Video and Nike Air Prestos help convict machine gun-toting man who robbed South Florida lawyer
A TIP LED NORTH MIAMI BEACH DETECTIVES TO DONAVAN BELL.
Robbed by a gunman wielding a machine gun, attorney Robert Roemer excitedly called 911 to report the crime. He ended the call with an exclamation.
“Let’s catch [him],” he told the dispatcher.
Three years later, a jury complied, convicting gunman Donavan Bell in a robbery caught on dramatic surveillance video in the parking garage of Roemer’s North Miami Beach law office.
Bell, 28, was convicted last week of armed robbery and faces up to life in prison at sentencing in several weeks.
Roemer, now of
Palm Beach Gardens, is a longtime general-practice lawyer who handles estate planning, family law and other cases.
The crime happened on the afternoon of Feb. 11, 2019, as Roemer was walking back into his office on the 100 block of Northwest 167th
Street. Bell, prosecutors told the jury, walked through some bushes and confronted the lawyer.
“I felt like the rifle poke me, and I turn around and the guy’s got — like it looked like some type of Soviet assault rifle,” he told WSVN-Fox 7 in 2019. “All of a sudden, the guy wasn’t saying anything. He just had this assault rifle.”
As captured on video, Bell pushed the man’s arm as he fumbled through his pockets. The robber wound up taking the attorney’s wallet — with all of $110 — and his Samsung Galaxy phone. Bell fled in a black Toyota Camry.
A tip led North Miami Beach detectives to Bell, an ex-con who once spent more than a year in Florida prison on a burglary conviction.
At last week’s trial, jurors saw black-andwhite Nike Air Presto sneakers seized in Bell’s apartment.
They resembled ones worn by the gunman, prosecutors Wally Hernandez and Lindsey Johnson told jurors.
Roemer, to police and on the witness stand, identified Bell as the man who robbed him. The six-person jury deliberated about one hour in convicting Bell.
Defense attorneys Steven Yermish and Zak Rosenberg argued there was not enough evidence to show Bell was the culprit. Bell will be sentenced by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jose Fernandez.