Family Demands Answers After Miami-Dade Cops Kill Father Outside Redland Farm

When Osvaldo Cueli spotted a man who he believed to be trespassing around his ten-acre farmland in Redland, he was concerned about his family's safety and retrieved his mother's pistol. His family says he was not the gun-toting type, but he felt he had no choice but to arm himself before going back out to see if the man had returned.

"These were his words to my grandmother, 'How am I supposed to defend myself? With a rock? I can't do anything with a rock.' She wasn't comfortable, but obviously because of what's happening, she gave it to him," Cueli's daughter, Gabriela, tells New Times.

Around 3 p.m. that day, after Cueli headed back to the edge of the property with his teenage son, two people drove up in a pair of pickup trucks with tinted windows — vehicles Cueli did not recognize. By all accounts, one of the drivers opened fire on Cueli in the confrontation that followed, and the 59-year-old farmer was shot dead near the entrance to the property where he'd run his tree nursery for decades.

Cueli's son, also named Osvaldo, tells New Times that neither he nor his dad had any idea the two drivers, who were wearing jeans and unmarked shirts, were Miami-Dade police officers. He says police did not identify themselves as law enforcement before shooting. "I didn't even know if they were cops. I thought they were random people trying to kill us," the son says.

In the aftermath of the November 2023 incident, the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) released few details about what had transpired, aside from stating that the officers were part of an illegal dumping unit responding to a report of a stolen vehicle. While the department claimed Cueli brandished his gun at the officers before police opened fire, the son maintained that his father never pointed a weapon at them.

"I didn't even know if they were cops. I thought they were random people trying to kill us."

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A photo of one of the unmarked trucks shows multiple bullet holes in its driver-side windshield. According to the autopsy report, Cueli suffered fatal gunshot wounds to his torso and right arm.

Newly obtained cell phone video recorded by Cueli's daughter shows the moments after the fatal shooting at his property on SW 192nd Street. The video captures Cueli on the ground with blood pouring out of his mouth. The two policemen standing over him are wearing street clothes — one with a black sweater and the second in a gray T-shirt with a badge hanging around his neck. The second officer claims, "We identified ourselves," and then steps directly over Cueli's body.

"That's my dad," Gabriela yells in the video, crying as her father's body lies motionless. "That's my dad. The cops shot my dad."
"My dad wasn't violent," Gabriela tells New Times. "He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was simply protecting his property, and they showed up and killed him."

What happened next was nearly as shocking to the Cueli family as the shooting itself. After fatally wounding his father, MDPD detained the teenager and put him in the back of a police car, holding him for several hours. His mother was handcuffed and detained as well.

"A lot of the police were just laughing and joking around the whole time," Osvaldo says. "None of them were answering me when I was talking to them."

Citing an open investigation into the shooting, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and MDPD declined to comment on New Times' inquiry, including requests for information about the officers involved in the shooting and details about the events that preceded it.

A Family Man

Gabriela, along with her three children — ages 1, 2, and 3 — her brother, aunt, grandmother, father, and mother lived on the ten-acre property, a former tree farm that once belonged to her late grandfather.

"We've lived there our whole lives," Gabriela says. "We grew up there. It's always been a family house."

Born in Miami, Cueli was one of four children in a tight-knit Cuban-American family.

His family says he dedicated himself to tending the farm and maintaining the land, where he grew mahogany and Royal Palms, among other trees. The property lies just east of the Everglades, about a 30-mile drive from downtown Miami, in a rural community that served as the site of some of south Miami-Dade's first agricultural settlements.

Cueli's children describe their dad as a hard-working and loving family man.

"Everything he did was for the family — it was for us," Gabriela says. "He'd wake up, take care of the farm. He was always trying to make people happy. He was always trying to make peace between everybody."
Osvaldo says his dad, whom he calls his best friend, would put everyone else's needs before his own. The son recalls when he wanted to buy a new TV for the back patio, his father offered to pay for it and put it in the son's room instead. He says he pushed his dad to replace his own TV, telling him, "You never buy yourself anything." Cueli initially obliged but, in the end, put the new set in a family area outside on the patio. 

Gabriela and Osvaldo insist their dad was not one to carry a gun day-to-day and that he was not a violent man. The siblings say on the day of the fatal shooting, he grabbed their grandmother's gun because he was concerned the person whom he spotted around their property earlier in the day would return.

Unexpected Visitors

It was a typical day at the Cueli household on November 29, 2023. Cueli was with his friend working on a vehicle while his son and Gabriela left the house to buy a car part.

After returning to the property, the son says he was talking to his dad outside the house when he noticed people standing by their back gate. He thought they might be his dad's friends, so he and his father rode over in a golf cart to investigate.

"Once we start getting a little close, we see that they hopped the fence, and they're inside our property," Osvaldo tells New Times. "They were looking at like a boat trailer by the edge of the property. Then, as we started to get closer, they still hadn't noticed us. My dad honked the horn, and they took off."

The father and son hopped into their car to track down the white truck that drove away. After they went around the block and came back down the street, Osvaldo says, they noticed the truck again parked on their property. "As I try to get out of the car and try to look at their faces, they drive off," he says.

The duo made their way back to the house, where Cueli grabbed the gun and put it in a holster on his waist before driving back out to the front of the property, with his son following behind in a golf cart. They were standing near the entrance to the farmland when, the son says, two trucks they did not recognize — a pair of unmarked Rams with tinted windows — zoomed up.

"They both came really close to the trees, and they blocked us in," Osvaldo says. "They started shooting from inside the car, and they didn't have any lights on. They didn't announce themselves. They didn't put down the windows, and the windows were blacked out."
The son says police started firing despite his dad never pointing a gun at them. At first, he says, he didn't know he was in the midst of a hail of bullets.

"Because they were shooting from inside the car, it almost didn't even sound real," he adds. "I got hit by a piece of concrete from the cement electricity pole that we have out front. I looked at my shoulder, and I was like, 'We're not getting shot at. That's not a bullet.' And then when I looked at the window, I started seeing little bullet holes popping up in the window."

MDPD has not publicly released ballistics evidence on whether Cueli's gun was fired. New Times will provide an update when that data is released.

Once he realized gunfire had broken out, the teenager hopped the gate to sprint back to the house as bullets whizzed around him. Gabriela noticed her brother running towards her with a panicked look on his face and rushed out with her mom's phone in hand to see what was going on.

"I noticed my dad's car there, and it's empty," she tells New Times. "As I get closer, when I do see my dad, it's him on the floor, struggling to breathe and blood coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his blood, and at that moment, I just pulled out the phone and started recording. They weren't doing anything to help my dad."

Cueli's daughter says one officer "walked over him like a rag doll."

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The heavy-set officer in the grey shirt can be heard saying, "We identified ourselves, and he pulled out a gun on us," before he strides across Cueli's body. Another responding officer dressed in street clothes tells Gabriela that her dad is "fine" and to calm down, to which she responds, "No, he is not fine. He is not breathing."

While Gabriela continuously cries out and asks for an ambulance, the officers are looking on and do not immediately tend to Cueli. Pointing out that her father's eyes are rolling into the back of his head, the daughter pleads, "No one's helping my dad."

The video shows the officers moving the siblings away from the scene and putting the teenage son's hands behind his back as he calls out for his father. The brother and sister urge the officers to airlift Cueli, but one officer reassures them an ambulance is on the way.

Gabriela tells New Times the officers "left him to die" and "walked over him like a rag doll as if he didn't matter."

"Their main concern was to get me and my brother out of the property and onto the road away from my dad," she adds, noting that her infants remained inside the house while the cops tried to detain her in a police car. "They weren't trying to help him. They had all of us detained for various hours along the road."

Following the shooting, Miami-Dade Police said detectives responded to the area after receiving a call about a possible stolen vehicle. They reportedly claimed they noticed a vehicle on the property matching the description provided by the caller and attempted to make contact with Cueli.

"As the officers were simply trying to get off to be able to make contact with him, that's when the subject armed himself with a firearm, produced a firearm, and that's when shots were fired," Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta said in November 2023.

Citing the active investigation, the Miami-Dade Police Department declined to provide further details. Early media reports suggested that the call to police may have been related to the man Cueli and his son spotted on the property, but the police department declined to elaborate when contacted by New Times.

Seeking Justice

Cueli's wife was escorted down the family driveway in handcuffs and placed in the back of a patrol car after the shooting. His son says the officers had him and his mom handcuffed in the back of police cars on the street for hours. He tells New Times he kept asking the officers why he was being detained but that they shrugged him off, at one point refusing to let him use the bathroom.

"I needed to pee for two hours, and then like all of them kept on telling me, 'Oh, just piss in the back of the cop car,'" Osvaldo says.

Shortly following his mother's release, Osvaldo says, he was freed around 8 p.m. — five hours after the shooting took place. The siblings say the police blocked off the ten-acre property until the family was permitted to go back home early the next morning.

"It was like two or three in the morning," Gabriela says. "They allowed us to back in the property. They gave my dad's personal effects, but that was it."

Osvaldo suspects he heard more than a dozen gunshots that day. Following the shooting, his family found multiple bullet casings strewn around the grass.

The two officers involved in the shooting were both two-decade veterans in law enforcement, according to previous reporting. FDLE declined to provide New Times with their names, saying it would be against policy in light of the ongoing investigation.

The tragedy bears some similarities to other high-profile police shootings in which officers in street clothes were accused of failing to identify themselves, such as the 2020 raid on Breonna Taylor's apartment.

In March 2019, Palm Beach Gardens officer Nouman Raja became the first Florida cop convicted for an on-duty shooting in nearly 30 years, in a case arising from the killing of church drummer Corey Jones. In October 2015, Raja drove up to Jones' broken-down vehicle and confronted him wearing street clothes and no badge. When Raja saw Jones was armed with a firearm, he opened fire. He said he announced himself as a police officer, though audio evidence did not corroborate that claim.

While questions linger about the call that prompted police to drive out to the Cuelis' property, the family maintains there was no stolen vehicle on the property that day.

"They were apparently looking for a stolen car," Osvaldo states. "Realistically, for them to do anything, they should at least run the plate of the car and make sure it's not just some random car."

The family's attorney, Robert Pertierra, says Cueli's gun was found in the shrubbery off to the side of the property near the road.

Since their father's death, the siblings say it feels different being at the property. Gabriela says she has since moved out of the house. Osvaldo tells New Times he would like to stay and does not want his family to sell the land because it was dear to his father and grandfather — the last place they called home before they died.

"My dad was the life of the farm," Gabriela remembers. "Now, when we're outside, it's quiet. Before there was always movement going around. There was life. He gave life to everything."