Responding to reports that a man was firing a rifle into the air near Little River Pocket Park, the Miami Police Department arrived at the scene on NE Tenth Avenue just south of the 79th Street Causeway a little after 8 p.m. on July 7 and confronted the armed suspect.
One officer opened fire, striking the man in the torso.
"Shots fired! Shots fired!" an officer shouted over police radio.
Police "subdued the male and rendered aid" before he was transported to Jackson Memorial Hospital in critical condition, according to a brief media release on the incident.
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"We don't know why the man was armed," Miami Police Chief Manuel Morales told reporters after the incident, noting that the man did not fire directly at officers.
Residents reported being shaken by the gunfire.
"Heard the gunshots in my house. Never realized how loud those rifles are," one woman said on social media.
A police radio transmission (attached above) indicates that officers were familiar with the subject from an encounter earlier in the day.
"We were there earlier. The subject was associated with a firearm. We confiscated it," an officer can be heard relaying over the radio at 8:15 p.m. (one minute and 40 seconds into the recording), moments before the suspect was shot.
Pedro Labaut, a local resident who said the suspect was his brother, told WSVN that the man had been firing a pistol into the air early in the day, an account that appeared to confirm the radio chatter.
"[Police] handcuffed him, and they put him in the back seat of a car. They find his gun, and then they released him," Labaut said of the initial incident. "He shot three rounds earlier that day; they let him go. I don't know why, and then he got shot in the back later that night, instead of taking him earlier that day, the same day everything happened. Twice they came."
Citing an open investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Miami Police Department released neither the suspect's name nor the name of the officer who shot him. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement declined to comment when reached by New Times.
