Well, 2017 is officially halfway over — and when it comes to crime news, Miami always crams more insanity into six months than most cities do in a year. This year has been no different: We’ve been subjected to a handful of criminal plots that could each form the basis of a true-crime Netflix series.
Across the nation, voters have asked for civilian-led police advisory panels, which review complaints about police separately from departments themselves. There’s a simple reason: Internal affairs officers often act to shield problem cops from discipline, while civilian-led panels can act independently to weed out bad cops.
Last summer, the Broward Sheriff’s deputy who’d killed Jermaine McBean — a computer tech who was carrying an unloaded air rifle — tried something that had never been done before in Florida: He asked for a Stand Your Ground hearing. The bet paid off. In late July, a Broward circuit judge dismissed the manslaughter charge, leading to protests and pushback.
Two men casually wandered through Dolphin Mall earlier this month, past the teenage shoppers and kiosks hawking watches, and headed for a quiet bathroom. One man gripped an envelope stuffed with $10,000 in cash. The other waited for a handoff in a stall. And lurking in disguise nearby, federal agents watched it all go down.
While the Brewers walloped the Marlins on a steamy June evening, a Miami Police officer working crowd control outside the team’s Little Havana stadium pulled over a speeding silver Pontiac. The cop soon realized that the driver, 32-year-old Emmanuel Reyes, was wanted for previous traffic offenses.
Late last year, as he served a life sentence in prison, Ernesto Behrens received a notice informing him of problems discovered at the crime lab that had examined DNA in his case. Behrens, who was convicted of armed sexual battery in Broward County in 2000, immediately filed a flurry of motions asking for the evidence to be reviewed.
On Wednesday, a small group of black-rights activists gathered outside city hall in Hollywood, Florida to ask that the city to stop honoring three Confederate Generals — Robert E. Lee, John Hood, and Nathan Bedford Forrest — with named streets. Forrest, in addition to being a general in the army…
Somewhere across the mystical river Acheron, the River of Woe, deep down in the darkest pits of the Malebolge, the undead servants of Hell are picking open a new prison in Cocytus, the frozen lake where God has permanently trapped Satan in the Homeric underworld. They await the arrival of a new Prince of Darkness, a Bringer of Sadness, a Miami man named Adrian Abramovich, who is accused of making 96 million illegal telemarketing robocalls in just three months…
A group of racial justice advocates gathered outside Hollywood, Florida’s city hall yesterday with a simple request: Change the names of streets honoring Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee, John Bell Hood, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was also the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Fritz Severe’s family believes police had no need to shoot him dead June 11, 2015. Severe was homeless, unarmed, and not posing much of a threat to anyone. He was standing in a park outside the Culmer/Overtown Branch Library and holding a three-foot-long metal pipe. According to the Miami Herald, a park worker called 911 to complain that Severe might have been bothering nearby children attending summer camp. But other witnesses said Severe was in the park every day and always carried his “little stick.”
Vagner Dapresa walked into the West Flagler convenience mart looking for justice. He’d been pumping gas the night before when another customer had shouted at him: “You’ve been looking at me a lot — and I don’t like faggots looking at me.” The remark stung Dapresa, a 31-year-old genderqueer Cuban-American…
In Nigeria, Dammy Krane is a major pop star whose silky-voiced party anthems like “Izzue” regularly hit the million-view mark on YouTube. Onscreen, Krane lives a hip-hop baller life of expansive mansions full of beautiful women and luxury cars.
In 2007, a jury convicted Liberty City native Harrel Braddy of kidnapping a 5-year-old and leaving her to die on the side of Interstate 75, where she was eaten alive by alligators. Eleven jurors believed Braddy should be put to death, but one disagreed. Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court vacated Braddy’s death sentence, calling it unconstitutional under a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision that invalidated the state’s sentencing practices.
If the Miami-Dade County Commission approves an upcoming funding request from Miami-Dade Police next month, the amount of money county police spend on guns, ammo, and body armor will have jumped from $6.8 million to $24 million — nearly quadrupling — in just a year.
The North Miami Police Department is in a state of disarray. One of its officers, Jonathan Aledda, recently became the first Miami-area cop in 24 years to be charged for an on-duty shooting after Aledda’s gunfire hit Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black behavioral therapist, in the leg while he was…
For years, the graying, muscular teacher with a bright tattoo of Buddha inked across his back has been a sought-after yoga guru in South Florida. Every weekend, dozens of students from Miami to Palm Beach have gathered at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach for classes by the man called Yoga Fox, who boasted of crafting his own style of yoga — complete with live harmonium playing — after years of intense study.
Lawrence McCoy, a 29-year-old semihomeless man, was shot dead by Miami Beach Police Officer Adam Tavss in 2009. In 2011, a lawyer for McCoy’s family, Gregory Samms, sued the City of Miami Beach for wrongful death and claims McCoy was unarmed when he was shot. But the case remains open to this day. Once or twice a year, Samms drives to the Miami-Dade County Courthouse and files a motion to prevent the case from getting dismissed. But he says he can’t do much more.
When Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators began probing North Miami Police’s disastrous shooting of Charles Kinsey — an unarmed behavioral specialist trying to help a patient — Chief Gary Eugene described a force in turmoil and torn apart by infighting.
Thirty years ago this November, federal agents unsealed a litany of indictments against arguably the most famous drug traffickers in world history: The Medellín Cartel, led by the infamous drug-importing Ochoa crime family and its accomplice, Pablo Escobar. The indictments were billed as the end of Miami’s era of drug-riddled violence. In 1986, crime had skyrocketed to unforeseen levels: There were 12,000 incidents per every 100,000 people. (Turns out arresting Escobar didn’t solve the city’s problems. The crime rate jumped to 13,500 by 1989.)
Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis and a friend, Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, had just finished a practice with the Republican congressional baseball team early this morning when they had an odd encounter with a man in the parking lot outside a Virginia baseball diamond. “There was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there,” DeSantis recounted to Fox News this morning. “It was just a little odd.”
The details of Miami-Dade County’s proposed plan to surveil poor, black neighborhoods with semipermanent spy planes were grotesque. MDPD had asked for a federal grant for so-called wide-area surveillance (WAS) planes, which can record up to 32 square miles at once and were first used to track Iraqi insurgents.
The way Miami Beach city commissioners tell it, Ocean Drive — the most famous street in Miami — has turned into a literal war zone. Drug dealers are roaming the streets, thieves are clubbing old ladies over the head, and you might lose your life if you hang out on the tourist-heavy street on the wrong night.
