South Beach hotel manager was beaten. Facebook photos led detective to a suspect

After an irate guest savagely pummeled the manager at the Riviera Hotel in South Beach last month, detectives seemingly had little to go on.

They had jarring surveillance footage, but the attacker’s face was mostly obscured by a towel. They identified one of the attacker’s friends, but he refused to speak to cops. But that friend did help in an indirect way, police said.

“He forgot he had a Facebook that was open,” said Miami Beach Detective Carlos Corvo.

Corvo said he combed through countless public Facebook photos and the man’s 2,000-plus friends. Corvo found photos of the friend with a man named Tehrron Greene, 22, of Norristown, Penn., who generally resembled the attacker. But that alone wasn’t enough, so Corvo called Greene — who he said promptly admitted to attacking the Riviera hotel manager, as the detective secretly recorded, according to court documents.

“He gave me certain details of the case only [the attacker] would know,” Corvo said in an interview.

Greene was arrested in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, accused of the Feb. 12 attack that severely injured hotel manager Zachary Burke. Greene will now be extradited to Miami-Dade to stand trial on a charge of burglary with battery.

On Wednesday, Greene remained in a Pennsylvania jail. It was unclear it he has a defense lawyer.

Greene has been in the spotlight before, but for more positive reasons. Because of a troubled home life, he successfully attended the Ron Burton Training Village, a camp for at-risk youth, for several years. The camp highlighted his story in a video set to inspirational music.

“My journey has been one continuous struggle,” he said in the 2014 video entitled the “The Journey of Tehrron Greene.”

The episode unfolded at the Riviera, after hotel management suspected that a Pennsylvania man named Marcus Brooks had registered the room with a fraudulent credit card. Brooks, who was with another man and two women, was asked to leave, according to an arrest warrant.

Brooks and the women agreed and walked outside. But the other man, Greene, “became enraged and jumped the counter viciously attacking victim Burke” as the manager tried calling police. The attack happened in a small utility closet next to the counter.

Bruised and his face swollen, Burke is now seeking treatment for a “possible broken orbital [bone] and damage to his left cornea,” the warrant said.

Only Brooks’ name was on file with the hotel.

When detectives finally got Brooks on the phone, he refused to speak. After Corvo combed through his Facebook and found Greene, he sent photos to Philadelphia police, who verified his identity, the warrant said.

Another hotel employee then picked out Greene, from a photo lineup, as the attacker, the warrant said. But Greene would not answer his cellphone.

“So I did the next best thing, I called his mom,” Corvo said.

Greene’s mother convinced him to call the detective. Finally, as the detective recorded, the two connected on the phone. According to the warrant, Greene immediately admitted he was was the attacker but that the manager “verbally mistreated him.”

Greene said “he was wrong for what he did but was still wanting to know how he got identified.”

Corvo, with help from the State Attorney’s Office, secured an arrest warrant and flew up to Pennsylvania this week to arrest the man. Greene agreed to speak without a lawyer.

“He gave a full confession,” Corvo said.

Stocks closed lower Wednesday as another rise in bond yields fueled concerns on Wall Street that higher inflation is on the way as the economy picks up.

The S&P 500’s pullback was the benchmark index’s second straight loss after clocking its best day in nine months on Monday. Technology companies bore the brunt of the selling.

U.S. government bond yields rose after easing a day earlier. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note climbed to 1.47% from 1.41%.

When bond yields rise quickly, as they have in recent weeks, it forces Wall Street to rethink the value of stocks, making each $1 of profit that companies earn a little less valuable. Technology stocks are most vulnerable to this reassessment, in large part because their recent dominance left them looking even pricier than the rest of the market.

On the flipside, banks benefit when bond yields rise, because it allows them to charge higher rates on mortgages and many other kinds of loans.

The S&P 500 dropped 50.57 points (1.3%) to 3,819.72. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 121.43 (0.4%) to 31,270.09. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite lost 361.04 (2.7%) to 12,997.75. Traders also sold off smaller company stocks, dragging down the Russell

2000 index 23.72 (1.1%) to 2,207.79.

The official June 1 start of hurricane season isn’t changing — at least not yet. But after six years in a row with named storms forming ahead of that longtime opening date, the National Hurricane Center is pondering an earlier start and has decided to push up its own monitoring schedule.

The NHC announced Tuesday that it will begin issuing daily outlooks at 8 a.m. on May 15 — two weeks earlier than in the past. The decision comes after the 2020 hurricane season shattered records with 30 named storms, including two that formed in May.

Throughout the six months of the season, hurricane scientists post regular updates on marine and atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico — the places where tropical systems develop. The reports are the earliest indicators of potential storms in the works.

In the past, updates weren’t issued routinely, only if something popped up in one of the basins they monitor. Now the statements will come on a regular schedule.

Pre-season storms have grown increasingly common in recent years; about half of the past 10 to 15 seasons have had an early storm. Experts, including at the NHC, attribute that to better satellite monitoring that allows them to identify what some call “junk storms.”

“Many of the May systems are short-lived, hybrid (subtropical) systems that are now being identified because of better monitoring and policy changes that now name subtropical storms,” Dennis Feltgen, spokesperson for the NHC, said in a statement.

But some research has shown that climate change may play a role as well, by heating up the sea surface and lengthening the window for storms to form. The science of how climate change affects hurricanes is complicated, but there’s growing scientific confidence that global warming could lead to wetter and stronger storms in the future, although NOAA research suggests that fewer storms could form in a hotter world.

For now, the official start date of hurricane season isn’t changing, although a team of experts from the hurricane center and several National Weather Service regions will meet this year to discuss it.

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