Hit-and-run victim 'was turning his life around'

The belongings outside an Elaine Drive address betray the troubled life that Daniel Fanuele was trying to fix on the night he was killed, police said, by a hit-and-run driver as he walked home from a Sayville church.

Among Fanuele's possessions that his friends piled curbside Thursday: Papers from a local addiction facility, and other documents related to what his friends said was a longtime battle with drugs and alcohol.

"The guy had a good heart and all but . . . the disease of addiction" had knocked him down time and again before his latest efforts to clean up, said one of the friends, Michael Kline, who met Fanuele decades ago at Alcoholics Anonymous. Kline said he was letting his longtime friend stay with him in a spare room down the street from New Life Community Church on Lakeland Avenue.

Suffolk police say Fanuele, 42, was killed Tuesday night when a car struck him on Lakeland Avenue and the driver then fled.

"He was turning his life around in the past five weeks, definitely," the church secretary, Eileen Heintz, said yesterday.

Doreen Faracco, the mother of Fanuele's son, said she'd recently seen signs Fanuele was headed in the right direction.

"This time around, believe it or not, I had faith that he was going to make it and obviously I was wrong," she said.

Car fragments recovered at the scene led detectives to suspect that the car was a blue-green Toyota Camry with possible damage to its front bumper and grille, said Det. Sgt. Alan Feinstein of the Patchogue-based Fifth Squad.

Outside the church, mourners had left a makeshift memorial of flowers and a wooden cross fashioned from Home Depot paint sticks.

The evening of the crash, Fanuele had gone to a men's fellowship dinner at New Life Community, the Protestant Reformed church where he'd shared soda, pizza and prayer, Heintz said.

"He just purchased a new Bible," she said.

And he had a new job: The faithful whom Fanuele met at New Life Community helped him get construction work.

Fanuele's wake and funeral are today at Powell Funeral Home in Amityville. The wake will be from 2 to 4:30 p.m. and 7 to 9:30 p.m. with a prayer service set for 8 p.m.

"The men were devastated. They were sitting here having dinner with him and then he was gone," Heintz said.

At the home where Fanuele had been staying, his friends were still coping with his loss.

One of the items Kline didn't discard was a handwritten "Gratitude List" Fanuele penned last week on loose-leaf.

"I am grateful that my son is healthy and that he is in my life," he had written. At the end of the list, he had added, "I am grateful for my present freedom."