Florida Injury Lawyer Blawg
In just 11 months, Partner Justin Shapiro secured a $16 million settlement for his clients, an elderly couple from New York who was savagely attacked while staying in a South Miami hotel. That day the individual defendant walked into the hotel, through the lobby, straight into an elevator to the 7th floor where he knocked on the couple’s guestroom door. As soon as the husband opened the door, the individual punched him in the face, lunged at him and pushed his way inside the guestroom before biting him on the back of his neck and strangling him. They fought for five long minutes before the assailant turned his aggression to the wife, chasing her outside the hallway, punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground.
At that time, three hotel and security employees showed up in the elevator. They stood directly in front of the aggressor as he continued to viciously beat up on our client. Our client was crying for help and bleeding profusely, but shockingly the employees did nothing. They let the attacker dragged his victim by the hair onto the elevator, she was helplessly screaming at the top of lungs as the elevator door closed.
Nobody knew on which floor the elevator had stopped but CCTV captured the rest of the most brutal sexual assault that took place five floors below. On the footage, the assailant is seen forcefully dragging the wife out of the elevator as she tried to fend him off. Ultimately he overpowered her, and punched her across the face over 30 times as he stood above her. In utter savagery he bit her face so violently that a large chunk of flesh ripped off her forehead. She was almost lifeless. He then ordered her to perform oral sex on him. She resisted him. He punched her again and again, strangled her, until she had no choice but to do what he said. It lasted several minutes before he forced himself on top of her and raped her in the middle of the hallway. When the police finally arrived to stop the attack, our client had endured the most horrific ten minutes of her life where she was raped, defaced and mutilated.
Investigators of the Miami Beach Police Department reviewed the surveillance camera footage and had sufficient evidence to arrest the alleged assailant, Rafael Munguia, 26, who was also staying at the hotel at the time. The surveillance footage showed Munguia leave the victim’s hotel room naked and run to his own hotel room. On the evening of the assault, the Police arrested Munguia on charges of rape, and he confessed to raping the young woman less than 24 hours later.