Mayor: Our handling of ousted cop was ‘great’

Mayor Carlos Hernández said Tuesday that the arrest of a now federally charged cop accused of sexually assaulting multiple women was prompted by the “great investigation” led by his own city.

“We have done everything, this office. From the moment he was arrested, he was terminated,” Hernández told the Miami Herald after a City Council meeting Tuesday night. “Everything was followed to the ‘t,’ where, thanks to the investigation of the city of Hialeah, the FBI was able to make an arrest.”

Hernández, who has previously attacked the Herald’s coverage of his city by calling it “racist,” also defended Hialeah Police Chief Sergio Velázquez’s handling of sexual abuse claims against former Sgt. Jesús Menocal Jr. that date back to 2015.

The chief called another journalist who has written about Menocal a “liar,” and the mayor noted that the Herald had sent a “pretty, little” reporter with a “nice face” to cover the meeting.

Menocal was accused of sexually abusing four women and girls in 2014 and 2015, according to a Herald investigation published in November. A Hialeah police internal affairs review in 2016 showed evidence of Menocal’s sexual misconHialeah duct and violations of departmental policy. But — contrary to the mayor’s assertion Tuesday — Velázquez did not discipline Menocal, and the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office chose not to file sexual battery charges.

Instead, Velázquez gave Menocal a “merit” raise that was recommended by the Hialeah Police Department in March 2016 — months before the state attorney’s office formally closed out its review of the evidence and one year before the FBI would follow up with an investigation.

After the Herald published the story on Menocal’s alleged sexual misconduct, he was arrested on civil rights charges by federal authorities in December following a two-year-long investigation. He was accused of detaining two women, one of them 17 years old, and coercing them into sexual contact.

“To the victims, the city of Hialeah did its part to make sure that the arrest was made and now it’s up to the jury to find this officer guilty or not,” said Hernández when asked if he had any message to send to the women accusing Menocal.

Records reviewed by the Herald show Menocal, 32, was also accused of impregnating a cadet while he was a law enforcement training adviser at Miami Dade College’s School of Justice in 2017 and told the cadet to say she had fabricated the story. No formal investigation was launched at MDC because the cadet, who had confessed she was pregnant with Menocal’s baby, retracted her statement.

Velázquez, who previously told the Herald the cadet had “fabricated” her story, refused to answer any other questions Tuesday. He has labeled the Herald’s reporting false.

“The situation your reporter has made with his half-truths, I’m not going to waste my time and address it, OK? I’m done,” the police chief said.

“He’s a liar,” the chief added.

Despite the mayor’s statement, the city has so far not released documents verifying that Velázquez informed federal authorities of Menocal’s alleged behavior.

“I don’t have that here, but if we had not given it to the FBI, how did the FBI know about it? This was a Hialeah investigation from the beginning, taken to the FBI, to the state attorney,” the mayor argued Tuesday. “Thanks to the great investigation, this officer was arrested and that was working with the FBI.”

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office released emails showing it referred the case to the Justice Department’s civil rights division in 2016 after declining to charge Menocal.

The city has also not provided evidence that, as Velázquez has asserted, police informed MDC of an investigation into the alleged relationship between Menocal and the 22-year-old cadet in his class.

“We brought this up,” Hernández said, calling the Herald’s reporting “untruthful.”

“I don’t know what the issue with the Miami Herald is,” he added.

College officials say they never received a memo or any other indication that police were investigating Menocal’s conduct.

During the council’s previous meeting two weeks earlier, the mayor harshly criticized the coverage of Hialeah’s handling of Menocal, and said: “I’ll challenge your editor anytime she wants to go [on] a Spanish station with me. I’ll put her in her place.”