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Man dies from freak fishing accident

BY MARC BEJA

July 30, 2008

A Roosevelt man died yesterday after a freak accident while on a fishing
outing with his family last week.

Jaime Chicas, 21, was fishing off a jetty at the west end of Jones Beach
on Friday when his 3-ounce lead sinker came out of the water and hit him
in the face and then lodged in his brain.

"Suddenly, we saw him laying on the rocks," said Jose Gonzalez, 30,
Chicas' brother-in-law. Gonzalez and his cousin, who both had been
fishing with Chicas, ran over to find Chicas bleeding from his head.

"We never could have imagined this," Gonzalez said through an interpreter.

The trio had gone fishing a few times before and visited the beach
often, Gonzalez said. While the sun set, Chicas kept fishing, as the
others began packing their belongings. As Gonzalez and his cousin walked
toward the beach, they heard Chicas make a whimpering noise behind them.

After looking at X-rays, doctors at Nassau University Medical Center,
where Chicas was taken, saw that the sinker of Chicas' fishing pole had
just missed his right eye and entered his head at the bridge in his
nose. The momentum of the weight continued across the middle of his
brain into the back left side of his head, where it stopped, neurologist
Imran Wahedna said.

"There was so much force that it kept going and it lodged through the
back of his head," Wahedna said of the lead sinker. "The trauma was
simply too severe."

Chicas was pronounced brain-dead at 2 p.m. yesterday, from severe head
trauma and herniation, Wahedna said.

Wahedna and New York Fishing Tackle Trade Association president Gene
Young all said they had never seen anything similar to Chicas' injury.

"This has to be a one-in-a-billion thing," Young said.

Chicas, a native of Lolotiquillo Morazán, El Salvador, had moved in with
his sister, Nohemy, 27, and Gonzalez last year.

On Sunday mornings, he played soccer at Cantiague Park in Hicksville,
where five men in the same soccer league were hit by lightning on
Sunday, Gonzalez said.

Chicas is also survived by his parents, Jose and Feliciana Chicas; his
wife, Fatima, and his 1-year-old daughter, who live in El Salvador; and
his brother, Julio Chicas, of Hempstead.

Chicas' family is trying to raise funds to send his body back to El
Salvador for burial.

Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.

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