What the hell is going on in the Homestead Police Department? A couple months ago, three Homestead cops were charged by prosecutors after beating and macing people outside a nightclub -- a series of assaults caught on surveillance video.
Now, another HPD officer has been canned after investigators say he asked a handcuffed woman in the back of his cruiser to show him her breasts in exchange for not citing her for a suspended license.
That officer, six-year veteran Juan Senabre, was fired on June 14, according to a memo the Miami Herald posted online this morning.
Senabre's trouble started last Dec. 11, when he began following a woman named Zenaida Figuero-Ortiz, who had been parked eating food in her car with her boyfriend on Krome Terrace.
Sometime after 9 p.m., Figuero-Ortiz stopped at a friend's house and was walking to the door when Senabre approached. He told the woman that she was under arrest because her license was suspended over some unpaid Sunpass tickets, and she followed him back to his cruiser.
That's when Senabre got seriously creepy, investigators say.
Senabre pulled the cruiser into a dark part of the apartment complex and turned off the lights. Then he asked her in Spanish, "Have you ever been with a crazy policeman?"
The cop began quizzing Figuero-Ortiz about what kind of underwear she had on, and asked to see her "tits" and her bra, the report says, all while offering to "help" her and keep her out of jail.
Figuero-Ortiz repeatedly denied his advances, and eventually another car approached and the cop had to turn on his cruiser again; eventually, he dropped her back at her friend's apartment.
During an internal investigation, the cop denied Figuero-Ortiz's claims, but investigators sided with the accuser.
(Senabre's attorney, Teri Guttman Valdes, didn't return calls from the Herald to comment on the case; Riptide has also dropped her an email. If she responds, we'll update this post.)
On June 14, Homestead's assistant city manager, David Hebert, recommended that Senabre be fired. You can read the full memo on Senabre's case here.
"Mr. Senabre denies the allegations of wrongdoing and stands by his sworn statement given during the investigation. His termination is pending for hearing before a neutral arbitrator where he expects to be vindicated based on discrepancies in the complainant's and witness testimonies."
