Strip joint brawl turns deadly. One man shot dead and another injured
A brawl inside a Miami River strip club at sunrise Thursday escalated to gunfire, leaving one employee dead and another fighting for his life in the hospital.
By late afternoon, the shooters still had not been taken into custody or identified, and police were studying surveillance video to determine what type of vehicles they used in their getaway.
“They’re considered armed and dangerous. It’s brazen what they did,” said Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta. “There are still lots of people [we’re talking to] inside. And we have video to look at.”
Late Thursday afternoon police released the names of the two men shot at the Booby Trap on the River, 3615 NW S. River Dr. Killed, was Jose Otero, a 31-year-old security guard from Coral Springs. Eric Bauer, 46, another security guard at the club was also shot and is recovering at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
A mainstay on the Miami River as a strip club — though under another name and new ownership for the past two years — the Booby Trap is set between industrial sites that mainly cater to cargo ships. It’s open 24 hours a day.
About a decade before the Booby Trap opened, the strip club there went by the name of Centro Espanol and was saddled with a long history of problems from crime to drugs. In 2006, police raided Centro Espanol and arrested its owners on a litany of tax and prostitution charges. Police said at the time that it essentially operated as a brazen brothel. A dancer there described it to police as a “whorehouse covered up by a stage.”
Police called it the county’s most crime-ridden strip club, with drug sales, assaults, shootings and murder in its parking lot. That same year a Miami-Dade judge ordered the club closed as part of a civil lawsuit filed by law enforcement which was attempting to seize more than $1 million in cash found there in safes.
Zabaleta, the Miami-Dade police spokesman, said a big fight erupted Thursday inside the Booby Trap well before sunrise and several of the people involved in the altercation were escorted outside by security. Some time later, he said, two vehicles heading west on Northwest South River Drive pulled up to the club, and several men got out and opened fire.
Police aren’t certain if the shooters were any of the men kicked out of the club.
This story was originally published January 17, 2019 at 8:21 AM.
