Date: Fri Sep 3 07:16:50 1999
From: carlos@THERIVER.COM ("Carlos A. Alvarez")
Subject: Unregistered weapon
To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
By ROBIN MITCHELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 1, 1999
As police officers closed in, a man suspected of grabbing a woman in Miami's Little Havana Monday night dashed behind a low wall, ducked and squeezed a few shots.
Six officers, at the ready with .40-caliber Model 22 Glock semiautomatic pistols, fired back.
During an eight-minute gun battle that witnesses said at times rattled like a machine gun, police fired 46 times at the man who alternately popped up, fired and hid.
Twenty of the police bullets struck home in the final burst.
Dead by the 3-foot wall in the parking lot behind Castillo de Farnes restaurant was an unidentified Hispanic man in his 40s, known in the neighborhood only as "El Loco."
His weapon: a child's silver cap gun.
"He's jumping up, and he's shooting this cap gun," said Lt. Bill Schwartz. "Now is he trying to commit suicide or does he think he has a real gun? Is he at the gun fight at the OK Corral shooting it out with Wyatt Earp? Who knows. The problem is the officers don't know."
Only minutes before, an officer was answering a call from 41-year-old Maria Perez, who said the man grabbed her from behind as she walked to a store. Perez and her daughter Luisa yala told police the man, who was acting erratically, had what appeared to be a gun in his back pocket.
The officer called for backup police as he followed the man. The man did not respond to repeated police commands in Spanish to put down his weapon, said Detective Delrish Moss. Soon, 15 police officers had converged on the neighborhood.
As six of the officers neared the man, he leaped behind the wall and fired, Moss said. The noise the cap gun made could be mistaken for a smaller-caliber weapon, he said.
Moss said the multiple firings of semiautomatic weapons would make a sound similar to a machine gun going off.
In addition to the dead gunman, Officer Augustine Clemente, an 18-year police veteran, was struck by ricocheting debris on the nose and arm, and an unidentified man in the neighborhood was hit with wood debris. Both were treated and released from a Miami hospital.
Moss said police were checking local mental illness treatment facilities in an attempt to identify the dead man. Though the man was known in the neighborhood in which he died, it was only by the moniker El Loco, or the crazy one. Police officers who regularly patrolled the community were not familiar with him.
The six officers involved in the shooting are on administrative leave until they give investigators statements.
-- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
HeadLine:
Man dies after using cap gun in shootout Miami police were told a man known as El Loco grabbed a woman. They exchanged shots for eight minutes.
"...one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." -- Charles A.Beard