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ST. GEORGE ISLAND - The case of the Rev. Joseph Donick Jr., a pastor in the Baltimore-Washington Conference who died Oct. 8, after a fall, has been resolved.

Donick, the part-time pastor of St. George Island UMC, fell down his porch steps during an altercation with a neighbor resulting from a long-standing dispute. He died shortly after from a heart attack, according to the medical authorities called to the scene.

A Circuit Court judge ruled June 6 that a St. Mary?s County man, Robert W. Hendrix, was guilty of second-degree assault and trespassing, following a heated argument the two men had over access to a boat ramp in Scotland Beach, where Donick lived. Hendrix was given a four-year suspended sentence and five years of unsupervised probation, according to the Washington Post.

The case was moved from St. Mary?s County, where Donick was a former county employee, to Calvert County. Judge Warren J. King commented, 'We all do things in our life we wish we hadn?t done. Generally, these things don?t have the consequences we have here. The sad thing is this whole thing could?ve been avoided.'