A Villager arrested in February after a golf cart crash left her male companion with a head injury is now fighting access to her medical records by the prosecutor’s office.
Cynthia Devane Jaudon, 72, of the Village of Virginia Trace, was arrested Feb. 25 after the golf cart she was driving crashed into a tunnel wall in the area of County Road 466A and Morse Boulevard. She was arrested on a charge of driving under the influence.
Last week, Jaudon’s attorney, Gail Grossman, filed an objection to the prosecutor’s office’s efforts to obtain “her privileged medical records.”
At the time of her arrest, Jaudon told deputies she suffers from sciatica, which causes pain that radiates along the path of the sciatic nerve, which branches from your lower back through your hips and buttocks and down each leg. Typically, sciatica affects only one side of your body. Jaudon struggled through field sobriety exercises. She refused to provide a breath sample.
Jaudon remains free on bond and has pleaded not guilty in the case.
When Sumter County sheriff’s deputies arrived at the crash scene that night, EMS personnel were already treating a man “lying on the golf cart roadway, just outside the tunnel,” the report said. Jaudon said the man had been thrown from the golf cart when it crashed into the tunnel wall.
“EMS advised his right shoulder bone appeared fractured, one of his right-hand fingers was broken and had a head injury,” the deputy wrote in the arrest report.
The man was transported to Ocala Regional Medical Center as a trauma patient.
Witnesses who called 911 said Jaudon and the man both appeared to be intoxicated.
When deputies asked Jaudon for her driver’s license, she handed them her Villages ID. She said she had been heading home from Brownwood Paddock Square and the passenger “at the last minute” reminded her she needed to turn at the tunnel.