A bloody two days: 6 incidents leave 5 dead and 5 injured, including 2 children
Monday night began with someone getting out of a car and firing indiscriminately into a crowd of people. When the shooting stopped, four people were injured, including two children, 3 and 6. Early Tuesday evening police shot and killed a man barricaded in his home. His family escaped harm.
In between those two events, a man running from police was killed when a train hit him. A cop was shot at, a man and a woman were found dead in a home and another woman dead in her apartment. Then there was a man who showed up at a hospital in critical condition with a gunshot wound to his head.
Police still don’t know who shot him or why.
Between Monday and Tuesday night, six separate bursts of viiolence marred Miami-Dade from south to north. In all, five people were killed, five others were seriously injured and a cop escaped gunfire unharmed.
The two days in Miami-Dade seemed in keeping with everything else going on in 2020.
“The last few days are not typical,” said Miami-Dade Police Director Alfredo “Freddy” Ramirez. “It’s just been a bad 48 hours.”
Miami, the largest city in the county, has seen a slight uptick in homicides in recent months but also a slight decrease in aggravated assaults during the pandemic. That pretty much mirrors the findings in several other major cities across the country. According to figures supplied by Miami police, aggravated assaults actually dropped slightly from 849 at this point in 2019, to 840 this year. Homicides rose slightly, from 45 to this point in 2019, to 53 this year.
Even with the increase, however, if the homicide rate continues it would be the second-lowest homicide rate in the city in the past 50 years.
A review by The Marshall Project released at the end of September found that while most types of crime decreased this year, a study of 27 major U.S. cities found increases in homicides. Minor crimes tended to drop as stay-at-home and close orders limited the number of possible targets. Still, the study concluded that even with this year’s upticks, major crime levels in most major cities remained historically low.
“If there is a bad weekend with a lot of shootings, people want to know what happened, and rightfully so,” David Abrams, a law and policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Marshall Project. “But to really understand how crime has changed, let’s look at the week, the month, the year, the decade. Crime has gone way, way down from the peaks in the ’80s and ’90s. Even the highest spikes in a few cities over the summer are small blips in comparison.”
The violence in MiamiDade began just before 6 p.m. Monday night when someone pulled up to a home in the 15100 block of Northwest Second Avenue, got out of a vehicle and opened fire on a crowd.
By the time the shooter was done, four were injured by gunfire, including a 3year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy. None of the injuries were considered life-threatening. The children were grazed in the arm and leg. The shooter had not been captured by Wednesday and police hadn’t offered a motive.
Early the next morning, well before sunrise, bursts of gunfire lit up a Goulds apartment complex called Cutler Manor Apartments. Shotspotter, an electronic sound monitoring device used by police to identify gunfire, captured more than three dozen blasts between 3:26 a.m. and 3:30 a.m.
When an officer arrived in an unmarked vehicle, he backed off as a man approached firing his weapon, the officer said. A short while later a man was dropped off at Jackson South Medical Center in critical condition with a gunshot wound to his head, police said. They didn’t say if they believed the incidents were related. By Wednesday afternoon there had been arrests.
Meanwhile, at about the same time in Miami, police received a call from a man who said he’d killed his wife in the Art Plaza Apartment in Edgewater, just east of Miami Avenue on Northeast 14th Street. The woman was found stabbed to death.
As the sun began to rise Tuesday morning, tragedy struck in Miami Shores. According to Miami-Dade police, Miami Shores cops responding to a domestic violence call found a couple in a vehicle in a parking lot,
the woman with markings that looked as if she’d been struck.
But before police could make an arrest, the man in the vehicle took off on foot. He didn’t get far, before a train traveling south on tracks crossing Northeast Sixth Avenue just south of a Publix Supermarket struck and killed him. Police didn’t say if they were chasing the man when he was killed. Body parts were found on the track two blocks north. As of Wednesday, police hadn’t released the man’s name.
Then, just before noon and back down south near The Falls, a cleaning crew found a man and a woman dead inside a short-term rental home at Southwest 136th Street and 92nd Avenue. Police haven’t said if the two are a couple and had not released the cause of death by Wednesday afternoon. They’ve asked anyone who might have information for assistance.
And finally, on Tuesday evening in the northern end of the county, Miami-Dade Special Response Team members shot an armed man dead who had barricaded himself in a home with his family at Northwest Miami Court and 171st Street. Police said they were called to the home because of a family dispute and were able to get family members out.
Miami-Dade Det. Alvaro Zabaleta said shots were fired after a “confrontation.” He didn’t say if the barricaded man fired his weapon. A law enforcement source said he did not.