What Miami Shores neighbors heard the night a young mother was shot and killed

A volley of bullets in Miami Shores woke up nearly a dozen residents early last Thursday morning, minutes before Miami Shores police found the body of a young mother shot to death in a car.

It was an anomaly in the mostly quiet and family-friendly neighborhood, said one resident, Raul Guerra, who was awakened by his frightened fiancée between 1:50 and 1:55 a.m. in his home about 500 feet north of the crime scene at 10334 N. Miami Ave.

“She was pretty petrified when she heard it,” said Guerra, 41, a self-employed mechanical contractor in Fort Lauderdale and a two-year Miami Shores resident, who remembers muttering something about fireworks being set off.

But his fiancée Nicole Hedmark, 37, dismissed the thought immediately. “It was distinct. It was guns,” she told Guerra, before warning her neighbors on the NextDoor app.

Hedmark said in a post on the app that the shooting “sounded like someone was at our patio door, pounding on it real hard.”

Another resident added, “I heard (it) too it seems like an exchange.”

Guerra later shared with the Herald two video files with sounds of the shooting captured by their Google Nest Cam security camera.

Two distinct sounds are audible in the footage, with more than 60 shots being fired from a fusillade which police believe killed Precious Paraison, a 20-year-old mother of a baby girl from Little Haiti, and two single shots with a higher pitch fired three and five seconds after the first weapon was discharged.

Miami Shores police, who responded to multiple calls from residents around 2 a.m., said they found the body of Paraison inside a white Nissan Altima with a side window smashed by a stray bullet.

As is standard with homicides in many municipalities, Miami-Dade later stepped in to handle the homicide investigation.

Miami-Dade police have not released any details about how many shooters were involved in the incident, how many shots were fired or the motive for the shooting. They have no suspects at this time, officers said.

“It’s an open homicide investigation and there’s nothing we can discuss at this time,” Miami-Dade police said on Wednesday.

Paraison was last seen by her grandmother Kimanie Alicia Paraison while breastfeeding her 1-year-old daughter. She left their home in a rush after receiving a call on her cellphone around 11 p.m. Wednesday.

The shooting came just one day after Miami Shores Village Mayor Crystal Wagar responded to residents’ concerns about the scarcity of policing in the area.

Miami Shores saw a crime rate increase of almost 7 percent last year with reported offenses rising from 557 in 2018 to 595 in 2019, according to offense data by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

But Miami Shores police mainly responded to thefts in 2019, while violent crimes including rape, robbery and aggravated assault—which were already rare —decreased. No murders were reported in 2019, according to the data.

Until Paraison’s murder, residents said they were mostly concerned about speeding in the area.

After residents submitted a public comment at a Miami Shores Village council meeting in April, “MSPD officers.. indicated that they would monitor the traffic in the area and provide a report of their findings,” according to an email residents sent to the Village Council Members in June.

Residents said they didn’t hear back from MSPD, but plan to press the matter further in the coming weeks.

Guerra said that the street where Paraison was killed attracts a lot of traffic headed northbound on North Miami Avenue toward Barry University.

While he expressed concerns about further isolating Miami Shores — which is among the most affluent municipalities in Miami-Dade and 75 percent white, according to Census data — from surrounding neighborhoods, he said MSPD should more closely monitor those that enter.

“It seems like none of the people involved (in the killing) were from the area. Limiting accessibility to traffic would... make us safer,” Guerra said. “In that corner (where Paraison was killed) there are always vicious accidents.”

MSPD has not yet responded to the Herald’s request for comment.

The family ofParaison told the Herald on Friday that they were struggling financially at the time that she was killed, but they are trying to gather funds to plan a funeral.

Samaya Green, who said she’d known Paraison since sixth grade and used to babysit her daughter three times per week, set up a fundraiser for Paraison’s funeral on GoFundMe Friday.

“Precious Loved Her Babygirl dearly please help me and the family by raising a proper funeral for my bestfriend Precious,” she wrote on the website. “Anything is helpful.”

A previous version of this story gave an incorrect last name for Raul Guerra.