After fatal street racing crash, no justice for Pinellas family

A few days before Thanksgiving in 2018, a Largo family was torn apart when a speeding pickup driver crashed into a car, seriously injuring the family’s matriarch and killing her granddaughter.

Hailey Mullen, 20, was studying to be a special education teacher when she died. Her grandmother, Ann Marie DeSocio, suffered a severe brain injury that medical examiners say caused her death three years later.

Witnesses said Luciano Gomes, a citrus company owner living in Redington Beach, had been racing another motorist in his truck. The pickup’s data recorder showed he hit DeSocio’s car at 89 mph in a 40-mph zone.

Yet more than five years later, after several delays in his prosecution, Gomes appears to have somehow vanished by fleeing the country.

In the wake of the fugitive’s flight, family members are reeling from the destruction left behind, denied closure that is long past due.

“I’m fighting for justice,” Mullen’s aunt, Danielle DeSocio, told a Pinellas judge last July. “He has no idea what he has made my life, but I need this to end.”

The beginning of a family’s tragedy

Mullen’s class let out early that day.

She just started a program through Florida State University focusing on students with visual disabilities and took classes at St. Petersburg College.

Mullen often stayed in Largo with her grandparents, Paul and Ann Marie DeSocio. It was a shorter commute and she could help her grandmother, who broke her hip the previous year.

She looked forward to celebrating Thanksgiving in three days. She won a free dinner from Walmart and planned to take care of everything.

Mullen called home and asked if someone could get her. Her grandfather was still eating, so her grandmother went instead. It was a 10-minute drive each way.

Meanwhile, Gomes drove his Ford Raptor home from work. The Florida Highway Patrol would later say he raced a green truck at speeds up to 97 mph. The trucks whipped around a curve on 102nd Avenue in the Largo area.

Gomes smashed into the passenger side of DeSocio’s car. His truck went flying. Witnesses said it flipped about five times, coming to rest 200 feet from the crash. The other truck driver sped away and was never identified.

John Pfeifle, a neighbor, heard a loud noise behind his car. When he checked his mirror, Gomes’ truck was in mid-air. He walked over to find it upright. “Didn’t even break the windshield,” Pfeifle said.

But DeSocio’s Lexus was unrecognizable. “As hard as he hit that thing, it just demolished it,” he said. The collision peeled the car open “like a can,” according to the crash report.

As the minutes ticked by, and the women didn’t come home, Paul DeSocio worried. He called his granddaughter. No response.

He drove to the intersection out of the subdivision and found devastation. He pulled to the side of the road. He knew.

The Lexus sat crumpled in the middle of the road, surrounded by emergency vehicles. The passenger side was a wreck of twisted metal.

Farther off was the battered Ford Raptor. Gomes was in a daze.

Danielle DeSocio’s phone rang at dinner with her kids. It was her dad. He told her that her mother was in a car crash with Mullen and had to be resuscitated. She was now in the hospital.

“I’m just standing there in shock,” the younger DeSocio said. “He’s telling me where my mom is, and he’s not saying anything about my niece.”

Her children, still in elementary school, stared up at her from the table.

“So where’s Hailey?” she asked.

Seeking justice

The Florida Highway Patrol concluded its investigation in December 2019, more than a year after the crash and just as the first cases of COVID-19 emerged. The pandemic delayed prosecutors filing charges until the summer of 2020, according to Highway Patrol spokesperson Sgt. Steve Gaskins.

Gomes was charged that August – nearly two years after the crash – with street racing, vehicular homicide and reckless driving leading to serious injury.

He was arrested later that month but posted $41,000 bail and was released from jail that day.

The victims’ family had by then settled a civil case against Gomes earlier that year for $200,000.

Mullen’s parents saw $50,000 of that, and the DeSocios $20,000. That was still better than Gomes’ initial offer, Danielle DeSocio noted: $20,000 total.

Through that time, Ann Marie DeSocio held on.

Her husband brought her home in September 2019. He dedicated himself to her recovery.

Brain damage left her with memory problems. To spare her from reliving her grief, the family stowed away framed photos of her granddaughter and closed her room.

Paul DeSocio lost weight and felt constant stress over his wife’s health. He was terrified of her returning to the hospital as news reports swelled with stories of emergency rooms ravaged by the pandemic.

Ann Marie DeSocio made a stunning recovery — healing from two collapsed lungs, a brain bleed and a fractured hip and ribs.

In October 2021, Paul DeSocio died of heart failure.

Due to her brain injury, Ann Marie DeSocio never fully regained her ability to swallow. Soon after her husband died, she fell ill with pneumonia — brought on by yogurt she choked on, trapping fluid in her lungs.

She listened to Elvis in her final days sitting in the living room, freshly decorated for Christmas, and gazing at the lights on the tree. She died on Dec. 14, 2021, the day before her 78th birthday.

‘This is torture’

The first time Danielle DeSocio saw Gomes in court, she screamed in his face.

It was February 2022, more than three years after the crash. Gomes showed up in jeans and a blazer, his hair freshly cut.

“That was my mother and niece,” she told him, catching him in the courtroom hallway.

“Oh yeah?” he said.

Gomes was charged with a second vehicular homicide count after Ann Marie DeSocio’s death. He faced up to about 18 years in prison.

The pre-trial hearings dragged on — 13 over three years — in part to allow Gomes to get his business affairs in order, according to court transcripts.

“Coming here, having to relive everything over and over, every time pre-trial after pre-trial — I mean, this is torture,” Danielle DeSocio told a judge last year.

Gomes wrote an apology letter, but DeSocio didn’t find out about it until a prosecutor read it to her over the phone.

While DeSocio’s family unraveled, Gomes sold off his assets.

He sold his Redington Beach home for nearly $1.6 million in May 2021, a Zillow listing showed. An import-export company opened up later that year under the name of Gomes’ wife, Anne Deuster, allowing him to travel in and out of the country on business. In 2022, Gomes also registered his citrus company, Quattro Citrus, under his wife’s name, according to Florida business records.

In September 2023, Gomes failed to appear in court. It was also when he sold his citrus processing plant in Largo, according to Nicole Santos, an employee with the new plant.

During that time, attorneys for Gomes and the state were negotiating a plea deal. He offered to pay $100,000 in restitution over 10 years in exchange for no time served — a proposal that was flatly rejected.

On Aug. 16, Gomes’ attorney requested he be released from his bail obligations. The company that issued Gomes’ $41,000 bond was under new ownership and could no longer cover it.

Judge Chris Helinger granted the motion to release Gomes from his bond that day, according to a transcript of the hearing. Gomes’ bond, set to expire on Aug. 20, was discharged along with the prospect of a bondsman hunting him down should he flee.

Gomes would turn over his passport and get a GPS tracker the day after the bond’s expiration, his attorney, David Parry, told the court. There was nothing to worry about, Parry said — he had cooperated for years.

“He’s never had any issue before,” Parry said. “He’s not going to have it now.”

Waiting for ‘karma’

DeSocio came to court on Sept. 13 hoping to see Gomes sent to prison. It was the day he was to plead guilty.

Instead, she found an empty courtroom. Her sister and brother-in-law, Mullen’s parents, were the only ones there.

She learned that Gomes didn’t turn in his passport or report to get a GPS monitor. The court issued a warrant for his arrest, but by then, he could have been out of the country.

DeSocio said the family suspected Gomes was a flight risk from the beginning due to his wealth.

“They should have known he would run,” said Lisa Mullen, who suffered a heart attack and brain hemorrhage soon after her daughter’s death. “We need some justice. My daughter was in her prime. She was making something of herself.”

DeSocio said a prosecutor told her Gomes is believed to have fled to Brazil, his country of birth.

In the months since his disappearance, Gomes, 59, has been active on Facebook, mostly posting about Brazilian politics — sharing election fraud claims and mocking President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Gomes and his attorney did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls seeking comment.

A Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office detective told DeSocio in October he would meet with the U.S. Marshal’s Office to discuss Gomes’ potential extradition. She hasn’t heard anything since.

A U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson declined comment citing a policy against discussing extradition requests or confirming their existence.

If Gomes is in Brazil, prosecuting him will be challenging. Brazil recognizes birthright citizenship and has a blanket policy against extraditing citizens. He would need to leave the country to be apprehended.

That justice for the family was at first delayed, and now appears to be completely denied, is cruel anguish for DeSocio.

“We’re still trying to pull ourselves out of the hole we’ve been put into by him,” she said. “I can’t wait for him to get his karma.”