Family claims Seminoles were negligent in man’s murder
Pierre J. LaCroze parked his Mercedes-Benz on the sixth floor of the Winner’s Way parking garage at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood.
It was a summer night in 2020, and he had ventured there many nights before. That night was going to be like any other — LaCroze arrived with money to spend.
But the jewelry he wore around his neck caught the eye of a young man in the parking garage.
LaCroze, 37, of North Lauderdale, never made it into the casino — or even out of his car. He was shot in the head, and first responders found him inside the car, with the door open, his leg hanging out and jewelry pendants and broken jewelry lying next to him. The father of four died just before 12:30 a.m. on July 16, 2020.
LaCroze’s mother is the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in Broward Circuit Court against the Seminole Tribe and the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, alleging the Tribe was negligent in myriad ways.
The suit says there was not adequate security in the garage that night, there weren’t enough cameras, the cameras that were in place weren’t in the right areas and the Tribe was aware that people had previously been raped, robbed and assaulted in that garage, among several other allegations.
The family’s complaint filed in October says the Tribe knew that its security methods weren’t enough but still did not ramp up the measures. It has been over a year since LaCroze’s family notified the Tribe of their claim, and their legal battle is continuing since there was no settlement agreement.
That battle against the Tribe is a gamble many are not willing to make, said Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University who has written about Florida’s tribal courts, because of sovereign immunity.
And the attorneys representing LaCroze’s family said the litigation will take years, racking up the costs and chipping away at any amount the family and his children may get.
Still, they’re going through with the lawsuit with the hope of bringing to light a flaw they believe sovereign immunity creates: “If you grant immunity to anybody from civil litigation, it gives them less desire or requirement to be careful,” attorney Todd Falzone said.
“They know if a terrible incident like this happens, they’re facing no responsibility for it,” Falzone said.
Seminole Tribe spokesperson Gary Bitner said he couldn’t comment because criminal and civil cases are pending. “It should be noted that a thorough investigation by Seminole Police resulted in the arrest of two suspects, who are being prosecuted by the Broward State Attorney,” Bitner wrote in an email.
‘Desperate for change’
The U.S. Supreme Court first recognized in 1919 that tribes have sovereign immunity the same way states and federal governments do, Jarvis said. That principle, which stems from the kings and queens in England, shields them from lawsuits.
“That left the interesting question of, ‘What about Indian tribes?’ Because they were not the federal government and they were not states, but they were some sort of governmental entity,” Jarvis said.
When the state and Seminole Tribe negotiated their gaming compact, the Seminoles agreed to waive their sovereign immunity to the same extent the state government partially has. And the compact is what allows anyone suing the Seminole Tribe a year period to reach a settlement with the Tribe’s insurance company, Jarvis said.
If no settlement is reached in that year, plaintiffs can then file a lawsuit against the Tribe. Yet there are caps
in place that limit how much a settlement could be — no one can bet on walking away from the legal wrangling with more than $200,000 per person or if there are multiple claimants, $300,000, which is split among them.
Those are caps that the state Legislature put in place decades ago, Jarvis said, and are among the lowest in the country.
As of data from 2018, the Seminole Tribe earned $2.2 billion a year from its seven casinos across the state, Jarvis wrote in the 2018 book about Florida’s tribal courts that he co-authored, “Florida’s Other Courts: Unconventional Justice in the Sunshine State.”
“They have the financial resources to really wear down just about any plaintiff,” Jarvis said. “You have to be very, very wealthy to say, ‘I can go toe-to-toe with the Seminoles.’ ”
Falzone and Josiah Graham, the attorneys representing LaCroze’s estate, are well aware of the uphill battle they’re signing up for. The case could go on for years, Falzone said.
“We could easily spend $100,000 litigating this case. What’s going to be left for those kids?” he said.
And Graham said LaCroze’s children “will have to fight over maybe $300,000 on the best day.”
The murder
One of the allegations in
the lawsuit is that the Tribe “breached its duty to exercise reasonable care for the safety and protection of ” the public, in part, by failing to have adequate security personnel, failing to have an adequate number of guards in visible areas, failing to have security cameras throughout the area and failing to put them in the appropriate places.
Graham said there should have been a security guard patrolling the parking garage — a deterrent he believes could have saved LaCroze’s life.
“The whole infrastructure, their security is flawed,” Graham said. “It looks like they’re getting it right inside of the casino … but you gotta protect these people as they’re exiting the casino, and they failed Pierre that night.”
Dion Javon Brown, Jaleel Arnett Thomas and Brown’s then-girlfriend Jasmine Hamilton were at the casino that night.
They pulled into the parking garage just 15 minutes before LaCroze and went inside, according to an arrest warrant.
Brown left his phone inside of his girlfriend’s car and saw LaCroze parking his Mercedes-Benz three spots away when he went to retrieve it, the warrant says.
Brown didn’t go back to the casino to join Thomas and Hamilton, records say. Instead, he called them, and they met up with him on the sixth floor of the garage.
The three got into Hamilton’s Ford Focus and pulled out to park in another spot. Hamilton later told police that Brown and Thomas talked about the robberygone-wrong moments before it happened, the warrant says.
The men noticed the jewelry LaCroze was wearing, and Brown said LaCroze was “slippin’,” the warrant says.
Thomas asked Brown if he had his gun with him.
Brown changed into a red hooded sweatshirt. Surveillance video from the parking garage shows he walked toward the elevators before he walked out of camera view, records say.
“Go, go, go, I shot him in the head,” the warrant says Brown yelled when he got back to the car.
Thomas and Brown have been in the Broward Main Jail since their arrests in 2020 and are awaiting trial. Hamilton was treated as a witness and never arrested in the case, according to records.
‘Law is really on their sides’
Falzone and Graham’s complaint argues that the deadly robbery was foreseeable based on other shootings, aggravated assaults, rapes and robberies that happened before in the garage.
A 73-year-old man was robbed on the third floor of the garage in 2016. Edenson Major, then 26, stole nearly $2,000 from the man, and the robbery also occurred out of camera view, according to an arrest affidavit.
Major spent time in prison for the offense and was released in 2020.
The LaCroze lawsuit isn’t the first to allege the Tribe had a reasonable expectation of violent crimes at the Hollywood location.
A lawsuit filed in 2020 against the Hard Rock Casino alleged a man was drugged and robbed by two women. That complaint also points out “previous instances of criminal conduct and criminal attacks” against patrons at the Hollywood location.
“We know that it was foreseeable, and how do we know it was foreseeable? Because it happened before, and it keeps happening again and again and again until someone is pretty much executed in their parking lot,” Graham said.
But the problem, Falzone believes, is that security measures will never ramp up with the caps being so low.
“If that compact said their sovereign immunity was waived up to $5 or $10 million, I guarantee you they would have an unbelievable security presence,” Falzone said.
A 2014 lawsuit against the Seminole Tribe and Hard Rock claimed a 17-year-old girl was gambling there and was served alcohol inside the casino to the point where her blood alcohol content was just below the level of anesthesia, and she was later diagnosed with alcohol poisoning.
Joshua Surman was arrested on a sexual battery charge in the attack and was sentenced to four years in prison. He was released in 2018 and was later rearrested in 2019 for violating the terms of his probation. He remains on probation through 2026, court records say.
That lawsuit complaint alleges Surman assaulted her on the parking garage roof, and the entire thing happened within camera view. Still, no employee went to the roof for 30 minutes, the complaint says.
Once an employee got there, the employee contacted the casino’s “monitor room” and was told “to tell the rapist to ‘get a room’ so that he could continue to rape the helpless minor Plaintiff,” the complaint says. The employee then left the minor girl there with Surman, who then left the girl by a trash can on the garage’s third floor.
That case settled for an undisclosed amount. And it could have been greater than $200,000, Jarvis believes.