Adoption Saga
Made you weep: The story about a Miami Shores woman tracking down her birth family in Korea ("The Long Way Home," Eric Barton, April 5) will make you cry. Home is where you make it.
Drake Mallard
Made you smile: My three children were also adopted through the Korean Social Services. I sat in that very nursery described in the article, playing with my son. I hope my children can go back as adults someday to find their own birth parents. I hope that agency is still there — they closed their adoption program in 2011, shortly after we came home.
Holly LaClair-Bogedain
Rapist Cop
Global disaster: John Timoney was chief of the Miami Police Department when it hired Michael Ragusa, the cop your story shows might have raped dozens of women while in uniform ("Sexual Predator With a Badge," Dan Christensen, April 5). Now he's an advisor to law enforcement in Bahrain, the Persian Gulf state. Guess what? During the Arab Spring, the Bahrain military and law enforcement shot to kill when protesters tried to speak to their government. Timoney's role in this stinks. It is putrid.
Cynthia Morse
No more crazy cops: Police departments across the nation need to implement an effective psychological test before they hire new cops. Just think, there are more officers just like Ragusa still on the force. That's scary.
Musiqmentor
Political failures: When bad apples continue to grow year after year in the police department, it's time to look at the tree and the real root of the problem: Miami City Hall.
Occupytruth
Unfair compensation: No money will make Ragusa's victims feel better, but how can the city offer one victim $550,000 and another only $62,500? How did they come up with those amounts? Is that the going rate for rape by a police officer?
Fiordelano
Outvote Racism
Too little too late: Uncle Luke's suggestion that the Trayvon Martin tragedy should inspire black voters to elect better politicians makes sense ("Luke's Gospel: Trayvon Should Inspire Black Votes," Luther Campbell, April 5). But sadly, in Florida it is too late. The bad politicians that the African-American community failed to keep out of office have now passed the most egregious voter suppression laws in the nation. Al Sharpton couldn't hold voter registration drives while he was here protesting the Martin case. Those kind of drives are now effectively against the law.
O-H I-O
Black voter power: Who are you and what have you done with Uncle Luke? This article was clearly not penned by him. It doesn't blame white people even once. Minority voting participation is a huge step toward equal representation, as you say, but until people realize what power they really can have over this country, they will never seize it. If the changes made through the polls were instantaneous, maybe more people would vote. Right now, they see the election results but don't see it personally benefit them in any real manner, so they can't be bothered to go to the polls.
Caucasian in the Hood
Memorial Day Anxiety
Residents beware: The piece about Miami Beach's lame plans for dealing with the hundreds of thousands of partygoers coming to town next month for Memorial Day weekend ("Memorial Daze," Tim Elfrink, April 5) makes it clear: All Beach residents need to once again leave their homes, close their businesses, and get the hell out of this beautiful paradise. That weekend, which ended last year with police shooting and killing a man and wounding four others, is as ugly as humanity gets.
Syndister
Visitors beware: After watching the racist, fear-mongering, unconstitutional frenzy that Miami Beach residents went through after last year's Memorial Day weekend, I have zero sympathy for whatever happens to their "poor neighborhoods" this year. I merely hope the gun-wielding psychopaths we insist on calling "police" around here don't kill anyone or shoot innocent bystanders this time.
Nanook5
Spam Revenge
Payback is sweet: Like Roscoe, the New Times reader who has been taking revenge on the guys spamming thousands of Miami phones with texts offering to buy junk cars ("Text Hex," Gus Garcia-Roberts, April 5), I've been doing my fair share of driving these people nuts. Every time I get a text, I call them multiple times and then just hang up whenever they answer. Eventually, they either block my number or ignore my calls. Then I repeat the same process from another number until it gets blocked.
Sir Sausage
Tops Again
Senior staff writer Gus Garcia-Roberts is the winner in this year's Sigma Delta Chi Awards for Public Service Journalism, Non-Daily Publication, for "Rotten to the Core," about Florida’s runaway McKay scholarship program. The series was also cited by Investigative Reporters & Editors as among the nation's best.