Local Illegal Immigrant Outrage

Here's an article from the Salem Evening News in Massachusetts. (www.salemnews.com)

An illegal immigrant from Brazil plowed into a Salem police officer doing a road detail. She then lied about her identity. She's getting a little jail sentence, but hardly enough. The officer may never be able to return to his job. It is an invasion, as Michelle Malkin says. Go to the website to find the picture and article.

Illegal immigrant imprisoned for running down patrolman

Nilma Goncalves Figueiredo,23, sits with a Portuguese interpreter appointed by the court during her court session Monday afternoon before Judge Santo Ruma. Michael Shea and his wife Melissa are in the background Photo by Jim Daly/Salem News.


By Julie Manganis
Staff writer

PEABODY — An illegal immigrant from Brazil was sentenced to six months in jail yesterday for causing an accident that seriously injured a Salem patrolman and then giving police a false name.

But before she was sentenced, Nilma Goncalves Figueiredo, 23, apologized in court to the man she ran down.

"I'm feeling very badly," she said, through a Portuguese interpreter, "because I caused these injuries to this officer. I want him to forgive me."

"I'm very glad you said that," Peabody District Court Judge Santo Ruma responded. "You almost took a man's life."

Whether her victim, veteran Salem police officer Michael Shea, will forgive her is a question he would not answer yesterday afternoon, as he avoided reporters waiting to speak with him after Figueiredo's plea hearing.

On the evening of April 13, Shea was working a detail at a gas leak on Tremont Street in downtown Peabody. As he directed traffic around two Keyspan trucks, Figueiredo clipped him with the right side of the Honda Accord she was driving.

The impact knocked Shea off his feet and onto the hood of the sedan. He hit the back of his head against the windshield and was then thrown from the car onto the pavement, prosecutor William Melkonian said.

A state police accident-reconstruction team concluded that Figueiredo was driving between 17 and 20 mph, well below the 30 mph speed limit. She simply wasn't paying attention, Melkonian said.

After the accident, Shea was flown to a Boston hospital where he was put into a medically induced coma because of swelling in his brain. While he has regained his mental abilities, he still suffers headaches and dizziness, the prosecutor said.

And his leg was badly damaged. Doctors had to insert a metal plate and eight titanium screws in his leg to repair it. Melkonian said the plate and screws will be permanent. It's still unclear whether he will ever return to the police force, a job Shea, 39, held for 18 years.

Shea did not speak at all during yesterday's hearing.

Figueiredo has formally been deported, but immigration officials have promised prosecutors they will not put her on a plane to Brazil until she completes her sentence, which will be served at Framingham State Prison.

She was given credit for 27 days she was held in jail before her bail was posted, and could also receive credit at the jail that could further reduce her time behind bars. She will be deported upon her release.

'Hoping to help her family'

It's not the outcome she was hoping for when she crossed the border between Mexico and Texas back on April 4, and then — after being released by the Border Patrol with an order to leave the country within 30 days — took a bus to Boston.

On the night of the accident, her lawyer said, she had been allowed by her passenger to drive the car, which was owned by a Salem woman, Lizette Faria. Figueiredo was heading to Salem to pick up a book that would help her learn English, the lawyer said.

Shea has filed a civil lawsuit against both Figueiredo and Faria.

"She had hoped to find the American dream and to be able to help her family," said defense lawyer Mark Gallant. Her sister suffers from a club foot, and Figueiredo told him she wanted to make money to help pay for medical treatment.

But Figueiredo appears to have had another reason for coming here, according to Danielli Limos, a Brazilian journalist who has been covering the case for a Portuguese-language newspaper, O Jornal.

A young man named Patricio, who was Figueiredo's boyfriend in Brazil, is in the United States on a work visa, a document Figueiredo was unable to obtain herself. Patricio was in court Friday and again yesterday for Figueiredo's hearing. During the hearing, he was crying.

Melkonian had urged the judge to send Figueiredo to jail for eight months — six months for the crash and another two months for giving police the false name of Leila Lopes and saying she was just 17.

Gallant, meanwhile, urged the judge to impose a sentence of time served, meaning she would have been sent back to Brazil with no further jail time.

Ruma imposed a sentence of four months for driving to endanger charge and another two months for giving a false name.