PRISON TIME

Judge Shreds Maskless Florida Woman Who Coughed on Cancer Patient

Debra Hunter was sentenced to 30 days in jail and was ordered to reimburse the cost of her victim’s COVID test.

A judge has sent a Florida woman to jail after she was filmed coughing on a cancer patient during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic last summer. Debra Hunter was given a 30-day sentence, fined $500 fine, and ordered to serve six months on probation dealing with anger management. She will also have to compensate her victim, mom-of-ten Heather Sprague, for the cost of her COVID-19 test. After she got in an argument with Sprague, who has a brain tumor, Hunter was filmed saying: “I think I’ll get real close to you and cough on you... How’s that?” Luckily, Sprague ended up testing negative.

Hunter expressed remorse and said her children were now “permanently scarred” but Duval County Court Judge James Ruth was having none of it. “Her children didn’t create this problem and her husband didn’t, and she talked about how it changed her world and she was getting nastygrams on Facebook and things of that nature and they can’t go to their country club or wherever,” Ruth said. “But I have yet to see any expression, or a significant expression on her regret about the impact it had on the victim in this case.”