A body lay in a North Miami Beach street. Cops investigating how it got there
A Sunday afternoon call about a traffic crash with injuries turned into a homicide investigation when officers arrived to find a man dead in the middle of a North Miami Beach street, police said.
The discovery led officers to quickly block off Northeast 12th Avenue from 153rd Street to 154th Street with yellow crime scene tape. The department brought its Crimescene van and incident command vehicle, along will several police cruisers.
North Miami Beach Investigations Division Major Richard Rand said police came to the area to answer a 1:30 p.m. call of a traffic crash with injuries. Shortly after that call, another one came in reporting that shots had been fired.
What they found was a man’s body and no cars or car parts to indicate a crash had taken place. For hours, the man’s body, covered with a yellow tarp, lay in the street — not far from a bus stop — as investigators collected evidence.
“At this point we found no indication of a vehicle being involved, as far as striking the victim,” Rand said, saying the man has not yet been identified.
On Monday morning Rand said the man was shot and killed in the street and that he still had not been identified.
They found shell casings, but not in the area immediately around the body, indicating the man might have stumbled before collapsing. Rand said “there is part of the scene that goes into the alleyway.”
Investigators knocked on doors in the surrounding area, hoping to get information and surveillance video.
“If anybody has any information, we need the public’s help on this,” Rand said. “ This happened right in the middle of daytime. Somebody had to have seen something or heard something.”
Anyone with information is asked to call North Miami Beach police at 305-949-5500 or Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers at 305-471-TIPS (8477).
This story was originally published March 31, 2019 at 3:53 PM.
