More likely, someone has fallen victim to a road rage-sparked attack or near-deadly slashing. If the incident happened in Miami-Dade County, the machete-wielding assailant may very well have been naked and wearing a cowboy hat.
(Not kidding.)
Whether because of savagery-inducing humidity or just a high supply of attackers armed with blades, South Florida has had its fair share of violent encounters involving machetes.
If you reach back to the 1980s, Miami's machete tales often were tied to vicious drug-smuggling activity, e.g., a crew of criminals who hacked up the body of a federal informant. These days, drunken disputes and random, frenzied violence seem more likely to spawn machete-related crime.
Miami Springs Police Chief Armando Guzman took a stab at explaining why Miami-Dade has so many headline-making machete attacks.
"The machete is an agricultural and landscaping tool that is very common and well known in the Caribbean and Central and South America," Guzman tells New Times. "So, it is something that is not foreign, and very well known to our Hispanic and Caribbean communities."
The more machetes, more problems theory, in a nutshell.
Last week, Guzman's officers arrested Luis Ruiz Herrera, 61, after he leaped from his car with a machete on Northwest 36th Street and swung at a scooter driver, cutting the side of his face, police say. It was one of two recent, widely publicized alleged machete attacks in Miami Springs and the neighboring Medley community over the last year. (Hint: the other one involved the naked man in the cowboy hat.)
New Times foraged through 20 years of newspaper archives to bring you a list of the 305's strangest and most disturbing machete attacks. These five made the final cut.
Terror on the Block
Ficien Joseph once made ends meet as a butcher.Haunted by voices and visions of demons due to schizophrenia, he straddled a living nightmare that repeatedly spilled over into reality. In 2004, he was shot by police and arrested at a Winn-Dixie supermarket after he allegedly stabbed a senior citizen in the neck for no apparent reason.
In 2009, upon his release from Jackson Memorial's psychiatric ward, where he'd spent nine days at a cost of more than $91,000, Joseph promptly went on the attack. Joseph came after his neighbor, Jude Cesaire, with a two-foot machete and sliced off his left hand. Two teens struck about the arms and head in the attack were left maimed.
In 2011, Joseph accepted a plea deal in which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Instead of prison, a county judge ordered Joseph to a Florida state mental hospital indefinitely for treatment.
Ol’ Knife-in-the-Shopping Cart Trick
In 2015, Guillermo Bejerano, then 80 years old, allegedly went ballistic on Emerito Lopez, 70, in a Hialeah Sedano's parking lot after he claimed Lopez swiped his cell phone, police said.Bejerano, who was homeless, pulled a machete from his shopping cart and struck Lopez multiple times in the arms and head, according to police. Lopez required 17 stitches, and the large bone between his elbow and shoulder was split.
Bejerano was charged with seven felonies, including one count of attempted murder and six counts of aggravated battery on a senior.
He was found mentally incompetent and was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. The court found there was "a substantial likelihood" that he would severely harm himself or another, "as evidenced by recent behavior causing, attempting, or threatening such harm." After years of psychiatric evaluations, and while the criminal case was still open in Miami-Dade, Bejerano died, leading the case to be closed in March 2021.
Bejerano is one of two alleged assailants on this list who were homeless, had severe psychiatric disease, and were adjudicated incompetent to stand trial.
Dirty Deeds
Guillermo Denis Gonzalez was released in 2004 from Everglades Correctional Institution after serving 12 years for second-degree murder.Roughly four years later, Gonzalez was accused of using a large knife to dismember and behead Sergio I. Quintero, a Hollywood jeweler, following a dispute at Gonzalez's home.
According to police, Gonzalez crept about east Hialeah in his 1998 white Dodge Caravan, methodically tossing into dumpsters six garbage bags containing Quintero's legs, arms, torso, hands, and head. One of the severed legs was found in a trash bin near the Red, White, and Blue thrift store.
As his state murder case was pending, the then-64-year-old Gonzalez was charged with submitting nearly $587,000 in false claims to Medicare in 2007 through his Hialeah-based DG Medical supply, netting him $31,000.
In 2012, a Miami-Dade County judge sentenced him to life in prison in the murder case. He died while serving the sentence, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
Nude Rampage
In 2022, a naked, machete-wielding man with painted nails and a cowboy hat slashed a bicyclist and fractured her skull near Miami Springs, according to Miami-Dade Police.The female victim was riding her bicycle at 6:30 a.m., on October 11, along South River Drive in Medley when Roberto Hercules asked whether she had a crack pipe, the report states.
"When the victim said that she did not have a pipe, the defendant [Hercules] pulled out a machete and began to attack," police said.
After striking her multiple times with the machete, Hercules fled on foot, according to the report.
The victim was transported to a hospital intensive care unit where she was treated for a fractured skull, bleeding in the brain, a broken left arm, and a large laceration on the left hand, the arrest report says.
Hercules, 45, was found sleeping nude next to two cowboy hats in a tent "hiding within trees," a Miami-Dade Police report states.
Hercules' charges for armed robbery and aggravated battery were dropped, according to the Miami-Dade County Clerk of Court's database. As for the attempted murder count, a Miami-Dade judge last March declared Hercules incompetent to face the charge.
From top left: Kaheem Arbelo, Desiray Strickland, Christian Colon, and Jonathan Lucas, who were charged in the slaying of Jose Amayo Guardado.
Composite from booking photos
Shallow Grave
Jose Amaya Guardado was a cherubic-cheeked 17-year-old with green horn-rimmed glasses who wore his baseball cap backward. His family moved to Miami in 2006 to escape the violent grip of gangs like Mara Salvatrucha in their native El Salvador.Guardado sold ice cream on weekends at the flea market and dreamed of being a mechanic. He enrolled at the Homestead Job Corps, a vocational training program for at-risk students run by the U.S. Department of Labor.
The teenager went missing in June 2015. His brother discovered his body during a search near the Homestead Job Corps after recognizing two socks sticking out of the ground.
Guardado had been hacked with a machete and forced alive into a shallow grave that was made ready before the attack, according to Homestead police.
Miami-Dade prosecutors charged four of Guardado's classmates in the murder: Kaheem Arbelo, Jonathan Lucas, Christian Colón, and Desiray Strickland. A fifth student, Joseph Michael Cabrera, was arrested in St. Louis.
According to the police report obtained by New Times, Strickland, who helped plan the murder, complained about missing the start of the machete massacre because she had to step away to urinate.
After Lucas and Colon left the scene, Strickland and her boyfriend, Arbelo, had sex near the body, according to police. They then tidied up by burning Guardado's belongings and their clothes, and ditched the machete, police said.
In 2022, Strickland pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced by a Miami-Dade County judge to 15 years in prison with seven years credit for time served. She could be released as early as 2030.
Colon entered into a plea deal in April 2023 on a second-degree murder charge and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Lucas and Cabrera previously pleaded guilty, resulting in a five-year sentence for the former and a shorter sentence for the latter, the Miami Herald reported.
A first-degree murder charge against Arbelo is still pending.
