South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Revisiting the Bowe shooting
Hallandale Beach SWAT team killed Black man in botched raid. The fallout continues years later.
HALLANDALE BEACH — Under the cover of darkness, 15 SWAT officers descended on a small pink home in northwest Hallandale Beach one morning in 2014. The mission: raid the home of a man informants had purchased small amounts of crack cocaine from over the last year.
Five officers made their way down a dark alley leading to the back door. They shot and killed an elderly pit bull that allegedly lunged at them. Officers saw a light flicker in the home and knew the element of surprise was compromised.
After busting down the door, an officer said he saw a dark figure standing in the threshold holding a shiny object. Without a word, he fired a shotgun round into his chest. When the smoke cleared, Howard Bowe Jr., 34, fell to the ground. Days later he died.
Six years after police killed him, his death is
drawing increasing attention in the midst of nationwide protests over police brutality.
The shiny object Bowe was holding turned out to be a broom. The officer who shot him was cleared by a grand jury. Bowe’s family received a payout from the city. Many city officials believed the issue to be resolved.
But a South Florida Sun Sentinel review of hun
dreds pages of police reports, internal affairs reports and documents from the Broward State Attorney’s Office show the raid was botched in many ways and the results of the subsequent investigation of Bowe’s death — including whether he ever held the broom — were far from conclusive.
The renewed focus on Bowe’s death has exposed long-simmering tension between police and the city’s Black neighborhoods as a result of a string of unarmed Black men shot by police over the past two decades and what they perceive as an overreliance on aggressive, military-style SWAT raids for low-level narcotics dealers.
All 10 members of the city’s SWAT team resigned this month and said they feel unsupported by city leaders in the face of criticism for their past operations. Six of those officers — Michael Haire, Pietro Roccisano, Christopher Allen, Jaime Cerna, Carmine Tufano and David Gonzalez — were involved in Bowe’s raid, according to a police report.
Calls for more scrutiny of Bowe’s death have been labeled unfair by city leaders, who say his case has long been closed. But many, including Bowe’s family, say fairness is precisely what they seek.
“Everything sort of felt as if it was swept under the rug,” said Corneesa Bowe, Howard’s sister.
‘He was loved’
Howard Bowe Jr. was born and raised in the northwest section of Hallandale Beach, where his grandparents first settled 70 years prior. The city itself was incorporated in 1927.
“We basically built this city,” Corneesa Bowe said of her family.
Bowe said her grandfather was an entrepreneurial man, opening businesses in the city’s northwest, and her brother followed in his footsteps. Before his death, he bought and sold used cars and owned an operated a car-wash business and lawn maintenance business.
Bowe remembers her brother as a humble and peaceful man. He was a father to three children. He was also generous and known to pay for items in the supermarket on behalf of others who couldn’t afford it.
Sports were important to him, and Bowe said her brother had always been a supporter of local youth football leagues, often buying equipment for them.
“I know people want to paint an ugly picture of him,” she said. “But he was loved in this community.”
Arrested for cocaine
Corneesa Bowe declined to speak about the reasons why some have painted an “ugly” picture of her brother, namely his criminal record. She said his past and alleged actions in no way justify his death. “My brother did not deserve to die like he did.”
In 1998, Howard Bowe was arrested for possession with intent to distribute cocaine, according to court records. Over the next decade he would be convicted three times on cocaine possession charges, with the first sentence being the most severe: 37 days in jail and 18 months of probation.
By 2013 Bowe was a known drug dealer in Hallandale Beach, according to a Hallandale Beach Police Department internal affairs report. Over the next year, police used confidential informants to buy small amounts of crack cocaine from him.
After a controlled buy of $100 on April 29, 2014, police obtained a warrant for a SWAT team search of his home on May 8, 2014, according to police statements in a report.
In a strategy meeting before the early morning raid, officers discussed intelligence they’d gotten from a confidential informant in 2013, who said he had observed Bowe to have guns in his home, including an AK-47.
Forcing their way in
Fifteen SWAT officers arrived at Bowe’s home on Northwest Fourth Street at 6 a.m. A line of five officers made their way down a back alley to the rear door where Bowe was known to sell drugs.
Bowe’s dog, a 13-year-old pit bull named Tank, was chained to a water faucet near the door and began to bark and lunge at officers, according to their statements. SWAT officer Michael McKenzie shot the dog once. When the dog rose to its feet, Sgt. Paul Heiser shot the dog in the head, according to a police report.
Officers said they noticed a light flicker inside the home. They were supposed to follow protocol and knock and announce their entry. Some officers said they heard a detective announce himself numerous times. Others said they heard nothing. The detective charged with making the announcement
Michael McKenzie, a Hallandale Beach SWAT officer who shot and killed Howard Bowe Jr. in 2014, told a grand jury that Bowe was holding a metallic looking object that turned out to be a broom, pictured here.
Corneesa Bowe, Howard Bowe’s sister
said he decided not to announce himself because of the gunshots.
Instead, two officers took a pry bar and a battering ram to the door. But opening it took longer than it should. “We were just standing there waiting, waiting, waiting,” said one officer.
The broom
Once the door opened, officers and other witnesses reported two loud bangs, according to police reports and state attorney files. One bang was a flash grenade deployed by an officer who feared their cover was blown. The other was the sound of Officer McKenzie shooting Bowe with his shotgun.
McKenzie said he fired seconds before the grenade went off, according to an internal affairs report.
He said the door “flew open” and it was dark. After turning on the flashlight attached to his shotgun, McKenzie said he saw someone holding a metallic object standing in the doorway and said he held it “in a manner consistent with someone holding a long gun,” according to the report. He said that moments after he fired one shot, Bowe said, “You hit me.”
According to a grand jury report after McKenzie was not indicted in 2016, jurors said that given the details gathered by police — suggesting possible weapons in the home — and the compromised nature of the raid, McKenzie was justified in fearing the object Bowe held may have been a gun.
Therefore, they said, he was justified in believing he was in danger and responding with force.
But the object wasn’t a gun. It was an aluminum broom. And whether Bowe ever held it is far from a settled matter.
McKenzie is the only officer who reported seeing Bowe hold the broom. Some officers reported seeing a broom nearby on the ground after Bowe was already shot. Others said it leaned on a cabinet. Others did not see the broom at all.
One officer said he moved the broom outside while applying aid to Bowe, possibly compromising its location before a crime-scene analysis team arrived to help reconstruct events.
According to an internal affairs report, the DNA evidence from the broom was collected at the scene but never submitted for forensic analysis because the state attorney never requested the analysis. Within the internal affairs report, other investigators speculated that the DNA might not be useful because the item would have likely had Bowe’s DNA on it before the shooting.
Bowe’s family and their attorneys believe Bowe never stood in the doorway and never held the broom.
“That’s a cover-up,” said Corneesa Bowe, who lived in the house behind her brother during the raid and heard everything. With so many officers surrounding the home, she said she does not understand why McKenzie did not issue any verbal warnings before he fired. “He got shot like an animal,” she said. “His death was not fair.”
According to a medical examiner’s report, the shotgun blast entered Bowe’s upper torso near the shoulder and sloped “distinctly downward.”
Fort Lauderdale attorney Greg Lauer, who represented Bowe’s family in a federal lawsuit, interpreted that to mean Bowe was shot from above and was likely on his knees and argued to the court that this information contradicted the narrative about his standing in the doorway.
Clarity was never reached: Police and the state attorney’s office never reconstructed the scene before the grand jury to determine Bowe’s position, according to an internal affairs report.
After Bowe was shot, he was handcuffed and treated for aid, according to police statements. One officer said Bowe asked if he was going to die.
Officers searched his home and found his 15-year-old son, Howard Bowe III, in his bed.
Corneesa Bowe said police dragged her nephew over his dying father, handcuffed him, roughed him up and took him to the police station. She said she had to fight to get inside the station and end an interrogation.
Police initially said they released the boy to family at the scene and he was driven voluntarily to the station, but statements from a detective in an internal investigations report agreed with Corneesa Bowe’s version of events.
Meanwhile, the boy’s father was rushed to a hospital. He fought for 11 days before dying on May 19, 2014.
After the raid
About 19 grams of cocaine were found in Bowe’s home, according to a police report. An investigator estimated the street value to be about $1,000. Twenty pistol bullets and an empty gun box were found, but no guns.
The community and Bowe’s family were given little answers about why he was shot. Many wondered why Bowe’s home needed to be raided in the first place and said it was another example of excessive force in the mostly Black neighborhood.
According to a 2015 New Times news article that was cited in the complaint of a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Bowe’s family in 2016,
38 SWAT raids took place in Hallandale Beach between 2006 and
2014 and 92% occurred in the northwest part of the city. Often the raids turned up little to no drugs. On at least two occasions the wrong house was broken into.
Hallandale Beach is about 19% Black, according to 2010 census data. And the majority of Black residents live in the west side of the city, according to Brian Stewart, a community activist and writer and editor of journal articles, who lived in the northwest not far from Bowe.
In 2017, about half of all households in Hallandale Beach reported incomes of $25,000 or less, according to Internal Revenue Service statistics.
Hallandale Beach had 1,766 incidents of violent crime in 2014, which was higher than other small cities such as Cooper City, which recorded 482 that year, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. After a spike of 1,803 incidents in 2016, Hallandale Beach’s violent crimes have been on a gradual decline. In
2019, the city recorded 1,422 violent crimes.
Within two months of Bowe’s death in 2014, the Hallandale Beach City Commission and Dwayne Flournoy, the chief of police at the time, began the process of hiring Ohio-based consultants Greenwood & Streicher to review the police department’s use-offorce practices.
A month before the review started in January of 2015, city officials publicly announced they were bringing in the firm as a proactive measure after public scrutiny for having fired on citizens eight times within five years.
The report identified a need for more use-of-force training and reporting, more accountability from internal affairs and the integration of body cameras.
It didn’t find any deep, pervasive issues in the department and said very little about the SWAT team. Community activists criticized the review, saying the firm that handled it was inexperienced and did little to reach out to community members.
But Scott Greenwood, a constitutional rights attorney, told the Sun Sentinel that he and his partner, a former Cincinnati chief of police, have over 80 years of experience in police accountability work. He also said they conducted a thorough and impartial review that included multiple visits to the city, full access to police records and interviews with over 100 people, including community members.
“We’re not just spring chickens,” Greenwood said.
After the report, a number of police policies were changed, including to deter officers from firing into vehicles and improve internal review processes. The department also became one of the first in South Florida to use body cameras in 2015.
In 2016, Officer McKenzie was pardoned by the grand jury and cleared in an internal affairs investigation. In 2018, the City Commission approved a $425,000 settlement for Bowe’s surviving children after a number of attempted motions to dismiss by the city were successfully rebutted by family attorneys.
However, when the City Commission voted on the settlement at a meeting in 2018, speakers, including some members of Bowe’s family, were not given the opportunity to speak and no city commissioners made any comments about his death before voting.
While city officials and the police department believed they were closing the book on Bowe’s shooting, family members and others in the community believed they were only sweeping the circumstances of his death under the rug.
“They never acknowledged that anything could have been done better,” said Sabrina Javellana, vice mayor of Hallandale Beach, who attended the 2018 settlement decision before she was elected.
Back in the spotlight
Javellana, 22, was in high school when Bowe was killed but learned about his case in 2017 after joining the Black Lives Matter Alliance Broward. Since then, she has marched with members of his family and brought his name up at City Commission meetings since being elected in 2018.
After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the protest movements across the country, she called out Hallandale Beach’s own history of police brutality at a June 3 commission meeting by listing off the names of men killed by city police in recent years — including Bowe; Michael Wilson, a 27-year-old suspected burglar who was shot in a car in 2016; and Eduardo Prieto Jr., a 32-year-old suspected shoplifter who was shot in 2012.
All officers in those shootings were found by grand juries to have used justified force.
At the City Commission meeting, Mayor Joy Cooper said it was unfair to equate Bowe’s death to Floyd’s. “This wasn’t just a stop over or pulling somebody over for, you know, a reported $20 bill,” she said of the SWAT raid. “This was a serious matter.”
Javellana said in an interview that grand jury proceedings, which are sealed from the public, do not provide enough accountability to families or communities. “It’s secret,” she said. “It’s not like we can read a transcript. We don’t know if the State Attorney’s Office
actually pushed for an indictment.”
A spokeswoman from the state attorney’s office said state law prohibits them from disclosing what happened in the grand jury room, but she said “our prosecutor presented all of the evidence to the grand jury before the jurors made their decision.”
On June 12, a modest protest in front of Hallandale Beach City Hall further stoked tensions when Police Chief Sonia Quiñones took a knee with protesters. During the kneeling, protesters called for the reopening of Bowe’s case.
The next day, the 10 active members of the SWAT team resigned, claiming the team was under-trained, minimally equipped, undermined by their chief and tired of dogged attacks from Javellana.
“She’s riling up the community against cops who were doing their job,” Tony Alfero, a police union attorney who represents members of the SWAT team, said in a recent interview. Alfero also represented Officer McKenzie during his grand jury trial in 2016 and said his client is “considerably upset” that his conduct is making news again despite its being cleared.
During a tense commission meeting on June 17, Javellana, Corneesa Bowe and others asked officials not to reinstate the SWAT team and use the funding for community programs.
“We don’t need a SWAT team,” Bowe said. “You could put grants and subsidies in different programs to help the community.”
However, many Hallandale Beach residents called in to demand just the opposite, saying that disbanding the SWAT team and “defunding” the police was a bad idea. Some called for more funding.
Quiñones said the police department has spent close to $200,000 on SWAT training over the last three years. If the SWAT team doesn’t return, she said, the funds for future training could be reallocated into community policing programs and training.
However, she said she firmly believes in the need for a SWAT team and having “highly trained and skilled officers” at the ready. “There are violent offenders who exist out there,” she said. “Our SWAT teams are the ones who are called upon to handle those situations on the spot.”
Seeking justice
The Broward State Attorney’s Office said it is unlikely that an investigation into Bowe’s death will be reopened unless there is any new material evidence to consider.
Javellana said most people know this. What they want, she said, is for him to not have died in vain. “They just want to see some acknowledgement of Howard’s life,” she said. “Not just, ‘Oh, he was a drug dealer, so he deserved it.‘”
She said she hoped that by saying his name and reminding others of his death and the militarystyle raid that prompted it, a change in attitude toward the policing of neighborhoods like the city’s northwest can be ushered in. Corneesa Bowe agreed. “You think that roughing up our kids and pulling guns on them is going to help?” she said. “You’re only going to build hatred in them.”
She said that while she hasn’t seen much change in policing since the death of her brother, she will stand with any officers on the force who wish to help improve the northwest through community relations and programs, rather than target it like a war zone.
“This community could be beautiful,” she said. “Make the community better, not worse.”
“I know people want to paint an ugly picture of him. But he was loved in this community.”