Miami judge rips jail after accused murderer on house arrest allowed to travel around state

Accused of murdering two men in South Miami-Dade in 2016, Joshua Burgos has not been awaiting trial in jail.

Rather, a Miami-Dade circuit judge granted him strict house arrest. Burgos was to be tracked by an electronic GPS ankle monitor, with an order that he only be allowed to leave home to work afternoons at an office in West Kendall. But when prosecutors recently pulled his GPS tracking records, they discovered that for more than a year, Burgos had been traveling all over South Florida.

The discovery led the judge on Wednesday to deliver a tongue lashing to the Miami-Dade County Corrections and Rehabilitation Department, which she said allowed “literally hundreds” of violations and Burgos to do “anything and everything he wanted to do.”

“He was allowed to be out and about during hours that had never come before this court, up to like 9 p.m.,” Judge Andrea Wolfson said during the Zoom hearing. “Mr. Burgos was in Midtown, South Beach, Islamorada, Key Largo — all of these places that he has no business physically being in for any reason at all.”

She added: “I find it offensive that an organization would take a court order and absolutely ignore it. And that’s what happened here.”

The case emerged as court officials say they are working on bail reform to thin Miami-Dade’s jail population, which has ballooned back up to about 4,000 inmates after dropping drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic. A corrections lawyer, during Wednesday’s hearing, announced that the department would be conducting an “administrative review” of the house arrest program, which currently oversees about 1,200 inmates.

“This one case is not reflective of the entire monitored release unit. On behalf of my director, we understand your concern,” corrections attorney Patricia Jones Cummings told the judge. “We absolutely want to keep this community safe. We don’t want any court to believe we are ignoring a court order.”

Burgos is not accused of committing any new crimes while out on house arrest. Burgos has been returned to a Miami-Dade jail, but he won’t necessarily stay there. The judge, in a hearing on Tuesday, granted him a new $200,000 bond, of which he’ll have to pay 10 percent, or $20,000. He’ll be confined to his home completely, with no permission to leave for work.

However, he’ll lose the $18,000 his family paid toward the original $180,000 bond last year. His defense attorneys, Christopher DeCoste and Tara Kawass, say their client was indeed working this past year, albeit at different jobs, and had the blessing of various corrections officers assigned to his monitoring.

“We all pay for the mistakes of our ancestors but Mr. Burgos will also pay for the mistakes of House Arrest,” they said in a statement. “The prosecution is desperate to put him behind bars pending trial. They tried once with the evidence at the beginning of the case and lost. Here they tried again by cashing in on the gross negligence of House Arrest. Mr. Burgos isn’t to blame and it’s absurd that the court imposed a new bond.”

Burgos, 29, is accused of fatally shooting Ryan Tolmas and Ariel Vior-Sobrino in the early morning hours of Jan. 30, 2016, after a night out at a Brickell-area bar. Tolmas was found mortally wounded in front of his Kendall home. Vior-Sobrino was shot too, and his body was discovered in a rural South Miami-Dade canal. Tolmas’ car was later found torched.

The motive for the murder remains unclear. Vior-Sobrino had been cooperating with authorities in a state racketeering case. Investigators say phone records placed Burgos at each of the crime scenes.

Burgos, who was arrested in November 2017, has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, carjacking and arson. In Florida, murder is normally a non-bondable offense, but a judge can grant one after hearing evidence about the case. In June 2018, Wolfson granted him a $180,000 bond with house arrest.

In February 2020, Burgos’ defense lawyers announced he’d gotten a job helping a law firm in West Kendall. Over state objections, the judge allowed him to leave his home for the office from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. each day.

But it wasn’t until May that prosecutors were given records of Burgos’ GPS-tracked movements for the first five months of 2021. “The GPS records show that the defendant has traveled as far north as Palm Springs and as far south as Islamorada,” Assistant State Attorney Stephen Mitchell wrote in a court filing late last week.

Burgos, it turned out, hadn’t worked at the law office since last July. He instead took various jobs, including at a furniture delivery store that had him driving around for work. The furniture store, a few months ago, fired him because “he had threatened co-workers with violence at or around February or March 2021,” Mitchell wrote.

On Wednesday, while the judge acknowledged that Burgos knew he wasn’t supposed to be out of his home except for the law firm job, she called out the jail system.

“He was just literally doing anything and everything he wanted to do at every moment in time and never once was this court alerted,” Wolfson said. “I’ve used the word appalled. It’s not even strong enough.”

This story was originally published May 20, 2021 at 7:00 AM.