On May 1, detectives with the South Florida Internet Crimes Against Children were assigned a case involving a 14-year-old girl. After downloading the contents of the girl’s iPhone 8, the investigators found what they were looking for: a series of explicit text messages sent to her by Kevin Kerlin, a 45-year-old Miami-Dade firefighter.
It takes a special sort of asshole to pin a bunch of crimes on an innocent 16-year-old kid just for being black. But former Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano now admits he’s exactly that sort of asshole: Federal prosecutors announced today that Atesiano pleaded guilty to framing a Biscayne Park teenager…
The Taco Bell menu is pretty easy to comprehend in any language. Hell, half of it is just made-up words anyway — CrunchWrap Supremes and “nacho fries” aren’t exactly ancestral Mexican dishes. You can also order food by simply shouting a combo number, such as “T3” for a three-taco meal.
Traditionally, police need two to three months to collect, process, and analyze DNA samples. But with a new kind of technology recently adopted by the Miami Police Department, the entire procedure can be wrapped up in less time than it takes to watch a movie. Soon enough, the agency says, it’ll be able to analyze a suspect’s DNA before he or she is even released from custody.
Two civilian employees of the Miami Police Department were quietly fired this week after they were caught taking police “property” from storage lockers and placing it inside their own cars, a Miami Police spokesperson confirmed to New Times yesterday. A third civilian employee tied to the scheme resigned amid the investigation.
Comedian and TV star Hannibal Buress walked out of a Wynwood bar during Art Basel 2017, stepped right up to Miami Police Officer Luis Verne, and shouted “this cop is stupid as fuck” right into Verne’s body camera. While certainly confrontational, the incident was both legal and hilarious. Verne disagreed and…
Edward Foster was walking home in Homestead when Officer Anthony Green pulled up alongside him. Within minutes, the police officer had fired off 11 rounds, striking the 35-year-old father of six at least six times. Foster never made it home. The Homestead Police Department has always maintained Green was in fear for his life after Foster reached toward his waistband.
The U.S. government recently launched a campaign to crack down on money-laundering and corruption in Latin America’s state-run oil companies, including the one in Venezuela. Now the target has moved a bit south and west. A Miami man yesterday pleaded guilty to trying to funnel more than $1 million to an official at Petroecuador, Ecuador’s state-run oil company.
Chief Colina is going a step further than any other police department in Miami-Dade with his department’s citation program: he is removing officer discretion for the first two violations, meaning all officers must issue a citation the first and second time a person is caught committing any of the five ticketable misdemeanors.
Seventeen months after the City of Miami signed an agreement allowing police officers to hand out civil citations instead of arresting people for certain minor misdemeanors — including possessing small amounts of marijuana — Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina says his officers will finally begin doing so by the end of this month.
Miami can’t build anything nice without someone getting charged with fraud along the way. Miami Beach pharmaceutical baron Phillip Frost pumped enough money into the new downtown science museum that the city wound up naming the place after him. He lives in a $59 million mansion on Star Island and sits in the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame.
Of the 10,078 total citations issued between July 1, 2015, and July 1, 2018, 72 percent — or 7,268 — were given to white people. Twenty-eight percent — or 2,789 — were given to black people.
Derek Graham admits he didn’t answer questions from City of Miami Police officers September 14, 2014. But that’s because he says he couldn’t. He was having a seizure.
Have sex indoors. Do whatever the hell you want as long as it’s consensual and behind closed doors. Don’t have sex in public. Especially don’t have sex on the 1300 block of Ocean Drive in broad daylight on Labor Day. Especially if you are a Catholic priest visiting Miami Beach with another church-affiliated man.
BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kimmel is suing Miami-Dade County for negligence, false imprisonment, and battery after police arrested him at Miami International Airport in October 2013.
According to the feds, Harlem Suarez was a radical, an extremist, and an imminent danger to the public. In the summer of 2015, a confidential informant recorded the 23-year-old plotting to bomb a public beach in the Florida Keys, and investigators found an arsenal of explosive materials inside his apartment. After a three-month investigation, FBI agents swarmed Key West and charged him with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
Earlier this year, New Times detailed the horrific case of Maria, a 24-year-old who fled persecution in Guatemala, gave birth to multiple American children, and wound up jailed in an ICE detention facility in South Florida after she was arrested while trying to pay a $150 traffic fine. Speaking from inside the detention center, Maria told New Times in Spanish that she was allowed to see her three young children only an hour or two each week and that her 9-year-old daughter was afraid she’d also be detained if she visited her mom.
If you’ve driven through Coral Gables anytime in the past three years, it’s almost 100 percent certain police have a photo of your license plate and the ability to pinpoint your vehicle as it traveled within city limits. Despite having just 50,000 residents, the Gables is on track to capture 30 million license plates this year — more than 26 other police agencies in South Florida.
In 2005, the Florida Legislature passed arguably the state’s most controversial law, Stand Your Ground. Now, whether or not cops can use that defense comes down to how the state’s highest court defines the word “person.”
On the Netflix show Narcos, Valeria Velez is a Colombian journalist who carries on a years-long affair with drug lord Pablo Escobar while he builds his empire and makes a short-lived foray into politics. Her story ends abruptly when she’s killed by a vigilante group after delivering a radio to help Escobar communicate while in custody.
After gunning down two unarmed black men outside a Miami strip club in 2012, security guard Lukace Kendle claimed the shooting was justified under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. During the trial, where Kendle chose to act as his own attorney, he compared himself to George Zimmerman and claimed the evidence was fabricated “because I’m white.”
Miami-Dade County Administrative Law Judge Timothy Maher was arrested last week for reportedly threatening to shoot his family members in his El Portal home. Then, yesterday, Maher allegedly threatened to kill someone at his federal office, which handles disability and Social Security cases. Maher’s threat was serious enough that the Federal Protective Service evacuated the building.
