South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Bullets fly on I-95, FHP shrugs
The 10-year-old who was in the backseat still has nightmares about his brother’s shooting on I-95. There was so much blood. “My brother, he’s dying!” the boy sobbed to a 911 operator that day.
The Florida Highway Patrol still hasn’t caught the shooter who paralyzed 16-year-old Ja’Noah Piner as he and his brothers headed home from a birthday party in March. For FHP, that’s not unusual.
Just three months after the shooting, the agency declared the case “CLOSED. All available leads extinguished.” Yet FHP hadn’t even tested DNA evidence found at the scene.
Shootings on I-95 are on the rise and now erupt roughly twice a month, but the agency charged with enforcing law and order on Florida’s busiest highway says there is little it can do. FHP’s track record backs that up: The South
Florida Sun Sentinel reviewed 29 shootings on I-95 in the past year and found evidence not pursued, cases closed quickly without results, and one case left dormant for nine months, then solved overnight after the agency’s track record was questioned.
The FHP major in charge in Broward and Palm Beach counties said there is not much the agency can do unless the victim solves the case with a tag number. One woman did just that, yet FHP
didn’t bother to bring in the accused for a lineup for nine months, during which time he allegedly terrorized other motorists.
When a man who opened fire on a truck driver turned himself in, claiming self-defense, FHP made an arrest but then bungled the case: prosecutors rejected it because FHP didn’t obtain a sufficient statement from the trucker.
Police presence on I-95 is sorely lacking, the Sun Sentinel reported in an investigation this fall. Fewer troopers cover I-95 today than they did 20 years ago. Dangerous drivers, drunks and even shooters can menace others without ever encountering a state trooper, and with little fear of arrest.
”An innocent kid”
Like most of the shootings reviewed by the Sun Sentinel, the one that paralyzed Ja’Noah was sparked by road rage.
He and three of his brothers were driving north on I-95 in Hollywood after a toddler’s birthday party at Dave & Buster’s arcade. They said a stranger cut them off near their exit. Ja’Noah’s older brother sped around and cut back in front of the BMW. Words were shouted from car windows. Then gunshots rang out.
“Breathe slow, breathe slow, please … Don’t, don’t, don’t die!” another brother pleaded with Ja’Noah, slumped over in the passenger seat with a bullet hole in his neck.
Fort Lauderdale police got there first; FHP arrived about 20 minutes later. Two Fort Lauderdale officers and a detective were given an award by the police chief for saving the teen’s life.
Ja’Noah spent months in the hospital, and then in a rehab center in Jacksonville. Now he requires help from nurses all day and night. He spends his time like most teenagers, playing with his cell phone, but controlling it with voice commands. What he misses is simple: “Playing games and moving.”
Another of his brothers, Kelvin L. Jackson, said it’s important to the family that troopers catch the shooter. “He was a grown man who had no need to shoot anybody,” Jackson said, especially “an innocent kid. My brother was a kid.”
Case closed, unsolved
Sitting by her son’s bed in October, Jacqueline Piner still thought FHP was looking for the man who paralyzed her son. But according to the case file, they weren’t.
An FHP investigative report obtained by the Sun Sentinel shows that FHP closed the investigation into the shooting of Ja’Noah Piner on June 16 — just three months after the shooting.
FHP requires investigators to close cases within three months, though troopers can get more time for complicated cases, according to department policy. Other agencies queried by the Sun Sentinel said they have no rule of thumb, and give each case the amount of time it deserves.
At FHP, even cases with evidence were shelved, inexplicably.
In late October, Jacqueline Piner told the Sun Sentinel that she and her sons hadn’t heard much from FHP. She said they did notify her they hadn’t tested evidence from the scene. Because of the pandemic, she said, they’d not checked for DNA on a cup the shooter threw at her son’s car.
A Fort Lauderdale crime scene report shows that officers found a Gatorade bottle filled with blue liquid at the crime scene and swabbed it for DNA and dusted for fingerprints. The report states that the evidence was available “in the event the lead detective deems further analysis is necessary.”
Reached by the Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale Det. Carlos Fargnoli said FHP was leading the case, and he was assisting. “I’m not going to discuss the case with you. I’m sorry,” he said.
After the Sun Sentinel began questioning, however, Fargnoli contacted FHP to inquire whether FHP had arranged to test the samples taken from the bottle. Only then, Dec. 11, were the samples sent to the Broward Sheriff’s Office crime lab for analysis — nine months after the attack.
FHP declined to answer specific questions about its handling of the case.
FHP doesn’t have a specialized crime scene crew or crime lab, and relies on other agencies for help. The FHP’s statewide staff of about 48 in the Bureau of Criminal Investigations and Intelligence spends much of its time on far less violent crimes; their typical fare is theft of cars, cargo or identity, and fraud with driver licenses and odometers.
Despite that, FHP holds onto most of the shooting cases — and then quickly deems some of them unsolvable, the Sun Sentinel found.
Shameka Early’s case was closed in just a month, records show. The MiamiDade transit driver was on her way to work early one June morning when she changed lanes and gunfire flew. Her car was riddled with bullets and her hand grazed.
“You know, on a regular road, you have a better chance of getting caught,” she said of the mystery shooter. “But if you’re on I-95, it’s like anything goes.”
Local rapper Saucy Santana’s case was shelved quickly, too. Santana was shot and wounded on I-95 in December 2019 after leaving a Miami club. The case was closed about two months later, records show.
In a song, “You Can’t Kill Me,” Santana memorializes the shooting, and curses that the police didn’t care.
Stand Your Ground
Florida politicians made clear that motorists are free to pack heat while driving. State law says guns in cars must be “not readily accessible” and “securely encased,” such as in a glovebox or center console. “Citizens have a constitutional right to possess and keep legally owned firearms within their motor vehicles for self-defense and other lawful purposes,” Florida law says.
On Florida’s busiest highway, those rights and flaring tempers can make for a combustible combination.
A dust-up between a trucker and a driver in a Camry led to a shooting, and an immediate confession to 911. But the case fell apart and no one was prosecuted.
Stanley Dumervil, 30, told 911 he was driving his Toyota Camry southbound in northern Broward County May when an 18-wheeler tried to run him off the road. Fearing for his life, he said, he opened fire, sending bullets through the windshield and driver’s side door of the 18 wheeler.
Then he pulled over on the shoulder, near the Copans Road exit in Pompano Beach, and called 911 to
Dumervil told the Sun Sentinel that Florida law allows him to defend himself against a deadly threat. He said it was raining, traffic was heavy and the trucker was honking and trying to cut him off.
“It’s Stand Your Ground,” Dumervil said, referring to the 2005 law that permits people to respond with deadly force when confronted with deadly force. “It’s Stand Your Ground, straight up. “
Truck driver Yoan L. Prado Valdes, of Palm Springs, Fla., now 39, said he wasn’t trying to run anyone off the road. He said a wreck in the far left lane was blocking his path and he needed to move over.
He escaped unscratched, but he said five bullets ripped through his truck, cracking the windshield and busting the door’s electrical system, which will cost several thousand dollars to fix.
He could have been killed.
The shooter wasn’t prosecuted.
A trooper found the gun wedged next to the driver’s seat in Dumervil’s Camry and “could see a fired casing on the front right seat.” The trooper arrested Dumervil on charges of shooting a deadly missile and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
But FHP botched the case. Broward prosecutors dropped all the charges, saying the information FHP provided was insufficient to file charges.
“The need for a taped sworn statement was communicated to the officer,” Paula McMahon, spokeswoman for the Broward State Attorney’s Office, said in an email. “It may be that the victim did not respond to the officer or stopped cooperating but, for whatever reason, prosecutors did not receive a detailed, taped sworn statement and declined to file charges after deferring the decision a number of times.”
Valdes had given FHP a brief, handwritten statement in Spanish. He told the Sun Sentinel that no one informed him there was a problem with the statement he gave.
Evidence shelved for months
Faced with questions about highway shootings,
FHP boasted in a Nov. 25 press release that it had solved a gun-related road rage case.
It turned out to be a case the agency let languish for nine months — even though the victim got video of the car and the license plate of the driver who leveled a gun at her. After that ninemonth pause, “the case was resumed” on Nov. 20, documents show, and an arrest was made in two days’ time.
Jatoria Traneisha Chambers, 25, told the Sun Sentinel she showed a trooper the tag number she’d documented on video right after a man in the car menaced her with a gun on Feb. 19.
The man was trying to get in her turning lane at the Pembroke Road exit ramp off I-95 south, she said. He pointed a gun at her, she said, so she stopped and let him in. As he passed, he rolled down his back window and fixed the gun on her, the police report states. Chambers followed him, using her cell phone to shoot video of the black Infiniti and its license plate.
“I was scared,” she said. “I was really shocked, like people have road rage, you know, you honk your horn, you cuss them out, everybody does that, but to pull his gun out! OK, but he actually pointed it at me! I was, like: ‘Are you serious? You’re doing all this to get over?’”
When FHP finally arrested 28-year-old Ryan Karl Bryan nine months later, on Nov. 22, the agency said that after his attack on Chambers in February, Bryan went on to menace other motorists with “aggressive driving, improper display of a firearm, and a shooting incident.”
The Highway Patrol gave no additional details of those incidents, despite repeated requests by the Sun Sentinel. No additional court cases were opened against Bryan in Broward County.
Gary W. Cole II, a Fort Lauderdale attorney representing Bryan, told the Sun Sentinel he was unaware of “these other potential incidents” and that he’s advised Bryan not to make any public comments about his arrest. As of Dec. 16, prosecutors still had not filed formal charges.
Chambers said she’s on I-95 every day, and rarely sees police. “If you have them constantly driving on 95, or even visible when on the side of 95, a lot of people wouldn’t even speed half the time, so definitely they would not be pulling out guns randomly like that.”
FHP ‘should have been there’
Robert Chandler, the FHP major over Broward and Palm Beach counties, said it’s almost impossible to solve the crimes because they are unpredictable, and victims usually get no identifying information. Roadside cameras capture images of the traffic for state transportation officials, but they do not record.
“They’re just so random,” Chandler said of the shootings. “That is the challenge because you just don’t know when and where that could happen. I mean you could have a trooper at every one mile and that would be the only way to deal with it.”
At a press conference about holiday enforcement in late November, Major Chandler said shootings on Interstate 95 are on the rise, but didn’t mention anything the agency is doing about it.
“Unfortunately in 2020 we have had a notable increase in this type of violence,” he said, blaming it on the stress of the pandemic.
“Try to avoid the situation,” he advised, until we get back to “somewhat normal — what we consider normal — for South Florida.”
Asked what FHP is doing to address the increase in shootings, FHP spokesman Capt. Peter Bergstresser said the agency “invests significant resources” into investigating shootings, but they “usually occur at high rates of speed and, in some cases, across extended stretches of roadway, which often results in limited witness information or evidence that is critical or necessary for investigators to identify suspects and make arrest.
“As with all investigations, physical evidence, witness descriptions of a suspect and witness cooperation are critical to the progress of a case, and to establishing the probable cause necessary to make an arrest. Investigators routinely partner with local law enforcement agencies to exhaust every available l ead to solve cases. Additionally, investigators will reopen closed cases as new information or evidence becomes available.”
Using FHP investigative reports, court documents, agency press releases, major-incident logs and news accounts, the Sun Sentinel documented at least 29 shootings since December 2019 on I-95 in Florida. The majority of the shootings identified along the 379-mile highway took place in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
Shootings on I-95 more than tripled this year compared to five years ago, with 29 versus just nine in 2015, the Sun Sentinel found, based on incident reports released by FHP under Florida’s public records law.
Two victims died, including FHP Trooper Joseph Bullock, 42, and Melissa Gonzalez, 22, a college graduate from Miami who was hit by a stray bullet.
Of the 29 shootings the Sun Sentinel examined, police caught the alleged shooters in 11 cases, or about 38 percent. By comparison, the FBI clearance rate for aggravated assault by U.S. metropolitan counties is 60 percent.
The majority of cases were closed without results — at least half of them within about three months, the Sun Sentinel found.
Megan O’Matz can be reached at momatz@sunsentinel.com or 954-3564518. Brittany Wallman can be reached at bwallman@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4541. Follow her on Twitter @Brittany Wallman