

“Some people freeze. People say that the people who freeze are cowards,” the judge said with unusual harshness. “Others rise to the occasion, and Deputy Punsky did just that, and likely, very likely, saved McClure’s life.” Punsky of course had not struck the three victims and is a trained deputy just as likely familiar with grisly shock, though his reaction was immediate and played a key role in the case, as did surveillance video that the judge watched outside the courtroom.

But Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark had described how Adona had hidden at Terranova, how his concerns were all about himself after the collision because he’d been drinking and didn’t want to let on, how he spoke out loud about how his life was over, how he was not so frozen as to not call his son.

Delgado, who knows subtle irony when he needs it, said it is easy after the fact to make judgments in an air conditioned courtroom, but no one knows how they’ll react in the moment. The same person may react courageously one time, and inexplicably the next. Adona had reacted inexplicably. “He could not bring himself to the scene and confront what happened, plain and simple,” Delgado said, speaking at times like a prosecutor.

The range Adona was facing after his plea to the charges was four to 10 years in prison. Delgado asked for something “closer to four.” Clark asked for the full 10. They both did so after the judge had pronounced sentence, overlooking the fact that the attorneys had not made their arguments yet. She reconvened to allow them to do so knowing what the sentence would be. That creates an opening for an appeal that would not have existed otherwise.

“I think that something like 10 years would be excessive in this case,” Delgado said, “not because human life is invaluable, not because people weren’t ripped from their loved ones, not because, as you pointed out, as the victims pointed out, his family has some ability to visit him and interact with him, but he’s not totally ripped from their world, as the decedents were here, not because of that, but because to incarcerate someone for a decade makes it almost impossible for them to re-enter into society, to rehabilitate themselves into society.”

Adona would punish himself for the rest of his life regardless, Delgado said. “He should be given the chance to show that he is deserving of some degree of second chance at some degree of step down punishment from the up-to-a-decade in prison. I think he should be given a chance effectively, to do the probation.”

Delgado’s rhetorical powers are difficult to dodge. But so are Clark’s, who can be withering in shorter bursts. “The actions of the defendant speak volumes,” she said. “I’m sure there’s remorse now, but at the time, all he thought was about himself.” He knew what he’d done at the party, he knew what he’d done in that collision, and he knew what he was doing, hiding. “That is what resonates,” Clark said.

The arguments did not change the judge’s mind. Nichols had also heard the testimony of members of the two families, and she had heard Adona’s own, including his apology to the families of the victims. “This happened because of my actions. I failed you,” he said. “I take full responsibility. In that moment, I froze. I did not do what I should have done. I had a responsibility to act, and I didn’t.”

Adona said: “I know your loved ones are not coming back, the hugs, the conversations, the laughter, those moments are gone because of what happened. I will carry this reality with me for the rest of my life.”

He spoke before 15 members of his family. The victims’ side had 18 people–separated, of course, by the center aisle–some weeping and at times sobbing throughout the sentencing hearing, and some likely thinking what the judge would later verbalize: that Adona still had a rest of a life to live, to think about these things, but Jacqueline Martin and Georgette Fisher did not, that Jacqueline’s two sons and three grandchildren (one of them is on the way) would not have her to “think about these things,” just as Fisher’s two adult children and a grandchild now in third grade would not have her, either.

“I just wish you could have stopped and rendered aid to them,” Jackie’s sister told the defendant on the stand. “All of that time you spent there worrying about being in trouble, maybe the help would have changed the outcome, like it’s been said. You’ve had two years since that night. In the same time, our family has had to bury a daughter, a mother, four months to the date later, my dad passed of cancer. He was actively passing when that happened to my sister. So now my mom has had to deal with both of these things. And yet, all I want you to know, Mr. Adona, is that God will forgive you if you allow Him into your heart.”

That’s how it was with the victims’ families: more forgiveness than bitterness, though when Philip McClure testified–the Philip McClure who was one of the victims, who survived the 30 broken bones and now has stage two cancer of the intestines and for whom “it’s a pain in the ass to get out of bed every day” or even sit where he sat, in the witness box, for more than 20 minutes–he was still in disbelief at Adona’s recklessness through Bunnell. He offered up the day’s most vivid metaphor about what had happened to him: “I mean, throw up a baseball bat, run it over and pick up all the pieces, see how you glue it back together, and see how effective it would be.”

He spoke with fondness about the two friends he lost, the shock of losing them as he did, and when the judge asked him what kind of sentence he would want for Adona, he said: “Well, respectfully,” he told the judge, “what’s this been going on now, two years, 47 days and so many hours? I’ve missed two birthdays of two of my good friends. I’m not going to go back to see their headstones anytime soon. I don’t get to spend Christmas with them. Not going to get a call from them say, hey, having a birthday party. Neither are their children or their grandchildren. I mean, they’re both grandparents. They both have children. He got to spend his last two birthdays at home, and that’s why I understand everybody on that side is upset because he’s going to be doing four years. But guess what? They’ll get to spend the fifth one with him.” He said he was being respectful, when he declined to say what else he wanted to express–words he apparently put to paper and sent the court. Words harsh enough to warrant his apology on the stand.

When he spoke, the judge had not yet handed down the sentence. Nichols took a break when the testimony was done, a reflection of how every judge has felt at sentencings of this sort. The dynamics are merciless, balanced justice elusive, because there is almost always an absence of malice in an act that looks impossibly malicious, and both sides are left suffering.

“When something like this happens, it doesn’t just affect the individual, people who are killed or greatly harmed. It affects their family members. It affects members of the community, the first responders, the defendant, the defendant’s family,” the judge said. “The ripple effect is tremendous.”

She believed Adona. He may have frozen. He may even have been a coward, though she did not explicitly say so, letting the implication speak for itself. “I absolutely believe Mr. Adona is remorseful,” the judge said. “however, two people are dead and one person miraculously survived. I do not know, sir, how you survived,” she said, addressing the third victim.

“I also want to thank the deputy who, after what he had just witnessed, had the ability to call for assistance and to quickly render aid, he was very understandably shaken by what he had seen,” the judge said.

Nevertheless: “The primary purpose of the sentencing statutes in the state of Florida is punishment,” Nichols said, before sentencing Adona to the 10 years in prison.

Disclosure: Aaron Delgado is a member of the Flagler Live Board of Directors and the company’s attorney. No conversations or contact took place between Delgado and the reporter before this article appeared; the reporter was not aware until this afternoon that Delgado represented Melvin Adona.