To Alexandra Natapoff, founder of a website called Snitching.org and a law professor at Loyola University, Enriquez's story is "terrible...Our criminal justice system has appallingly little protection for informants. This is worst in the case of minors." (The Miami-Dade police training manual includes only one line about juvenile informants, urging that "parents or guardians shall be present during [an] interview.")
Natapoff points out that Enriquez's fate might have been different in California, which passed strict rules in 1998 after the killing of 17-year-old Chad MacDonald, who had been employed by police to help nail a couple of meth dealers. The state legislature moved quickly then to require a court order before juveniles could be used as snitches.
Henriquez in exile in Nicaragua.
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In 2009, Florida passed a law that ordered police departments to set standards for dealing with informants. It was signed by then-governor Charlie Crist in reaction to the murder of Rachel Morningstar Hoffman, a 23-year-old Florida State University graduate who was murdered with the very gun that cops had asked her to buy from two drug dealers.
The crime that cops used to coerce Hoffman into cooperating? She had been caught with marijuana and four Ecstasy pills.
State Rep. Peter Nehr, a Republican from Hoffman's hometown, was the original sponsor of that law. He proposed a much stricter law that would have required greater court oversight of informants, including very young ones. But law enforcement, he says, has a powerful lobby. And representatives are limited in what they can accomplish. "This was a very difficult bill," Nehr says. "I had a lot of opposition. Police and law enforcement don't want limitations."
Ironically, the only stain on the record of Serralta, Enriquez's handler, followed a run-in with state politics. According to police records, the now-lieutenant and his wife started a company called High Ridge Consultants one month before the 2008 election to support the campaign of his brother-in-law, state Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera.
Despite a six-figure salary, Serralta neglected to tell his bosses about the company, which was paid $22,500 and earned a $10,000 profit from Lopez-Cantera's campaign.
Serralta, who called the whole thing "an ugly misunderstanding" in police documents, was reprimanded by his bosses. After reviewing the details, state prosecutor Howard Rosen seemed to rue the fact he couldn't charge the officer with a crime: "While it may not look good to campaign contributors or the general public that a company wholly owned by the candidate's sister and brother-in-law made a profit on the campaign, actual work was done by them and there is nothing to preclude them from making a profit."
Meanwhile, Enriquez is almost out of options. His aunt plans to move soon from the place he has been living. His cash is running out. He has contacted law students at Ave Maria University near Naples for help, but so far they haven't achieved much.
"As a kid, I made bad choices," he says. "I joined the gang out of stupidity, out of boredom, and that came back to haunt me. I take responsibility for that. But as for everything that followed, I blame the system, the whole system."
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of Enriquez's saga.
