FORT LAUDERDALE &mash; Betsie Gallardo may die in a Broward County prison this Christmas, her 27-year-old body ravaged by stage four cancer, her family unable to take her home to Indiana to live out her final days, her life ending as it began -- with little hope.
"She's going to die alone in some prison hospital in the state of Florida,'' said Jessica Bussert, who drove to Pembroke Pines from Indiana this week to be with her daughter.
Gallardo is serving a five-year sentence at Broward Correctional Institution for biting and kicking a Collier County sheriff's deputy.
Now her family fears Gallardo will die of cancer in jail without a loved one to hold her hand or hear her final words.
How Gallardo arrived at that point is a story that begins in Cité Soleil, an impoverished and populous neighborhood of Haiti's capital, where Gallardo was born HIV positive and raised as an orphan.
Subjected to sexual abuse, neglect and starvation, Gallardo and her younger sister, Germaine, were sickly and near death when an American couple on a missionary trip from Indiana met them in 1993.
Joshua and Sharon Bussert adopted the girls, and took them home to Lafayette, Ind., raising them along with their own biological children and several other adopted children. Years later, Joshua had a sex-change operation and is now Jessica.
Despite her difficult early years, with three meals a day and access to HIV-inhibiting drugs that can be hard to find in Haiti, Gallardo blossomed into a 5-foot 2-inch, 116-pound ballet dancer who graduated from high school with her peers, Jessica Bussert said.
"The drugs she got on were miracles,'' Bussert said. ``Her T-cell count went through the roof, and her viral load went through the floor, and she got healthy.''
But after high school, Gallardo grew distant and troubled. She bore two children, but Indiana officials removed them from her care, Bussert said.
Her marriage failed. She left for South Florida to be nearer to a half-brother in Naples and a Haitian community where she hoped to belong.
"She was involved in one of the big churches down here. She was active in her faith,'' said Jessica Bussert, who along with Sharon Bussert and Germaine plan to spend Christmas at a Pompano Beach motel, waiting to take Gallardo home.
"The fact of the matter is my kid's not a perfect kid,'' Jessica Bussert said. ``But you know, if you look at her life, it's amazing that she's gotten as far as she has.''
The criminal charges came in August 2008 when Gallardo was arrested in Naples on a charge of child neglect. She had left her boyfriend's child home alone for more than 30 minutes and driven his car into a ditch after taking Xanax, a prescription drug for anxiety.
According to the police report, Gallardo was taken to the Naples Jail where she bit one deputy on the forearm and wrist and kicked another in the knee as they tried to restrain her.
The child neglect charges were later dropped, but Gallardo was convicted of battery on a law enforcement officer, and resisting arrest with violence. She was sentenced to five years in prison -- a term that critics contend is unfair.
"She's really serving most of that five years entirely for stigma,'' said Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy, a legal advocacy group for people with HIV.
Florida courts traditionally have treated HIV-related battery cases very seriously, particularly when the victim is a law enforcement officer, said Alvin Entin, a Fort Lauderdale criminal defense attorney.
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