The Firearms Review Board disagreed and ruled the shooting justified. Quintero is among the officers indicted last year. Quintero's lawyer in the federal case and Mendez say they acted appropriately in all of their shootings.

* In 1993, officer Thomas Laura recognized two robbery suspects in their getaway car. He stopped them and ordered them out of the car at gunpoint. Veronica Colon, the passenger, disobeyed the command and reached under the seat.

Laura fired once. The bullet traveled through the rear window and the headrest and into the back of her shoulder.

She was not armed. She told police she was hiding money and jewelry under the seat.

In this case, the Firearms Review Board, chaired by Martinez, found that "the mere crouching of a female . . . does not justify the use of deadly force." The department did try to dock the officer for 80 hours. But the city's Civil Service Board, an appeals body, ordered the discipline rescinded.

* On June 19, 1993, officers Kelvin Harris and Clifford Gibson fired at least 19 times, killing 17-year-old bystander Laurence Johnson. It is one of the department's most perplexing unsolved cases. To this day, investigators say they cannot determine which officer fired the deadly shot. Both went undisciplined and returned to work.

Harris has never given an official statement to homicide investigators.

Both were on plainclothes duty when they were sent to investigate reports that a group of young men was firing shots into the air. Gibson said he exchanged gunfire with a suspect. Harris said an armed man charged him with a gun.

In the end, one suspect was shot in the hand and the bystander, Johnson, was shot in the back. Neither was armed.

Investigators scoured the scene, looking for casings from Harris' gun, and found none - until 20 days later, when Harris' lawyer called them back to the alleyway. There, in plain sight, were nine casings from Harris' gun.

Prosecutors suspected, but couldn't prove, evidence tampering. Investigators couldn't prove who fired the fatal shot.

"I can't believe they can't force their own people to talk, " said Eva Mae Peterson, who helped raise Johnson. "This whole thing is a crime and a coverup. My boy is dead and there's nothing I can do. It's outrageous."

Miami's Police Firearms Review Board never considered the case because homicide and internal affairs investigators were so stymied.

* In 1994, officers Alejandro Macias and Francisco Casanovas fired a combined 24 shots during an eight-block car chase through the residential streets of Little Havana.

The shooting began after a carload of robbery suspects spotted the undercover police vehicles of Casanovas and Macias and fled, according to reports. The officers, in separate cars, said they were fired upon and fired back. Casanovas was firing through his own windshield; Macias was hanging out the window of his car.

During the chase, several citizens - including a woman and her infant in a stroller - were dangerously close to the shooting, reports say. One bystander told The Herald that he and his young nephew had to run to avoid gunfire.

One suspect was grazed in the forehead. Witnesses said they saw the suspects with guns, and police said three guns were found. But there is no evidence in police reports that the guns were ever fired, as officers said.

Macias is among the officers charged in two suspected gun-planting cases. He, like nearly all of the officers named in these shootings, did not respond to requests from The Herald for comment.

The shooting was never reviewed by the department's Firearms Review Board. Both shootings were ruled justified in a short memorandum from a supervisor, Paul Shephard.

NORMS OF JUDGMENT
Police officials cite different standards in '90s

"There certainly appears to be shootings in here that appear to be questionable, " said Assistant Chief James Chambliss, reviewing a list of shootings provided by The Herald.

But he and other top brass say it's not fair to use current standards to judge past shootings. Officers had more discretion in the 1990s to shoot at an escaping person if they thought the suspect was armed, or a violent criminal.

"The overriding mission of the 1990s was to get the bad guys, " Chief Martinez said. "I think that was a reflection of the level of crime we were dealing with. We had a different policy and we held to the standards of that policy."

TOURIST INCIDENTS
5 questionable shootings came during that period

At least five suspect shootings came during the department's high-profile war on tourist robberies.

"In the '90s, you couldn't stop a car in Little Havana that didn't have a gun, " said Al Cotera, head of the Miami chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. He said many of the shootings on The Herald's list came from special units that targeted violent offenders.

"I think we had to be aggressive because the bad guys were aggressive, too, " Cotera said, adding that he has seen no sign that the department has been lax on shooting discipline.

But some internal critics said those units at times went too far.

"I think some of these guys enjoyed shooting at people at just no cost whatsoever, because they would find a way to justify it, " said Miami police Capt. David Rivero.

"[The suspects] were robbers, they were no-good criminals and no one would care if they got killed or not."

As the decade went on, the shootings became wilder and some officers became increasingly brazen - and even corrupt, according to prosecutors handling last year's federal indictment of 13 officers.

In 1995, Derrick Wiltshire and Antonio Young, two teenage robbers, were shot in the back in a spray of 37 bullets. Both died.

The seven officers at the scene that night said the pair had smashed a tourist's car window, snatched her purse, led them on a chase and flashed pistols as they jumped over the side of the Interstate 395 overpass downtown. But the guns were really planted, two officers involved in that shooting say.

Then, less than a year later, Richard Brown, 73, was shot at 122 times and died in his tiny two-bedroom apartment. During the shooting, his 14-year-old great-granddaughter cowered on the bathroom floor as bullets pierced the walls around her.

Five officers claimed they returned fire after Brown, suspected of drug dealing, fired at them first. But physical evidence and witness statements contradicted their stories.

Officers in both the Brown and I-395 shootings have now been indicted by federal authorities, accused of manufacturing evidence or planting guns to justify the killings. They deny wrongdoing.

Both of those shootings were initially cleared by the Firearms Review Board under Martinez, part of a larger pattern of failures in accountability, The Herald found. In many shootings, the department's internal probes were perfunctory, with investigators feeding leading questions.

"Everyone goes out there and assumes everything is good and there's no problem, " said Miami police Maj. Miguel Exposito, now in charge of the department's training division.

"When we go out to other crimes, cops do not take anything at face value. But, when we look at ourselves, we don't look at it that way, " said Exposito, who spent four years at the head of Internal Affairs.

Martinez and other top supervisors argue that the Firearms Review Board was diligent in pursuing truth, but was sometimes stymied by poor investigations or conspiracies by officers. And for years, they acknowledged, they found it difficult to believe that their own officers could be lying. "Maybe I'm in the minority, " Martinez said. "I would have never thought an officer would do that. Maybe I was naive."

Herald database editor Jason Grotto contributed to this report.

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@