Miami Beach 8th-grader ‘began to act crazy’ before falling to his death. What happened?
Friends and family — and detectives — are still trying to figure out why a 14-year-old boy fell to his death from the 17th floor of a Miami Beach condo.
Marlon Cárdenas, an eighth-grader at Nautilus Middle School, was declared dead Sunday night when Miami Beach police and fire rescue crews found his body atop the fifth floor roof of a building at 1800 Collins Ave., according to a police report released Thursday night.
Marlon’s family, his friends, classmates and teachers spent part of Friday at a Celebration of Life at National Funeral Homes at 151 NW 37th Ave. on Douglas Road in Miami, followed by a burial at Graceland Memorial Park North on Southwest Eighth Street.
“One of the most caring people I’ve ever met. Never failed to put a smile on my face even when I was at my worst,” Vivian Nosovitsky wrote of Marlon on a GoFundMe page that was started on Monday by classmates Daniela Murcia and Benita Albornoz to raise money for Marlon’s family.
By Friday morning, the GoFundMe page had raised more than $13,000 on a $10,000 goal from more than 300 donors.
So what exactly happened? That’s the question yet to be answered.
According to the redacted Miami Beach police report, Marlon and two unidentified teens were on Lincoln Road Sunday when the three returned to the Collins building and entered an apartment where Marlon “began to act crazy,” according to one of the witnesses.
The boys told police they tried to get Marlon to “calm down” and suspected that “he was on drugs.”
Marlon, they said, took off his clothes and left the apartment and walked down the hall.
Building residents Lester Massiglia, 46, Mariana Lima, 34, Christopher Knight, 54, and Jacqueline Knight, 53, all told police they heard screaming and a disturbance on their 17th-floor hallway.
Lima said she heard someone screaming “LSD” in the hall outside her apartment and the sound of things being thrown around. The Knights said they heard the same commotion
Massiglia told police that Marlon “appeared to be on drugs” when he crashed through his apartment door and fell down. Massiglia said Marlon got up, walked toward another door across the hall that leads to an emergency stairwell with a small balcony railing.
None of the four witnesses in the police report said they saw Marlon go over that balcony and detectives don’t know if he jumped or fell.
The Knights told police they noticed Marlon “was in despair and allowed him to stand by in their apartment until his parents and the police arrived” at the Collins condominium.
But by then, it was too late.
This story was originally published February 22, 2019 at 9:00 AM.
