BEVERLY — Thomas Tester spent nearly seven years behind bars for a drunken-driving crash in 2000 that killed his passenger and led to serious injuries to two people who tried to help the victim and suffered electrical shocks.

Now, he's back in custody, after being charged in Maine with drunken driving, his fifth such offense.

It's an arrest that the mother of his victim once predicted would happen.

"My concern is that he's going to get out and do it again," Joanne Allie said during Tester's sentencing eight years ago. She is the mother of Nelson "Nicky" Ramos, the man killed in the 2000 crash.

"I just knew it would happen," she said yesterday after learning of the new arrest. "Unbelievable."

Tester, 38, who was living in Lynn after he got out of prison, was ordered by a Salem Superior Court judge yesterday to serve 18 months in the house of correction, the balance of two so-called "split" sentences he also received during his 2001 sentencing.

"I just want to say I take my drinking problem serious, and I just want to apologize," Tester told Judge Timothy Feeley during a probation violation hearing yesterday.

In the early morning hours of Oct. 4, 2000, Tester, whose license had already been revoked for three prior drunken-driving convictions, was at the wheel of a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass, with his friend Nelson Ramos, 32, of Salem in the passenger seat.

Tester crashed into a utility pole on Bridge Street in Beverly, snapping the pole and sending live electrical wires to the street.

As Ramos lay dying, Tester ran away and hid in a backyard, where he was found a short time later.

Meanwhile, a nurse and a schoolteacher who lived nearby ran to help Ramos. They both received severe electrical shocks from the wires.

Jim Webb, the teacher, would end up spending weeks in the hospital with serious burns and brain injuries and underwent lengthy rehabilitation afterward. He was not able to teach after that.

Lynda Monteith, the nurse, suffered injuries that led her to drop out of a graduate nursing program.

The following year, Tester was sentenced to six to seven years in state prison, after pleading guilty to vehicular homicide while driving drunk. He received concurrent 21âÑ2-year jail terms on charges of drunken driving, leaving the scene of a personal injury accident and driving after license revocation as a habitual offender. Part of that time was suspended, however, so that he would have the threat of more jail time hanging over his head while he was on probation for six years.

During the sentencing hearing in 2001, Judge Isaac Borenstein had planned to impose just three years of probation after Tester was released from prison. But after hearing from Ramos' mother, he doubled the length of probation to six years.

Tester was still on probation when he was arrested on the evening of Sept. 25 by Maine state police in York County. According to the notice of violation, another driver saw him driving erratically and called police.

Those charges are still pending in Maine, where Tester was released on bail and hasn't yet been arraigned in the case.

But when his probation officer, Jeff January, learned of the arrest last month, he immediately filed a request to revoke Tester's probation and send him to jail.

Tester admitted yesterday to violating his probation by leaving the state without permission. He did not admit to driving drunk again.

Allie, meanwhile, said she will never get over the loss.

"Nicky was a good, straight-up person," she said. "It hurts.

"He died in the street because that little weasel ran away and hid behind a house."