A couple who witnessed a deadly police shooting on South Beach say they were menaced by officers, who demanded their video after pointing guns at their heads.
The controversy over the shooting, and over the future of “Urban Beach Week” on South Beach, continues, with this story in today’s Miami Herald:
A West Palm Beach couple who filmed Monday morning’s deadly officer-involved shooting on South Beach has accused officers of intimidation, destroying evidence and twisting the facts in the chaos surrounding the Memorial Day shootings – a charge that police officials say they know nothing about.
… On Thursday, The Miami Herald spoke to the couple that saw the end of the 4 a.m. police chase on Collins Avenue, then watched and filmed from just a few feet away as a dozen officers fired their guns repeatedly into Raymond Herisse’s blue Hyundai. They say the only reason they were able to show the video to a reporter is because they hid a memory card after police allegedly pointed guns at their heads, threw them to the ground and smashed the cell phone that took the video.
The three-minute video captured on Narces Benoit’s HTC EVO phone begins as officers crowd around the east side of Herisse’s car with guns drawn. Roughly 15 seconds into the video, officers open fire.
Benoit filmed the incident from the sidewalk on the northeast corner of 13th Street and Collins Avenue, close enough to see some officers’ faces and individual muzzle flashes.
Shortly after the gunfire ends, an officer points at Benoit and police can be heard yelling for him to turn off the camera. The voices are muffled at times. The 35-year-old car stereo technician drops his hand with the camera and hurries back to his Ford Expedition parked further east on 13th Street.
The video shows Benoit get into the car, where his girlfriend, Ericka Davis, sat in the driver’s seat. He raises his camera and an officer is seen appearing on the driver’s side with his gun drawn, pointed at them.
The video ends as more officers are heard yelling expletives, telling the couple to turn the video off and get out of the car.
“They put guns to our heads and threw us on the ground,” Davis said.
Benoit said a Miami Beach officer grabbed his cell phone, said “You want to be [expletive] Paparazzi?” and stomped on his phone before placing him in handcuffs and shoving the crunched phone in Benoit’s back pocket. He said the couple joined other witnesses already in cuffs and being watched by officers, who were on the lookout for two passengers who, police believe at the time, had bailed out of Herisse’s car. It is still not known whether any passengers were in the car.
Four bystanders were shot in the gunfire and three officers suffered minor injuries.
Benoit and Davis said officers smashed several other cell phones in the ensuing chaos.
Benoit said the officers eventually uncuffed him after gunshots rang out elsewhere and he discreetly removed the SIM card and placed it in his mouth.
Officers again took his phone, demanding his video. He said they took him to a nearby mobile command center, snapped a picture of him, then took him to police headquarters and conducted a recorded interview while he kept the SIM card in his mouth. He insisted his phone was broken.
He was given a copy of a police property record receipt dated May 30. The couple has hired an attorney.
That harrowing tail only adds to the intrigue that’s growing around this shooting. Another video, seen at the top of this post, was shot by a man from his residents several stories above the street. It shows officers firing into Herisse’s stopped car on Collins Avenue – and you can hear the tremendous hail of gunfire. The man who shot that video seems to confirm the police chief’s account that Herisse was shooting from inside the car, but that can only be confirmed by ballistics tests.
The shooting has opened up a wider debate over whether Urban Beach Week, which brings lots of young, mostly Black tourists to South Beach every Memorial Day weekend, should even continue, and it’s reviving racial tensions on the Beach, where the population is more than 90 percent white/white Hispanic, and where protesters last week demanded an end to the annual festivities.
Also from the Herald:
The see-through strip club on wheels slowly cruises down Miami Beach’s Washington Avenue while two scantily-clad young ladies inside gyrate to music against a pole, rubbing bare backsides against Plexiglas walls. The fast action elicits hoots and hollers among a massive crowd spilling from the sidewalks onto the streets.
Young men in tank tops, baseball caps and baggy shorts hang out on Ocean Drive, hoisting bottles of beer while proclaiming Urban Beach Week — the annual festival that draws an estimated 250,000 people to South Beach over a single weekend — “da bomb’’.
But residents have a decidedly different view of the festivities that have flooded the streets around their homes like a tsunami of misbehaving humanity each year since the first, unexpected wave struck in 2001.
“It was horrible to even walk down the street,’’ Mary Thingelstad, 57, complained to city leaders of the scene around her South Beach neighborhood over the Memorial Day weekend. “The people, how they dressed and behaved, was disgraceful. I was embarrassed.’’
Because the overwhelming majority of these rowdy revelers are young African Americans, race is an uncomfortable – if unspoken – undercurrent of the conversation.
The rest, however, is rote.
Florida’s beach towns long have been a magnet for college-aged visitors intent on partying, and prone to overdoing it.
Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Panama City all have greeted hordes of rowdy revelers over the years — and then struggled to reign them in when they overstayed their welcome.
Now, it’s Miami Beach’s turn.
In the wake of a Memorial Day police shooting that left a 22-year-old man dead, three officers injured and four bystanders with bullet wounds, city leaders are flailing for answers and struggling to maintain an image of Miami Beach as a sophisticated, family-friendly destination – not one where young women in thong bikinis walk up to perfect strangers, shake their hips and thrust their pelvises, then walk away.
City leaders are proposing curfews, street closures and shorter hours for nightclubs and bars. But leaders face a dilemma: How to control an unofficial gathering over which the city exerts little influence?
Miami Beach does not issue a single permit for Urban Beach Week, Mayor Matti Herrera Bower said this week. Nor does the city provide venues, organize special events or partner with promoters.
“Even though it’s called an event, there’s no such event,’’ Bower said. “That is why it’s so hard to control. People just decide to come here.’’
Indeed, a decade after Internet buzz, radio DJs and word of mouth launched a large and raucous Memorial Day party aimed at college-aged black tourists — and alternately named Black Beach Week, Urban Fashion Week and Hip Hop Week — the party keeps getting bigger each year.
Now, with serious questions surround the police’s actions in the Herisse shooting (did the bullets that wound up in other officers and bystanders come from Herisse, or from police crossfire?) and the clear racial undertone of the arguments, this isn’t going to get better.