Police & Law Enforcement

The brutal 2010 murder of Matteo Patrick Giovanditto was the first killing in the idyllic, planned community of Celebration.

Soon after Rudy Eugene gnawed off Ronald Poppo’s face near the MacArthur Causeway in May, the media ran wild speculating he was high on “bath salts.” Later, commentators suspected LSD, coke, Ecstasy, or PCP. Eugene’s girlfriend even insisted a voodoo curse was to blame.Yet when Eugene’s autopsy came back last…

Charles William Collins was a career drug dealer and petty thief. Miami-Dade police knew as much when two undercover cops followed him into a bright-yellow pawnshop on NW Seventh Avenue in Liberty City on August 14. They pulled out their badges and asked him for ID. Collins said he left…

It’s been a bad week for Johnny Law in the 305. The day after the FBI accused a Miami-Dade cop of getting his rocks off by pulling over women and asking about their underwear and breasts, a Miami Beach officer is under arrest this morning on eight felony counts, including…

Miami-Dade Police Officer Prabhainjana Dwivedi worked the midnight shift around Key Biscayne, Metrorail stations, and Jackson Memorial Hospital. If what the FBI says is true, woe unto any woman who ran into Dwivedi in the middle of the night. Because the cop had a bad habit of pulling over women…

Read “Hialeah Residents Claim Local Recycling Plant Is Causing Increased Rates Of Cancer”Today, the Miami-Dade County Commission will vote on a resolution on whether to investigate a potential cancer cluster in Hialeah along NW 36th Avenue. Residents have pointed fingers at nearby King Metal Recycling Plant as the reason for…

It was 9:45 a.m. on October 11, 2009, when Juan Carlos Portieles parked his beat-up Toyota Camry on a quiet side street in Cutler Bay. Tall and heavyset, with close-cropped brown hair and traces of stubble on his jaw, the 30-year-old DJ walked several blocks to a cluster of condominiums…

Between 1977 and 1978, John Errol Ferguson led a shocking killing spree through Miami-Dade County. A home invasion gone wrong and a rape-murder of a teenage couple left eight people dead.More than three decades later, Ferguson will die for his crimes. Gov. Rick Scott signed his death warrant this afternoon,…

Also read DJ Seasunz: A Murder Killed a Nightlife Scene.After Juan Carlos Portieles, AKA DJ Seasunz, murdered his teenaged girlfriend, Jaclyn Torrealba, in October 2009, investigators began to comb through the wealth of correspondence the two had amassed in their two-year relationship. Police and prosecutors unearthed dozens of pages of…

Look! In the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a flying drone with a camera strapped to it! Odds are you’ve seen the first two in Miami airspace. But so far, the only people to have spied the third in action are the folks in Miami-Dade Police Department…

Tonya Burns, 36, appeared in court yesterday for allegedly using a tire iron to strike her 15-year-old daughter in front of Carol City High School. The incident occurred Tuesday morning, after the teen told Burns that she didn’t want to go to school that day. Burns dropped her off but noticed she…

As Republicans parade through Tampa this week touting their party’s platform, one formerly signature Florida issue — Jeb Bush’s Stand Your Ground law — has been nowhere to be found. That probably has something to do with the ongoing trial just down the road in Orlando of George Zimmerman, who…

Luis Alfonso Lucero, a nurse technician at Kendall Regional Medical Center, was arrested yesterday on charges that he raped an unconscious female patient. Lucero claims that the intercourse was consensual, even though the patient was under his care and was checked into the hospital for serious alcohol intoxication…

Chad Johnson’s NFL career is all but over. His wife, Evelyn Lozada, has filed for divorce. His sponsors have dropped him. His reality TV series is canceled. The troubles keep coming, and now comes a report that Johnson could face up to a year in prison for assaulting his wife…

Joaquin Amador Serrapio Jr., the 20-year-old local musician who fantasized on social media about killing Barack Obama, will avoid jail time after his threats caught the attention of the Secret Service. Instead, Serrapio will face home confinement, probation, and community service. He’ll also be forced to speak to high school…

Samuel Woodside, a custodian at Liberty City Elementary School, was arrested after allegedly making plans to transport a 14-year-old girl he met online from Louisiana to work as a prostitute in South Florida. That 14-year-old girl turned out to be an undercover cop.However, a parent at the school says Woodside…

Also read “New Times Frees Boxer Yathomas Riley, Jailed Two Years Without A Trial” For two years, boxer Yathomas Riley sat in Miami jail cells awaiting trial on an attempted murder charge. Prosecutors said he’d shot his ex-girlfriend Koketia King in a jealous rage in 2010, derailing his promising career as…

Tampa’s strip club industry is preparing for a cash-making bonanza next week as tens of thousands of Republicans come to town to blather on about family values all day before hitting Ybor City at night to get hammered and ogle some T&A. But Tampa police are drawing a line in…

Your pet canaries can sing a song of relief tonight. Two men allegedly responsible for stealing 500 canaries from the home of an elderly Miami man have turned themselves in after Miami-Dade Police asked for help identifying the suspects…

Read our in-depth article about the bizarre attempted murder case that landed Riley in jail.Yathomas Riley has spent more than two years behind bars for a crime he likely didn’t commit: the attempted murder of his then-girlfriend on June 10, 2010.Now, however, the undefeated heavyweight boxer is finally getting out…

Back in 2007, the feds indicted a Miami doctor for allegedly writing bogus prescriptions for hydrocodone and other addictive medicines shipped across the country through an online pharmacy. The case was more than solid; in fact, prosecutors gathered more than 400,000 pages of records to bolster their case.Turns out they…