Customer wanted to show his gun to a cop at a Bal Harbour restaurant. The chef wound up shot
Business was quiet at the Palace Cafe in Bal Harbour following the Fourth of July, but it would turn out to be an explosive Sunday.
Chef Williams Tejeda Santana was cooking burgers, ribs and takeout orders for a handful of customers and Bal Harbour police officers who dropped by the poolside restaurant at The Palace condo high-rise on the ocean.
Rafael Motola, a regular, brought some Cuban coffee for the chef and began talking with one of the officers about the coronavirus pandemic and how it had shut down his retail business in Miami. Motola then changed the subject, saying he owned a gun and wanted to show it to the officer.
Motola, who lives at the Palace, went to fetch his 40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol, carrying it in a green grocery bag with a plan to ask the officer to clean it for him. Motola carefully unloaded the weapon — or so he thought.
He “pulled the trigger to make sure the handgun was empty and a shot rang out,” according to a police report, but “he then realized he had forgotten to eject the ammunition magazine before clearing the firing chamber.”
The single bullet ripped through a cabinet into the kitchen area, striking the chef in his right leg.
“Me dió,” Santana said in Spanish. “I’ve been hit.”
Now Santana, 50, who was hospitalized with a bone fracture of his tibia, is suing Motola, 77, in Miami-Dade court for damages, claiming he “breached his duty of care” when he fired the weapon inside the chef’s restaurant.
“It was an accident,” Motola told the Miami Herald repeatedly in a brief phone interview.
Bal Harbour police, after an investigation of the July 5 lunchtime shooting, reached a similar conclusion, saying Motola was “exceptionally cleared” in an incident report. No charges were filed against Motola, who has a concealed weapon permit for his firearm.
“While Mr. Motola may have shown poor judgment or even negligence in attempting to unload his handgun inside a restaurant, he did so with the firearm pointed away from others and in a downward direction,” according to the police report. In other words, he didn’t intend to shoot the chef.
Sgt. Ronald Smith, the Bal Harbour police officer who had been approached by Motola to look at his pistol inside the restaurant, said “he never told Mr. Motola to show him his gun, never asked Mr. Motola to bring a gun to him, and never offered to clean Mr. Motola’s gun,” according to the incident report.
“Sgt. Smith stated he did not know Mr. Motola had a gun until the gunshot occurred.”
Santana’s attorney, however, challenged the police department’s assessment of Motola’s actions. “It’s such a reckless thing that he did,” said Miami lawyer Cosme Caballero.
Caballero said the chef “has been unable to return to work after suffering the grievous injury and is undergoing extensive therapy.” He said Santana’s medical bills have mounted as his income has dwindled to nothing.
“He is a hard-working family man who has taken a lot of pride in his profession,” Cabellero said, noting that Santana once cooked for former President Jimmy Carter during his visit to Havana, Cuba, in 2002. Santana immigrated to the United States two years later.
An attempt to mediate the case went nowhere. Now a Miami-Dade jury will have to decide whether Motola was liable for the chef’s injury and should pay him damages.
This story was originally published November 10, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
