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The Murder of Master Do

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Over at Jackson, Do clung to life. Students gathered outside as surgeons operated. At one point, a doctor emerged to talk to Ricky. "He lost a lot of blood," the doctor said. "I don't know how he's still alive." As Sunday dawned, the family had some hope. Do was hooked up to a breathing machine and nodded his head when people spoke to him. The surgeons operated three more times, but on Monday his prognosis was even worse. Around noon, he was taken off the ventilator, and the family prepared to watch him die. But Do lived for five more hours — long enough for nearly 600 students to pass his bed and say goodbye.

Ricky watched his father take his final breath. "I reassured him that everything was going to be okay," he recalls.

When the heart monitor flat-lined, Ricky walked out of the room and down the hospital corridor. Tears welled in his eyes. This is not for real, he thought. It's a bad dream.

Just then, a yellow beam began pulsing toward him. "It was the most beautiful light I'd ever seen," Ricky recalls. He rubbed his eyes, but it didn't go away. "It made me feel so calm. I think that was my father speaking to me, telling me right then that everything was going to be all right."

Three days later, the family buried Do. Nearly 2,000 people attended the funeral — including Mayor Burns, Police Chief Shannon (who was promoted), and countless students. In Korean tradition, the body was driven past the place where Do spent the most time — the tae kwon do studio — so his spirit could say goodbye. Scores of students laid flowers and tributes at the door. "Thank you," wrote members of a black-belt class from some years back, "for your patience and wisdom in helping us achieve the understanding of the night."

Ricky opened the studio a week after his father died. During the first class after the shooting, he says, "people didn't know what to say. I couldn't stop looking at the back door, looking at the parking lot. I was waiting for my father to show up."

In the following weeks, 27 tips poured into the North Miami Police station. Sergeant Croye identified several suspects — but none panned out. Meanwhile, violence in North Miami raged on. Three people were killed over the next three weeks, less than a mile and a half from where Do was gunned down.

Six days after the Do shooting, 16-year-old Bunky Telys was murdered by another teenager. Both were gang members, police said. On December 3, Victor Manuel Guzman Lopez was discovered dead in a closet inside his home. Police suspected foul play but made no arrests.

And on December 14, Pedro Fernandez Moreno, age 43, was shot and killed in his Nissan Altima while he was parked outside a strip mall less than a half-mile from the tae kwon do studio. This killing echoed the Do tragedy — it happened in broad daylight on a weekend.

But so far, police haven't linked any of the killings. The city ended 2007 with 10 homicides — six in the final two months of the year. "We're concerned, definitely," says North Miami Police Chief Clint Shannon. "Some of these cases were not random acts."

Though Shannon says it's a stretch to call Do's killing the product of a gang execution, that's not completely clear. Sources close to the investigation say the murder weapon was an M-1 military rifle, a half-century-old gun that was one of the first semiautomatics manufactured. They are mostly collectibles now, though they were the weapon of choice for the Haitian army in the Nineties.

Indeed Haitian gang activity — and police crackdowns on those thugs throughout Dade County — had bubbled up in North Miami, possibly because enforcement had been stepped up in Little Haiti and other parts of the county. And it was perhaps no coincidence that North Miami's bloodiest two months in memory came immediately after the October indictment and arrests of the two Terrorist Boys leaders and 15 other gang members.

Sergeant Croye won't speculate why Do was killed. "We can't confirm that this was a robbery gone bad," he says. "We know that nothing was taken and that Mr. Prosper did not hear any words exchanged."

Though Do had no criminal record, no pending civil lawsuits, no legal troubles of any kind, his student George Oxar believes the killing might have been planned. "In my heart, I think the person who did this either knew him, was angry at him, or was paid to shoot him. That's the only thing that makes sense," he says. "There's no doubt in my mind that if the shooter had been within three or four feet of Master, the shooter would have been dead."

But Lucien Cayard, co-owner of a Haitian bakery located in the same strip mall as Do's studio, disagrees: "Master didn't have a beef with anybody. Everyone really liked him."

Maybe it was a random murder. Or it could be the bullets were meant for Leclerc, although the 62-year-old has no criminal record and says he "never had trouble with nobody."

Sergeant Cruz is now in charge of the department's violent crime unit. He thinks it's possible that Do might have angered some kids by telling them to leave the back parking lot. Or his brand of discipline perhaps didn't sit well with a student. "The culture in this county, the youth culture, they just have a lack of concern about life," Cruz says, shaking his head. "Master didn't even have the opportunity to defend himself. I don't know the reason why someone would want to kill him. That person who shot him would have been taken in with open arms into the school, to harness his anger."

The most difficult thing for students to grasp was the fact that Do, who seemed invincible, was unable to fight his attacker after a lifetime of teaching self-defense. Says Oxar: "Master always taught us that with respect to weapons, the closer you are, the better your chances. He trained you so you would have a chance. He taught people not to feel helpless. But for whatever reason, he didn't have that chance."

Ricky, meanwhile, is moving his father's business forward. He recently opened a satellite studio in Hallandale and is planning a May 17 martial arts exposition and memorial for Do at South Broward High School. He's also overseeing the opening of the North Miami Beach location later this year. Eventually the family will move out of the West Dixie Highway storefront and away from the bad memories of November 10, 2007.

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