The Herald review found other cases that were cleared despite nagging questions about the officers' accounts. Juan Pablo Hernandez, an 18-year-old on probation, was walking through his Little Havana neighborhood one Saturday evening in September 1997 when he attracted the attention of a rookie Miami patrolman. Then-Officer Richard Perez saw a bulge under Hernandez's shirt that he suspected was a gun. He rolled his window down and unholstered his Glock pistol. With his gun pointed, he called Hernandez over to his car. What happened next? Hernandez tells one story, Perez another. This much is clear: Hernandez ran and Perez shot him in the back, a bullet striking two inches from his spine. "I took my hand and I saw the blood, " Hernandez said. "I was thinking, 'I don't want to die, I don't want to die. I have to keep my eyes open.' " Perez claims he pulled the trigger after Hernandez pulled a weapon out of his pants, aimed the gun at him, then twisted to run away, still pointing the pistol. Hernandez, who has no violent crimes in his past, told this story: He says he tossed his gun through the officer's open window and bolted. The bullet dropped him when he got 15 feet away. "I threw the gun in the car for the simple reason I wanted to run and not get shot, " Hernandez said. "If I don't have the gun, why would he shoot me?" Asked to describe how Hernandez could have ended up shot squarely in the back, Perez couldn't say. "I'm not sure when I fired, sir, " Perez said later in a sworn statement. "I closed my eyes, so I don't know what happened." When a fellow officer pulled up seconds later, he found Hernandez writhing on the ground, Perez outside the car pointing his pistol and no other gun in sight. Hernandez's gun was on the front passenger seat of the cruiser, just where Hernandez said he threw it. Perez said he had used a pen to help him pick up the gun and put it in his police car, a method he never learned in the academy but had seen a lot on television. The internal affairs report makes no mention that Hernandez was shot in the back, a fact that might have raised questions. Instead, reports describe Hernandez's wound in a vaguer term: "midsection." The Firearms Review Board, a panel of three assistant police chiefs chaired then by now-Chief Martinez, justified the shooting, never questioning that Perez closed his eyes or that he drew his gun simply because Hernandez had a bulge under his shirt. Prosecutors dropped the criminal charges against Hernandez on grounds that Perez had no legal reason to suspect Hernandez of any crime in the first place. Perez, now a sergeant, said in a court statement that Hernandez's story was "ridiculous" and that he never would have allowed him to put the gun on the cruiser seat. He did not return phone calls and a letter seeking comment. In other shooting cases, officers swore they saw guns - but guns were never found. On a rainy night in 1992, about seven weeks after Hurricane Andrew, Officer Nestor Garcia spotted a pickup heading west on Route 836, driven by a man he thought was a Miami Beach murder suspect. When Wallace Brimer bailed out near Northwest 27th Avenue and ran, Garcia followed. He said Brimer pulled a handgun and pointed it at him - then took off running again. "He still had the gun, " Garcia said in a statement. "He turned his body toward my direction." Garcia fired three rounds, then two more. All missed. Brimer decided to stop running after Garcia caught up to him and pointed the gun at his head. "Mr. Brimer had no complaints about his arrest, " the internal affairs report reads, "but did say that he never had a weapon." Garcia said he never lost sight of Brimer. Still, no gun was found. There was no explanation. Garcia was never asked for one in his interview with internal affairs. And Brimer, an auto-glass installer from Alabama, turned out not to be the murder suspect. He said he ran because he had a suspended license. Prosecutors dropped the assault charges against Brimer as unfounded. The shooting was ruled justified by the Firearms Review Board, again under Martinez. Garcia did not respond to requests for comment. In another case involving a disputed gun, then-homicide Detective Confesor Gonzalez was driving on Northwest Seventh Avenue one afternoon in May 1995 when he spotted Gesner Altenor, 27, a security guard, leaning into a stopped car, pointing a gun. Gonzalez jumped out and Altenor took off. With Gonzalez on his tail, yelling at him to stop, Altenor bolted down an alley. "At one point, the male turned and pointed a black gun at me, " Gonzalez said. He squeezed off three rounds, but the man didn't drop the gun, Gonzalez said. He cranked off two more. Grazed once in the right foot, Altenor was caught a half-block away. Altenor, who pulled the gun after a road-rage argument, said he had dropped the gun as soon as he saw the officer and had nothing in his hands when he was shot. Indeed, the blue steel .357 Magnum was found on the sidewalk where the chase began - not in the alley where Gonzalez said Altenor carried it. "When I fired, this guy was armed - no doubt in my mind whatsoever, absolutely not, " Gonzalez said in a recent interview. "I've never been trigger-happy. It was my first shooting in 15 years." Police even called out a ladder truck to check rooftops for a second gun. No luck. "He could have thrown it anywhere, " said Gonzalez, adding that the gun found was not the same one he saw in Altenor's hand. All charges against Altenor were later dropped after Gonzalez failed to appear for court hearings. "A total miscommunication, " Gonzalez said. "I was very aggravated by it." Questions about the handling of controversial shootings first surfaced publicly in 1997 after the shooting of an unarmed homeless man in Coconut Grove. Miami police investigators discovered that the gun found at the scene was planted by one of their own - by which officer is still unresolved. Alleged coverups involving contradictory evidence are now at the heart of a federal indictment involving 13 Miami officers. But The Herald's review shows that years earlier, doubts arose about the stories told by some of those same officers in other shootings. And again, the department did little to resolve the discrepancies. "The same names jump out at you, " said Deputy Chief Bobby Cheatham, looking over a list of questionable shootings provided by The Herald. One of them involved Israel Gonzalez. Prosecutors and detectives had open doubts about Gonzalez's version of how he came to shoot Anthony Smith in the back on an Overtown street corner in June 1987. The call went out shortly before 10 on the night of June 21, 1987: Shots fired in Overtown. Gonzalez and partner William Andersen, working in plainclothes and driving a rented car, answered. Here is Gonzalez's story: He spotted two men running toward them. One had a revolver, the other a shotgun. As Gonzalez jammed on the brakes and grabbed for his own shotgun, he said, one running man raised the shotgun barrel "just above hip level" and shot once in his direction. The man shot again as Gonzalez chased him through an apartment courtyard, according to Gonzalez. "I told him, 'Freeze! Police!' and I saw his torso turning towards the right, " Gonzalez said. "I rapid-fired two rounds, and the offender went down." Anthony Smith did have a shotgun, a 12-gauge pump found near the bloodstain that marked the asphalt where he fell, his back and leg and right side raked by double-00 buckshot. But Smith and an independent witness told a much different story. Smith and Roslyn Snead, who was watching from her porch, said Smith never pointed his shotgun at the officers. Both said Smith stumbled and the shotgun went off into the ground by mistake. A casing from Smith's shotgun was found near where he was shot, reports say. There was no evidence to support Gonzalez's story. No casings were found a block away, where Gonzalez and his partner say Smith first shot at them. No casings were found in the courtyard either, and no pellets in the officers' car.