JURY INDICTS 5 MIAMI POLICE OFFICERS

Coverup In Fatal '96 Shooting Charged

Five veteran Miami police officers have been indicted by a federal grand
jury for allegedly lying and fabricating evidence to cover up their part in
the fatal shooting of 73-year-old Richard Brown, who died five years ago in
a hail of 122 bullets.

An indictment made public Wednesday charges the officers with conspiring to
obstruct justice in an attempt to "justify the deadly force" used on Brown
on March 12, 1996.

Charged with two counts of obstructing justice were Sgt. Jose Acuna, 42;
Officer Ralph Fuentes, 33; Detective Arturo Beguiristain, 40; Detective
Eliezer Lopez, 34; and Officer Alejandro Macias, 37. Attorneys for the
officers say the indictment is unwarranted.

The shooting has already cost the city of Miami $2.5 million. Last year,
the city agreed to pay that amount to Brown's great-granddaughter Janeka
Brown, who was 14 when the SWAT team burst through her front door and fired
the barrage.

Six police officers said they returned fire after Brown, a suspected drug
dealer, fired at them first and struck an officer's shield.

Janeka Brown cowered on the bathroom floor during the raid as wall-piercing
bullets crackled around her. Police said they did not know Janeka lived in
the apartment at 1344 NW Seventh Ct. Donald Warshaw, then the police chief,
told reporters that was the only flaw in an otherwise defensible operation.

But the city settled the case after an assistant city attorney found the
accounts of participating Miami Police officers unbelievable and
contradictory, leaving the city vulnerable to a large jury award, an
internal legal memorandum showed. Not all the officers involved in the
shooting were indicted.

According to the indictment, the alleged conspiracy ran from the day of the
shooting and continued through March 13 and 14, when the five men "provided
and caused to be provided false information to state of Florida law
enforcement investigators," the indictment states.

The officers could have given statements to any combination of law
enforcement parties in those days following the shooting: the department's
homicide detectives, its Internal Affairs section, the Miami-Dade state
attorney's office.

Chief Raul Martinez expressed disappointment about the indictments.

"It's not a happy day at the Miami Police Department," he said in an
interview Wednesday. "But we're a very resilient department. We've been
through worse things than this."

Internal police investigations and an inquest had cleared the officers.

Martinez defended the department's review. He said the grand jury "must
have received different information [than we did] from different sources."

He defended the department's review -- which included an internal affairs
investigation and a probe by the shooting review board, which at the time
he oversaw -- and criticized a memo issued by the city attorney's office
pointing to evidence in the shooting that implicated the officers.

"It wasn't a proud moment," he said. "But it was always looked at as a
justifiable shooting."

The indictment stops short of accusing the officers of violating Brown's
civil rights, a federal charge often used in police-brutality cases.

But it suggests that's where the case was headed when it says the alleged
conspiracy continued for nearly two more months, through May 1, 1996, and
that the officers' objective was to prevent the FBI, Justice Department and
a federal judge from getting information "relating to the possible
commission of a federal offense."

Had Janeka Brown's civil lawsuit gone to trial, her attorney, Fort
Lauderdale lawyer Barbara Heyer, was going to argue that the shooting was
bad, the officers knew it and they covered it up.

"To me the shooting was terrible," Heyer said, "but the coverup was worse."

Heyer blames not only the police officers, but their bosses, for running an
organization that she says "rubber-stamps" bad behavior.

"If you know Internal Affairs will do a real investigation, and you'll be
disciplined or fired, then let me suggest you're not going to go shooting
up a house like that," she said in an interview last year.

Court Appearance

Four of the five officers appeared before a federal magistrate Wednesday
afternoon, only hours after being allowed to surrender at FBI headquarters
in North Miami-Dade. The fifth officer, Macias, was out of town on military
leave and is scheduled to turn himself in today.

Shackled and handcuffed, surrounded by a horde of news reporters, the men
appeared shell-shocked to be sitting in the courtroom seats reserved for
defendants.

They listened attentively as Magistrate Barry Garber read them their
rights. They somberly searched the audience for familiar faces.
Disbelieving relatives and fellow officers filled the room, whispering
about bond collateral and lawyer fees.

The officers' lawyers told the judge that their clients were stable civil
servants with strong community ties who deserved lenient bonds:

For the four officers present, the judge set $100,000 personal surety bonds
to be signed by the officer and his wife. They also have to surrender all
their travel documents, remain in South Florida and visit pretrial services
every week.

The officers' lawyers and supporters complained that prosecutors pushed the
indictment through on the last possible day before a five-year statute of
limitations kicked in.

That suggests a weak case, they said, adding that "political pressure" from
Brown's survivors and lawyer was given too much weight. Brown was African
American; none of the indicted officers are.

"They think it's racially motivated," said Roy Kahn, lawyer for Acuna,
"even though two witnesses are black and have basically exculpated them."

The indictment does not say what the officers did to fabricate evidence.
But it singles out Acuna, a SWAT supervisor who was part of the second
entry team, as the person who "removed a .38-caliber revolver from 1344 NW
7th Ct., Apt. 6, and turned it over to another police officer on the scene."

1997 Inquest

Acuna testified about the shooting during a Feb. 13, 1997, inquest.
Assistant State Attorney Elise Targ asked him specifically about the gun.

Acuna: "He was laying on the floor, gun was still in his hand, finger on
the trigger."

Targ: "OK. There was no pictures of the man with the gun still in his
hands. Could you explain why?"

Acuna: "When I walked in and we had the shield on the person, finger on the
trigger, it seemed like -- I could not determine whether he was dead or
alive. It seemed like he was going to ambush us, so I had to cover him with
the shield and we took the gun out of his hand." Targ: "Did you ever check
the gun?"

Acuna: "No. I handed it to Lt. Perez."

Heyer scoffed at that version.

"If the fellow had a gun in his hand, why are you moving it?" she said,
referring to Acuna. "Why aren't you photographing it at the scene?"

"Standard operating procedure when you have a subject down and you don't
know if your subject is dead or alive," responded Kahn, Acuna's lawyer.

Continued Heyer: "I have one officer who says it was clear Brown was dead.
Also, when you go up to that situation, you do not pick up the gun and give
it to another officer. You kick it out of his hand. You want that gun as
untouched as possible -- unless it didn't exist to begin with."

Each charge carries a maximum 10-year sentence.

Richard Sharpstein, lawyer for Beguiristain, said, "This case has already
been through the mill. The officers were cleared by police inquest in state
court, and we're very confident they'll be cleared by a federal jury in
this case."

Al Cotera, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, agreed. "This was a
good shooting that's been looked at every which way."