It’s been two years since Miami’s Summer of Zika, when everyone was freaked out about mosquitoes and your friends all canceled their trips to Florida. But although the public frenzy about the virus has since died down, dozens of Floridians are still being diagnosed with Zika. According to the Department of Health, at least 59 travel-related cases have been reported across the state so far this year.
In February 2017, Miami-Dade Police arrested Bernardo Osorio, a decorated math teacher at Cutler Bay Senior High, and charged him with sexually abusing an underage student. The school district quickly fired Osorio and issued a statement condemning his behavior. But a new lawsuit from Osorio’s victim says the district failed to discipline the teacher after another student made similar abuse allegations years earlier.
Jose Farquaharson was standing on a street corner in Overtown one night in 2015 when a car sped past him. The 42-year-old says he shouted to two Miami Police officers across the road: “Do your fucking job and stop the cars from speeding!”
After a 2014 appointment at Massage Envy turned into a sexual assault, a South Florida woman filed a report with the Coral Springs Police Department. But it wasn’t until detectives began investigating that the woman learned she wasn’t the massage therapist’s first victim: According to police, Gabriel Mata had previously sexually battered another client.
After a barista in Philadelphia called police on two black men waiting for a friend, Starbucks temporarily closed 8,000 stores to train its U.S. employees about how not to be horribly biased toward customers. The Seattle-based company said it would continue to introduce anti-bias initiatives and publicly released its May 29 training materials online for others to use.
For years, anyone who hopped onto Miami’s Metromover paid a quarter per ride. But in 2002, voters approved a half-penny sales tax that made Metromover free. Ridership soared to 9 million annually in the early 2000s and then peaked again with a surge of new development downtown in recent years.
One day after his arrest for driving without a valid license, Moises Rojas showed up at the Miami Police Department’s headquarters to file a complaint. While the 32-year-old tiler was in custody, his mother said she got a call from an “Officer Rosa” who demanded $2,400 for his release. Emma Rojas met with the officer and handed over the money, but her son still wasn’t released. In the end, Moises Rojas’ girlfriend ended up having to bail him out.
For almost two decades, Miami-Dade Homeless Trust Chairman Ron Book says his goal has been to ensure no family spends the night on the streets. But because the county’s homeless shelters are often full, as many as 50 families a night have been placed in hotels and motels as a short-term fix. In recent years, Book says the hotel tab has added up to “a large seven-figure sum of money” as families began staying for longer periods of time. Now, in an attempt to cut spending and get people into permanent housing more quickly, the majority of that funding is going away.
This week, crews began work on an ambitious new beach renourishment project in Miami Beach, where Hurricane Irma washed away much of the shoreline. The $1.5 million emergency project, which involves trucking in 32,000 tons of sand from Central Florida, won’t be done until at least November. But…
Inspiration struck Joe Stone in the most Miami way possible, with his mind wandering and hands behind the wheel of a Porsche Macan as he sped down Interstate 95. “I was driving on I-95 and the entire concept just downloaded into my brain, from the name of the show, to the people I wanted to get involved to help me produce it, to the format,” says Stone, a music producer and writer.
After the state of Florida expanded Interstate 95 in the ’90s, only a few feet separated America’s busiest highway from houses along NW Sixth Avenue in Miami-Dade County. Residents organized, and their protests seemed to work — in 2002, former Commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler met with three of the homeowners, who…
Court documents filed in Broward County show XXXTentacion began making plans for his death at least seven months before he was gunned down in Deerfield Beach.
Miami Beach’s affordable-housing crisis is nothing new, and its elected officials know that. Seven years ago, the city adopted an ambitious plan to create at least 16,000 new affordable units by 2020. But last summer, commissioners admitted there was no way the city could hit that goal and voted to extend the deadline and reduce the goal to only 6,800 affordable units.
Two hours after North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot behavioral technician Charles Kinsey — an unarmed black man — Det. Michael Gaudio interviewed Kinsey’s client with severe autism, 26-year-old Arnaldo Rios Soto.
Sybel W. Lee stomps her foot on the vinyl floor in her kitchen. On the wall hangs a sign: Love makes a house a home. But the truth is, this house stopped feeling like a home a long time ago. Lee moves to another spot a couple of feet away…
In April 2017, just a few weeks before Sweetwater’s elections, Commissioner Isolina Maroño and mayoral candidate Saul Díaz were riding in a car together when they were stopped by police. Officers found inside the vehicle multiple absentee ballots belonging to Maroño’s relatives.
In February, a white homeowner in Little Havana captured video of a black stranger moving a garbage can in the resident’s front yard. The fisheye footage came from a “smart” doorbell made by Ring, a tech company now owned by Amazon. In a post shared with other locals, the homeowner labeled the man an “intruder” and warned neighbors to be on the lookout.
In recent years, the Miami Design Preservation League has become one of the loudest voices against harmful development across the county. It has battled gentrification in Little Havana, the trend of McMansions replacing historic homes, and a plan to turn the Miami Beach Community Church courtyard into a retail store. In many cases, the scrappy nonprofit has challenged the county’s biggest developers and lobbyists.
Two years ago, Miami Beach real-estate agent and homeless advocate Valerie Navarrete began interviewing local homeless people to get a sense of how they had ended up on the streets. Her videos brought much-needed humanity to former teachers, veterans, and construction workers who had lost their homes after devastating life events such as layoffs, deaths in their families, or health problems.
After picking up her high schooler one day in December, Alison Paneque and her 15-year-old daughter stopped at a Coconut Grove juice bar for an after-school snack. But as Paneque pulled out of the parking lot, a Miami Police officer stormed up to her car and went on a curse-filled tirade.
In recent years, Miami-Dade County has been held up as a model for how the criminal justice system should handle people with mental illness or developmental disabilities. Much of that can be attributed to the work of Circuit Judge Steve Leifman, who created a jail diversion program for those with mental illness and developed a framework for “crisis intervention training” to help cops handle calls involving people with mental health issues.
In 2012, Miami-Dade County became one of the first places to test a gunshot-detection technology called ShotSpotter, which uses acoustic sensors to alert police to gunfire. But after a year of the pilot program, the county abandoned the system over concerns about its effectiveness: Officers were able to confirm only 50 shootings of 1,000 supposedly detected by ShotSpotter, and the department couldn’t point to a single crime the technology helped solve.
