Man accused of beating trans woman to death as she slept near Miami City Ballet is arrested
A man caught on video surveillance beating a transgender woman to death — smashing her on her head and face with a pipe as she slept near the
Miami City Ballet building in Miami Beach on Tuesday — was arrested, police said.
Gregory Fitzgerald Gibert, 53, who was out on probation, is charged with the second-degree murder of 37-year-old Andrea Doria Dos Passos, who police said was homeless.
Gibert was booked into a MiamiDade County jail where he remained as of Wednesday afternoon.
Around 7 a.m. Tuesday, an employee
Andrea Doria Dos Passos of Miami City Ballet, 2200 Liberty Ave., spotted the woman on the ground and tried to wake her up, according to Gibert’s arrest report. When the employee saw blood around her, he called 911.
Paramedics found her body partially covered by a sweater, with lacerations on her face and back of her head and two wooden sticks lodged into her nostrils.
“One stick exited over the right eye and the other appeared lodged into the nose cavity,” police said on Gibert’s arrest report. “A puncture wound was also located in the victim’s chest.”
Surveillance footage from Miami City Ballet shows the woman lying down by the building’s entrance around midnight, police said in the report.
Hours later, a man is seen looking around and at
her, walking away and picking up a pipe from the ground before sitting on a bench near the woman, police said. That’s when the man — later identified as Gibert — walked toward the woman and “begins to strike her with the metal pipe about the head and face several times.”
After beating her, Gibert is seen walking away and placing the pipe in a nearby trash can, where cops found it, police said.
After matching Gibert’s description to one of his previous mugshots, police found him at 1524 NW
First Ave. in Miami hours later before taking him to the police station, where he declined to speak with officers. Police say Gibert was wearing some of the same bloodstained clothes he had on during the attack.
Gibert was behind bars at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, jail records show.
The woman’s killing is not being investigated as a hate crime, according to
Miami Beach police.
“We have no evidence indicating that she was targeted solely based on her sexuality and, or gender,” police spokesman Officer Christopher Bess told the Miami Herald on Wednesday.
The motive behind the woman’s killing was not immediately known.
But Flamingo Democrats, the Miami-Dade chapter of the Florida LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus, called for the State Attorney’s Office to add a hate-crime enhancement to Gibert’s second-degree murder charge.
“The safety of all residents of Miami Beach and
Miami-Dade County should be of the utmost importance, especially those in marginalized communities such as our transgender community,” the organization said.
The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office Hate Crimes Unit is reviewing the case, the agency said Wednesday.
“The SAO Hate Crimes Unit reviews every criminal offense that has the potential of being motivated by hate, to see if Florida’s hate crime enhancement is applicable to the specific situation,” the agency said.
Joe Saunders, senior political director with Equality Florida, told the
Miami Herald that the “level of overkill” that Dos Passos experienced “is often one of the hallmarks of hate-motivated violence.”
“So whenever a transgender person is murdered, especially when it is with such brutality, the question should be asked about whether or not this was a hate-motivated crime,” Saunders said.
The beating death happened six days after Gibert was sentenced to four years probation for aggravated assault with no intent to kill and attempted robbery with a weapon. Gibert also got one year in prison for those crimes from April 5, 2023, but his 377 days in county corrections custody before sentencing counted as time served.
Gibert’s address is listed as “unknown” on the current arrest form, but his Florida Department of Corrections online entry says he was living in an apartment in the aforementioned two-living unit house on Northwest First Avenue in Miami.
His aliases include Gregory Fitzgerald Gilbert and Fitzgerald Gibert.