Police seemed to have no qualms about shooting Antonio Andrew that night in the Redland. His corpse was so shredded from bullets that morticians weren't sure they could prepare him for his funeral.
"His body was like a bullet pail," funeral director Lori Hadley Davis says. "He had more wounds than you could close up. There wasn't a spot on him that wasn't shot: his chest, abdomen, and head." But what Hadley Davis immediately noticed were Antonio's hands. They too were shot.
Courtesy of Ladonna Florence
Antonio Andrew celebrates his son A.J.'s first birthday in 1995.
Michael E. Miller
The Redland house where Miami-Dade police ambushed the robbers.
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"He died a horrible death," says Hadley Davis, who has seen hundreds of murders in her day. "For you to shoot someone like that, you must have a hatred for them."
"Every time a cop kills someone, they claim it's self-defense — they claim that it's justified," Ladonna Florence says. Sitting in the dark living room of her house in Miami Gardens, she lets the last word hang in the air with a sarcastic sneer. Her son A.J., now a 17-year-old with a striking resemblance to his father, fidgets anxiously beside her. A copy of Antonio's funeral-service program sits between them. "But how are you gonna shoot somebody when they got their hands up?" she says. "When they are running away?"
For Ladonna and other relatives of the four dead men, those are a few of the hundreds of questions they have been left with since last summer. More than ten months of official silence has led to resentment, conspiracy theories, and threats of lawsuits.
"The cops violated his civil rights," says Jesse Dean-Kluger, an attorney preparing a lawsuit over Antonio's death. "There was no due process. He had the right to be arrested and go through the system. Instead, they basically went out and shot him."
He argues that cops led the gang to expect an armed confrontation with marijuana growers. When snipers dressed in black sprang out of unmarked vans, did they really expect the robbers to drop their weapons?
"They set them up for a bloodbath," he says. "Police have guidelines, and it's not to run up and shoot people. This is not Judge Dredd, and those aren't the rules."
Rosendo Betancourt's family members might also file a lawsuit, although they are waiting for the police report before deciding. They feel betrayed by the police who, they say, pledged to protect the informant.
"The police promised, 'Don't worry — he's working with us,'" says Grisel Perez, Betancourt's mother-in-law. "Then he was dead. We don't understand how they could have let this happen to him."
The bodies may be long buried, but both families are still living in fear. Michael Xavier, Betancourt's brother-in-law, claims that people have driven by his sister's house honking and yelling, "Snitch!" "My sister felt like she was being followed," he says. "She had to move."
Ladonna, meanwhile, says she worries about police retaliation as she goes ahead with her lawsuit. "They are the wrong people to have a problem with," she says. She also intends to sue over Antonio's $120,000 settlement — just as soon as she finds out where it went.
"If he had received that money, his whole life might have turned out differently," she says. Instead, she buried Antonio next to Anthony in Dade Memorial Park cemetery.
Now she worries about A.J. His father's death has rattled the teenager and opened a floodgate of anger inside him.
"I blame the police because they could have arrested him," says A.J., wearing a black Miami Heat jumpsuit and spiky braids. "I don't trust the police." He has already started mouthing off to cops, Ladonna says. She fears that Antonio's death will push A.J. into repeating his father's mistakes instead of avoiding them, just as Antonio followed his own father into prison.
"Antonio tried to be a good father," Ladonna says. "But how good of a relationship can you have when you keep going to jail?"
After the shooting, Antonio's family finally received something from the City of Opa-locka. It wasn't a check for $120,000 but a plaque that read, "On behalf of our community, we wish to record our deep sorrow over the passing of Antonio Lee Andrew."
The mystery over what happened that night in the Redland might be over in a few months, when police release their investigation into the fatal shooting. The lone surviving suspect, Roger Gonzalez Jr., has cooperated with authorities. He signed a plea agreement admitting to at least 11 robberies and was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison on April 13.
But his conviction only rankles the families of those who have no court dates to attend, only tombstones.
"It's not the cops' decision who should be on Earth and who shouldn't," Ladonna says. "Doing crime doesn't give them the right to take somebody's life."
