What the family didn’t know is that Owen had already been dead — and in the county medical examiner’s office — for seven days. Despite the fact that officers had recovered Owen’s body from beneath a Metrorail overpass May 31, his sister Kathy Kavalin says Miami Police never notified relatives to let them know.
Kim Hill is one of two activists who have been arrested and banned from City of Homestead public meetings simply for asking for reforms at the police department. In 2016, both Hill and activist James Eric McDonough told WSVN that they’d been arrested and carted out of city hall on three occasions, simply for asking for changes at the police department.
The defendant had already pleaded guilty and a gaggle of reporters had shuffled out of the federal courthouse Thursday morning. But Judge Federico Moreno wasn’t in any rush to leave, and neither were the half-dozen veteran prosecutors and defense attorneys. After all, this case had been more than two decades in the making, dating back to Miami’s cocaine cowboy heyday.
As of 2015, the Miami Police Department reported in a statewide audit that a whopping 2,243 rape and sexual-assault kits were sitting untested on city shelves collecting dust — the highest number of untested rape kits for a single agency in Florida. That meant 2,243 victims had reported a rape…
City of Miami Police Officer Dermis Hernandez casually tried to board a plane yesterday en route from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to Costa Rica. He nearly made it. But instead, federal officials say, he was arrested just before boarding the flight for running a Ponzi scheme while working as a cop.
Three City of Miami Police officers raced down the train tracks, desperately waving their arms at the freight train barreling past the NE 54th Street intersection. A few hundred feet down the tracks, a dark-green SUV was stuck on the rails. If the train hit the car at full speed, it could easily derail the miles of shipping containers.
Mel Fisher is the closest thing Florida has to Indiana Jones. Recently retired Floridians adopt the state’s Jimmy Buffett-inspired, faux-pirate persona after spending 30 years selling renters insurance in Denver, but Fisher was the real deal. He spent his life diving for pirate treasure and most famously hit the mother lode…
Late one Tuesday night, a heavyset man in a worn-out sport coat lumbered out of a sprawling restaurant on Hollywood Beach to his parking spot, the one closest to the building. His basset hounds, Amos and Tillie, tagged along. Even at 78 years old, Joe Sonken was usually the first…
In September 2014, Miami-Dade Police Sgt. James Edwards submitted a two-sentence letter resigning from the department with a “heavy heart” because of personal circumstances. But those circumstances also happened to involve two other people: a 15-year-old boy and his 16-year-old brother.
The Florida Department of Corrections remains adamant that “Operation PUSH,” a statewide prison-labor strike designed to force state officials to treat prisoners better, never actually happened, even though prisoner-rights groups released a statement last week about the action. They say prisoners in more than a dozen facilities either went on…
Last week, a video went viral showing a Jamaican-born grandmother being hauled off a Greyhound bus at a Fort Lauderdale station. The woman was returning from visiting her grandchild for the first time in Orlando, according to activists who mounted a campaign to pressure the bus line to stop granting federal agents access to randomly demand papers from its customers.
Miami Beach leaders took turns last week heaping praise on the founders of a secret Facebook group aimed at banishing criminals from the city. “You’ve taken an active role to become part of a solution for your community, and it’s just beautiful,” Commissioner John Elizabeth Alemán gushed. Added Commissioner Kristen Rosen…
Accused rapist and ultrapopular South Florida rapper Kodak Black live-streamed his own arrest last week. A masked squad from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office descended on his Pembroke Pines mansion as Black and a large entourage of friends, including Black’s own toddler — named King Khalid — hung out in a…
Despite New Times basically devoting an entire beat to Miami Police Capt. Javier Ortiz’s shameful exploits over the last decade, he’s only managed to fail upward, ascending the ranks from lieutenant last year. While he’s technically stepped “down” from running Miami’s Fraternal Order of Police union, he remains the…
On November 26, Fort Lauderdale Police found Bob Karpinen slumped over dead on a bench at Colee Hammock Park. Identifying the body wasn’t difficult — the 58-year-old had an ID in his wallet and a pill bottle with his name and his doctor’s name listed on the side. Officers Jesus Gonzalez and Scott Bellinger filled out a report, jotting down contact information for Karpinen’s 77-year-old mother in Delray Beach.But for some reason, neither officer bothered contacting her or anyone else in the family. Within hours, Karpinen’s body was hauled off, his property seized, and the report closed out.
At her home in the tiny village of Palm Springs, just outside Lake Worth, Anna Mae Kiger started each morning the same way. After rising around 7, she walked down the driveway to pick up her newspaper. Then the 75-year-old Air Force veteran hoisted an American flag high up a…
“This is new?” a worried passenger asks while she films U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stalking the aisle of a Greyhound bus in Fort Lauderdale and demanding proof of citizenship from the riders. Moments later, the agents arrest a passenger, pulling her and her luggage off the bus.
Blanco laid the violence on thick to convince male kingpins around her that she was not to be messed with.
When a series of disturbances and insurrections erupted across state prisons nationwide in 2016 on the anniversary of New York’s 1971 Attica prison riots, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) danced around acknowledging whether a set of incidents that had occurred in the Sunshine State were related to the nationwide movement.
Various media sources are reporting this morning that Kodak Black, one of the most talented rappers in South Florida but a magnet for trouble, has been arrested for grand theft of a firearm, possession of marijuana, child neglect, two counts of possession of a weapon by a felon, and two counts of probation violation.
Apparently, living off his fame as an ’80s Miami cocaine smuggler tied to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel wasn’t quite enough for Michael “Mickey” Munday. One of the Magic City’s most colorful characters and a man who hosts film events and parties all over town, he was found guilty today of smuggling cars for an enormous auto-theft ring.
When FX’s American Crime Story premieres tonight, Miamians will be familiar with much of the landscape. Season 2 of the hit series explores the assassination of Gianni Versace, who was gunned down on the front steps of his Ocean Drive mansion in 1997. The death of the iconic Italian fashion designer stunned South Beach and sent police scrambling to find the murderer.
