Police have found the man they say is responsible for the stabbing of an Amazon driver earlier this month in Fort Lauderdale.
Curtis Gardner, 33, was charged Monday with attempted murder, armed carjacking and burglary with battery.
The incident happened on Dec. 7 around 7:30 p.m. while the delivery driver’s vehicle was disabled with a flat tire. Police alleged Curtis pulled out a knife and stabbed the driver before leaving.
An Amazon delivery driver was hospitalized with serious injuries following a stabbing while on duty over the weekend, according to reporting from The Miami Herald.
Police were called out to the 1100 block of Northwest 10th Terrace just after 7:30 p.m. to a report of a stabbing. The driver’s vehicle was disabled when they were approached by their alleged assailant.
The driver was taken to Broward Medial Center. Additional details whether anything was taken in the incident or the condition of the driver as of Monday morning were not immediately available.
Two brothers face felony charges after police accused them of attacking a worker and using his own gun against him in Miami mechanic shop brawl Monday afternoon.
Pedro Luis Rodriguez, 40, was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and Angel Rodriguez-Candano, 32, was charged with aggravated assault with a firearm. Aggravated battery with a deadly weapon is a second-degree felony in Florida that, if convicted, can carry up to 15 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Penalties for aggravated assault with a firearm include up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000, if convicted.
The alleged incident stemmed from a dispute that broke out Monday afternoon at Tire Liquidators, a shop located at 2090 Southwest 67th Avenue. Police told local reporters that the two brothers argued with the unnamed mechanic over past repairs made to Rodriguez’s vehicle. The two brothers allegedly followed the mechanic into the shop’s office where, police said, Rodriguez began punching him several times. At one point in the altercation, the mechanic pulled out a gun that Rodriguez-Candano lunged for, according to the report. The brawl between the three men continued until the mechanic fired the weapon three times.
In 2023, the families of Edward Dixon and Taborez White were rocked by the news of their deaths in two separate shootings within the same Miami Gardens community. Now, over a year after their deaths, their families have banded together in a lawsuit, claiming that Cedar Grove Apartments, the complex where the shootings took place, didn’t do enough to protect them.
“He was in the prime of his life when he was ripped from this Earth and us,” Marcia Dixon, Dixon’s mother, said in a press conference Wednesday.
Dixon went to the apartment complex to visit a friend in January 2023 when he was shot, his mother told local media.
Two women were rushed to the hospital for injuries incurred following a shooting Wednesday morning at a Broward restaurant, according to reporting from local news outlets.
Emergency responders were called out to the restaurant around 2 a.m. for reports of shots fired and found that one woman had been taken to HCA Florida Plantation Emergency for treatment while another was also taken to the hospital.
The first woman was shot while the second had non-shooting-related injuries. The first woman was stable as of Wednesday, according to reporting from The Miami Herald. Both women were taken to the hospital by friends.
Two police officers with the City of Doral Police Department are suing a local bar, its managing company, a security company and one other after a man was allowed inside the location with a gun.
The shooting happened on April 6, 2024, at the Martini Bar Doral, located at 3450 NW 83rd Ave., Suite 144. The two officers, Andre A. Romo and Ricardo A. Acevedo, were patrolling the area on off-duty detail when a dispute broke out involving 37-year-old Jamal Wayne Wood who entered the bar with a gun. The shooting resulted in the death of a security guard and the injury of seven others, including the two responding officers. Wood was also killed that night by responding officers.
Acevedo and and Romo responded to the scene after seeing the chaos of fleeing patrons. Both officers were injured by the stampede of customers as they tried to get inside to stop Wood’s rampage. Wood aimed and shot at Romo and Acevedeo and the other officers who responded to the scene. Romo was “dangerously close” to being hit and Acevedo was shot in the leg, mere centimeters from his femoral artery, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by Bernardo Pimentel II, a Trial Attorney with Leesfield & Partners, P.A..
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.
Over the last 45 years, especially in the last 1000 days, Leesfield & Partners’ negligent security practice has seen first hand the dire consequences of the escalation of violent crime and the increasing number of innocent victims needlessly killed, battered, or raped.
The last two years have brought on much anxiety to all of us. The ripple effect of world economies shutting down has caused local economies and its people to suffer the most. The atmosphere of uncertainty has been a significant contributing factor to the resurgence of crime in our communities, especially the most violent crimes.
According to Statista, violent crimes are the worst they have been in the last 10 years. The number of aggravated assaults is the highest we have seen in the last 23 years, and the number of murders & non-negligent manslaughters has been this high since 1995.
Josh was a broken man. Devastated from an unspeakable shooting tragedy that ravaged his family he was disillusioned from having his case turned down by Florida’s most prominent negligent security firm. When his personal family attorney tried to refer Josh to that other firm, he heard things like ‘impossible’, ‘a tragedy but not a case’, ‘likely to lose’, and then he heard ‘NO’. Those sentiments were terrible blows to Josh’s already gaping open-wounds. He felt completely and utterly hopeless.
Luckily, Josh’s well-intentioned family attorney did not take ‘no’ for an answer and reached out to Leesfield & Partners after having heard of the firm’s tenacity and success. Where others have said ‘no,’ Leesfield & Partners understood that this case was previously investigated and vetted and ultimately declined by this top negligent security firm. Having litigated and tried many negligent security cases, he was not going to let another law firm’s decision affect his independent analysis. Leesfield & Partners saw a family man who was hurt and grieving for his loss and promised that he would take a fresh look at everything and turn over every stone. Despite the daunting facts, bad law and a team of expert witnesses that were sure to be hired by the biggest defense firms in the country, Leesfield & Partners attorneys had a hunch. On that hunch, the Leesfield & Partners firm took on the case, immediately filed the lawsuit and began intensive litigation which lasted over a year. Through discovery and depositions, attorneys with the firm were able to prove that the assailant that killed his own family never should have been allowed to live on the premises in the first place. He successfully argued that the domestic nature of the crime, the cold-hard brutality and the assailant’s resolve to commit the heinous murder was ultimately irrelevant to the fact that he never should have been on the property in the first place. If he was not allowed to be on the property in the first place, he ultimately successfully proved that this incident would not have occurred.
Leesfield & Partners understood why the other firm turned down the case. It was a nearly impossible hill to climb. The entire Leesfield & Partners team takes a personal approach to each case they are working on. Even though we do this day in and day out, it is the client’s only case and it is their most important case. We take that to heart and pursue each case as though it is the only one we have. It is a philosophy that has served the firm and its clients well over the last five decades.
After the horrific murder of Miami-resident, Carla Stefaniak, for which the security guard of the Airbnb where she was staying was arrested, it seems clear that Airbnb continues to fail its self-declared standard: “Your safety is our priority”
Assaults at Airbnb’s are unfortunately not uncommon. So much so, that a website called airbnbhell.com was created in 2013 and guests have been posting horror stories ever since, a lot of them involve violence and sexual assaults.
The fundamental problem with Airbnb’s business model is that Airbnb’s website funnels guests toward properties that were not vetted. And when the unthinkable happens, guests are not covered under Airbnb’s insurance because they fell victim to an intentional act, which is a known insurance coverage exclusion. These compounding failures and acts of negligence make the entire online hospitality services business model inherently flawed and utterly dangerous.
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