‘You can’t just shoot blindly.’ Risky police shootouts persist in Miami-Dade

The gun battle between 21 cops and two armed gunmen that left a hostage and a bystander dead in Miramar followed a troubling pattern in South Florida.

A dangerous high-speed car chase. A final stand, and a mass of officers converging on a potential threat. Dozens upon dozens of police bullets firing on a public street, putting bystanders and even fellow cops at risk.

As criticism mounts over the gun battle in Miramar that killed Frank Ordonez and motorist Rick Cutshaw, a review of police records reveals that similar shootings have unfolded with regularity over the past eight years. The Herald has identified at least five other similar shootings in Miami-Dade that left six suspects dead, only one of whom was armed with a gun, several civilians wounded and two officers hit by friendly fire.

Experts call them episodes of “sympathetic fire,” “contagious fire” or “bunch shootings” — when one cop fires his gun, the rest open up en masse, so focused on a threat they don’t realize bystanders or fellow cops might be in harm’s way.

Critics call it overkill.

In last year’s fatal shooting of Alexander Carballido in West Miami-Dade, 18 officers fired over 300 times. Newly released body-camera footage shows a scene that looks like a Call of Duty video game: a long, deafening roar of gunfire, officers shooting dangerously close to one another from behind, and even one cop firing from his window as he tried to drive.

“Most often, these officers hear gunfire and think, ‘Oh my god, I’m being shot at.’ But you have to look for a muzzle flash, you have to look for a target, you can’t just shoot blindly and that’s what’s happening with a lot of these younger officers,” said one South Florida police officer who was nearly hit from behind by friendly fire during one shooting several years ago.

The officer, who is still active duty, asked not to be named in order to talk candidly. “At this stage in my career, I’m more afraid of being shot by a police officer than being shot by a subject,” he said.

The UPS truck chase shooting unfolded on the afternoon of Dec. 5, when cousins Lamar Alexander and Ronnie Hill held up the Regents Jewelry Store on Coral Gables’ Miracle Mile. During the robbery, an employee was shot in the forehead and survived. The store owner and manager opened fire on the men as they fled in a rented U-Haul truck.

The men, convicted felons with long criminal histories, soon hijacked Ordonez’s UPS truck, taking him hostage. Miami-Dade Police officers later caught up with the truck, which led them on a high-speed chase up the Turnpike and Interstate 75, firing at them along the way. It finally ended on a Miramar street packed with commuters at rush hour.

As TV news helicopters broadcast live, officers swarmed in, some taking cover behind cars with motorists inside. The robbers began shooting, at least one through the windshield of the UPS truck. In all, at least 21 officers fired — between the robbers and the cops, agents found nearly 200 bullet casings.

In the gun battle, as bystanders rushed for cover, Ordonez was killed, as was Cutshaw, who was felled by an errant bullet as he tried to drive away. Alexander and Hill also died.

After the shooting, Miami-Dade Police Director Juan Perez defended the cops, saying they had no choice but to engage the robbers who had already fired at cops and could have taken more hostages nearby. Negotiating with the robbers was impossible once they opened fire at the scene, Perez told a town hall-style meeting Wednesday.

“In order to negotiate with someone, they can’t be shooting at you,” Perez said at the Miami-Dade County Community Relations Board meeting.

The incident also unfolded against the backdrop of the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stone Douglas High in Parkland, where Deputy Scot Peterson was pilloried — and charged criminally — for not engaging active shooter Nikolas Cruz.

Across the country, police officers have been increasingly taught to engage shooters rather than wait for hostage negotiators, said Thomas Aveni, a deadly-force expert and director of New Hampshire-based Police Policies Studies Council. In “bunch” shootings such as the Miramar case, officers wind up firing so many rounds because they are using handguns, which are inaccurate at ranges of over 15 feet, he said.

“We noticed these guys fire more rounds to make up for the number of misses. That’s a really bad scenario,” said Aveni, who advocates arming officers with rifles that can hit targets more accurately than handguns. “What we’re doing on the street has to be a lot smarter than that. You don’t have control of the environment in a lot of these scenarios.”

Some of the officers involved in the Miramar shooting belonged to Miami-Dade Police’s Priority Response Team, which was created after Parkland to do just that: quickly engage threats such as active shooters. The unit now comprises nine roving squads of tactically trained officers, each comprised of eight officers and a sergeant.

Miami-Dade Police Benevolent Association President Steadman Stahl said he believes the UPS shooting was an active-shooter situation that forced officers to move in.

“They were shooting at police cars, they were shooting at everything,” Stahl said.

The phenomenon of police officers shooting en masse has been particularly prevalent in Miami-Dade, although most cases have not received the amount of media attention as the UPS shooting.

In one highly publicized case, 12 police officers from Miami Beach and Hialeah opened fired on a motorist who barreled down a crowded South Beach street during Memorial Day 2011, nearly hitting several people.

Police officers surrounded the car and fired over 100 rounds, killing Raymond Herisse — and wounding several bystanders. Investigators don’t believe Herisse was armed, although a gun was found wrapped in cloth under the driver’s seat.

The shooting, captured on bystander video, spurred a slew of lawsuits from outraged families and spurred Miami Beach police to restrict officers from firing at moving cars. Across South Florida, the controversy raised by the Herisse killing hasn’t stopped officers from firing en masse after car chases. The others:

▪ In October 2011, five officers shot and killed Jose Ivan Hernandez after he led police on a high-speed chase through South Miami-Dade, colliding with several cop cars. After his Mitsubishi Mirage stopped, officers with their guns drawn surrounded the car — one cop even jumped onto Hernandez’s hood as others tried to pull him out.

When Hernandez began to rev the engine as if he might lurch forward, five police officers fired nearly 50 rounds, killing Hernandez. No officers were hit by friendly fire.

▪ In December 2013, an armed robber, with a buddy in the passenger seat, led Miami-Dade, Miami and Hialeah police on a high-speed chase that ended when the car crashed in Liberty City. A ring of officers surrounded the car, and 23 opened fire — killing Adrian Montesano and Corsini Valdes.

But two Miami-Dade officers, David Williams and Jimmy Harrell, were wounded by friendly fire. In a final report, prosecutors said some officers later admitted they were concerned about the possibility of friendly fire even before the shots rang out. Although Montesano had used a gun to rob a Walgreens earlier in the day, no weapons were found in the car.

▪ In October 2017, Hialeah police in patrol cars chased Lester Machado, 24, who fled from a traffic stop. After nearly hitting several officers, Machado’s car crashed into a Metrorail column as six officers unloaded 128 bullets.

Machado was not armed. As they have in most of these cases, prosecutors declined to press charges against officers, citing a Florida law that allows police to fire at a “fleeing felon.” Machado’s family is now suing.

“Why are these cops so trigger happy?” said Roberto Pertiera, a Miami lawyer representing Machado’s family. “It seems like overkill to me.”

▪ In September 2018, the fugitive armed robber Carballido fired at police when officers found him at a gas station on Flagler Street at Northwest 57th Avenue. He led police on a high-speed chase through the the streets of West Miami-Dade before crashing into the back of a cement truck.

The investigation revealed that Carballido began firing. In all, 18 officers and agents from Miami-Dade Police, Miami Police and the FBI surrounded the car and fired over 300 rounds.

These types of “sympathetic” or “contagion” shootings come because of a lack of proper police training and supervision, said R. Paul McCauley, a criminologist at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who testified often in use-of-force cases. It’s not uncommon for officers, so focused on what’s in front of them, to assume a “circular firing squad” and nearly hit each other.

“I understand how it happens, but it shouldn’t. Much of this falls on scene-supervision command and it’s a problem,” McCauley said. “In these uncontrolled shootings and discharges, it’s important for someone to take command and at least have the authority to say, ‘hold your fire.’”

Laurence Miller, a Palm Beach County psychologist who works with police officers, cautioned that in many cases, even as officers look like they are joining in with their fellow cops, most of the time they are making their own individual assessment of a threat.

“It looks like it’s contagious but that’s because officers are always kind of seeing the same thing,” Miller said.

Still, he warned, an officer’s “tunnel vision” is real. “While tunnel vision is an explanation,” Miller said, “it’s not a ready-made excuse for when collaterals get injured.”