By Michael Mayo
Sun-Sentinel
BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. — If the miraculous recovery of Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Maury Hernandez were a movie, the ending would have Hernandez putting on his badge and holster and returning to his job as a street detective.
But this is real life, which means things aren’t so tidy. Two years after taking a bullet to the head during a traffic stop, Hernandez walked into a recent meeting at the Sheriff’s Office in uniform, and the reaction was discomfort.
Hernandez, 30, now confronts a tangle of insurance and pension issues. Instead of life-affirming triumph, there’s soul-deadening bureaucracy. He has a lawyer. There’s tension in the air.
“I’m not asking for a charity position,” Hernandez wrote by e-mail Monday. “If the sheriff didn’t really mean it when he said there would be something waiting for me then I just want him to tell me so. I will not have hard feelings.”
Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti said: “Emotions have overtaken everything.”
On this there’s agreement: Hernandez isn’t fit to perform his old job. His mobility is compromised, his left arm partly paralyzed. Basically, a return to a weapon-carrying law-enforcement job doesn’t appear possible.
During his rehabilitation, Hernandez got full pay through the county’s worker’s compensation system. But that’s about to lapse.
Lamberti said Hernandez has two options:
He can retire with a permanent disability pension from the state, which would pay him 65 percent of his salary for life, tax-free. The payments would start at $32,229 a year and rise with inflation. He’d also get lifelong health insurance.
He can take a civilian job with the Sheriff’s Office, something like an investigative aide. But that would mean he’d be disqualified from getting disability benefits related to the shooting in the future.
“It’s Maury’s decision, but we just want to make sure he fully understands the ramifications,” said Lamberti, who didn’t attend the Aug. 5 meeting.
“So far, all that has been offered is disability retirement, which is not a job,” Hernandez wrote Monday. I wanted to talk face-to-face, but his attorney wouldn’t allow it.
“I loved working at the BSO, and my heart is there,” Hernandez wrote. “It’s a shame the way things are right now, but there is too much positive history and too many great friends there for me to say that my feelings have soured.”
Lamberti said he wouldn’t want Hernandez to return to the Sheriff’s Office, get injured because of his condition and not be entitled to benefits. The sheriff said the meeting was meant to be a starting point, not an ultimatum.
“We want what’s best for Maury,” Lamberti said.
Lance Block, Hernandez’s attorney, called the Aug. 5 session “a sales meeting to get him to take the disability option.”
If Hernandez took the disability pension, Lamberti said he could remain involved with the Sheriff’s Office as a motivational speaker or crisis-team volunteer. “Look, the guy is a true inspiration,” Lamberti said.
Lamberti knows that Hernandez makes for the ultimate sympathetic figure, and this is a public-relations fight he can’t win.
But it’s not as if Hernandez is the first to get wounded or disabled on the job. If Lamberti makes an exception to let Hernandez keep his position, then lawsuits from other disabled deputies could follow.
Hernandez’s shooter, David Maldonado, is now serving a life sentence.
A shame that Hernandez, as the victim, might also have to serve a life sentence, losing the job he loves.
“I don’t know what my next step will be,” Hernandez wrote.
Not exactly a Hollywood ending. But it could have been a whole lot worse.
Copyright 2009 Sun-Sentinel