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Prosecutors Have Doubts About Police Shooting, But Decline to Press Charges
Prosecutors Explain Why No Charges Stem from Botched Police Sting
By Robbi Peele, Tony Pipitone and Mc Nelly Torres | Wednesday, Jul 16, 2014 |
Miami-Dade County has never witnessed anything like it – infrared cameras rolling from aircraft during a muggy June night in 2011 as police killed four men, including their informant, in a botched sting operation in the Redland.
Three years later, the office of Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, finding “a number of unusual, counterintuitive, suspicious, and/or disturbing factors,” ruled it cannot say definitively that three of those police killings were justifiable. Yet, they determined, no charges can be filed against the officers.
“Are there question marks? Of course there are question marks. There are too many question marks,” Fernandez Rundle said in an interview with the Team 6 Investigators.
Part 1: County Pays $600K for Deaths in Botched Sting
More than 100 officers staked out a county-owned home that night, where confidential informant Rosendo Betancourt lured three men suspected of home invasions. He told them drugs and money awaited. Betancourt offered to help police, saying he was concerned about the escalating level of violence in previous home invasions involving at least one of the other men.
When a Miami-Dade officer shoots someone, the agency’s homicide detectives investigate the officer-involved shooting. Fernandez Rundle says police officers investigating their own can be a conflict of interest and she wants the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to take over those investigations.
Still, Fernandez Rundle said, she can’t be certain a different agency investigation would have produced a different result in this police-involved shooting.
“I wouldn’t jump to there could be charges filed, but what I would say is this: We wouldn’t be asking these questions,” Fernandez Rundle said.
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