This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

State investigators have launched an inquiry into the Miami police department after an officer shot and killed a homeless man in front of dozens of children at a city park.



Miami police chief Rodolfo Llanes said the victim, Fritz Severe, was involved in a “violent dispute” on Thursday at Gibson Park, where the children were playing at a summer camp.

He said two officers responded to an emergency call that said Severe was “armed with a metal object” and that one, a 20-year veteran of the department, “confronted the subject and discharged his weapon. There was more than one shot”.

Witnesses, however, said Severe, a homeless 45-year-old who was familiar to local residents in the Overtown neighbourhood, was posing no threat to the children or the two officers who approached him, and was only waving his walking stick at them.

“He was a homeless man, wasn’t bothering nobody,” said Nichelle Green, who saw the shooting. She told reporters: “The man walks around, we see him every morning with his stick, the same little stick that he had in his hand when the police officer shot him five times.”

A second witness, Stephanie Severance, said: “They really didn’t have to shoot that man. What happened to the tasers? Why couldn’t they tase him?”

She said she saw the man pointing his stick at the officer.

A spokesman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) confirmed to the Guardian on Friday that it had begun an investigation into the shooting, in co-operation with the Miami department.

The spokesman said that under an agreement signed in January, all police-involved shootings would be looked at by the state agency to establish if any criminal act had taken place.

Javier Ortiz, president of the Miami’s Fraternal Order of Police, told the Miami Herald that his group was “confident that when the independent investigation is complete it will find that our officer involved acted within the law”.

Llanes said the inquiry would take some time. “We have anywhere between 40 and 60 witnesses that we have to interview, some of them being kids,” he said at a press conference at the park. “This is going to be a long investigation for FDLE.”

He added that detectives recovered a metal pipe from the scene but said: “The mechanics of the confrontation we won’t know until we have interviewed the witnesses.”

The officer who killed Severe was identified as Antonio Torres, 41, a member of the department’s honour guard. Torres, who took more than a year off work to recover after he was badly injured in a 2007 accident on his police motorcycle, was placed on administrative leave following Thursday’s shooting.

Llanes was unable to say if Torres was also armed with a taser, or whether the presence of so many children influenced his decision to use deadly force. He said: “Officers are trained to be aware of their surroundings when they discharge their firearm.

“I understand the anxiety that’s been created across the country from police-citizen interactions. I would ask that everybody wait for the facts of the case and not make up your own story.”

Severe, who was arrested several times over the last year for violence, burglary and criminal mischief, was the second victim of a police shooting in south Florida on Thursday.

Four members of a rapid response unit from the Broward Sheriff’s Office shot and killed a suspected bank robber, Charles Ziegler, 40, in his car after he allegedly pointed a gun at them in Pompano Beach. Sheriff Scott Israel said the deputies were temporarily reassigned while the incident was investigated.

The FDLE inquiry into the Miami department is the second launched by state investigators this week.

On Wednesday, the FDLE began looking into the Orlando Police Department after an officer was captured on a cellphone video repeatedly kicking a suspect who was seated on the ground and offering no resistance.

Natalie Jackson, the attorney for Noel Carter, of Hollywood, Florida, filed a formal complaint alleging police brutality and demanded the state attorney’s office bring criminal charges against the officer.

Carter was charged with domestic battery and battery on a law enforcement officer following an altercation with his girlfriend outside an Orlando nightclub earlier this month.