Throwdown-Gun Toting Pigs
..
snares fourth police officer
After circling the edges for nearly a year, Miami Police
got to the heart of the
Coconut Grove throwdown gun case Friday. They arrested
another one of their
own and accused him of planting the weapon.
Jesus ``Jesse'' Aguero, 35, became the fourth Miami officer
criminally charged in
connection with the throwdown scandal, which rocked the
department and
prompted the dismantling of its once-elite undercover
narcotics unit.
Investigators allege that Aguero planted the gun to justify
the police shooting of an
unarmed homeless man. Other officers stand accused of lying
to cover up the truth.
The FBI later found Aguero's left pinkie print on the gun.
``This is one of the more painful episodes in the
department's history,'' Police Chief
Donald Warshaw said. ``The planting of evidence is the most
serious breach of a
police officer's responsibility, and it undermines the
public confidence we must
have to succeed.''
Aguero, who was suspended with pay in July as the
investigation expanded, turned
himself in at police headquarters at 8:30 a.m. He was taken
to the Miami-Dade
County Jail, booked and released on $10,000 bond.
Internal Affairs investigators charged him with two
felonies: grand theft, for
allegedly stealing the gun in question during a 1996 drug
search, and tampering
with evidence, for allegedly planting the gun at the police
shooting scene June 26,
1997. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years.
Aguero, a 13-year veteran, has been accused and cleared of
wrongdoing before.
Prosecutors charged him with conspiring to cover up the
fatal beating of drug
dealer Leonardo Mercado nearly 10 years ago. He was
acquitted in 1994, and his
lawyer, Harry Solomon, predicted the same outcome again.
``My client is not guilty of these offenses, and we look
forward to full vindication at
trial,'' Solomon said Friday. ``It's very upsetting to be
charged with a crime when
you're not guilty.''
Police and prosecutors allege that Aguero threw the stolen
gun under a parked car
to make it appear that Daniel Hoban, the homeless man, was
armed when Officer
Jorge Castello shot him in the leg. In reality, authorities
believe that Hoban was
carrying only a Sony Walkman-type radio. It disappeared.
In the official police report on the shooting, Officer
Rolando Jacobo wrote that
Hoban had pointed a gun at Castello and him. Hoban insisted
he had no gun,
however, and witnesses said they didn't see a gun at the
scene for the first 20
minutes after the 8 p.m. shooting.
It was then, after Aguero arrived on the scene, that police
discovered the
.45-caliber pistol, serial number N5417, under the nearby
car.
Spurred by conflicting witness accounts, investigators
traced the weapon's
ownership. Internal Affairs Maj. William O'Brien said
investigators discovered that
it had belonged to an alleged drug dealer whose home was
searched by Miami
Police on Feb. 11, 1996.
Among the searchers: Aguero, who allegedly went alone into
the room where the
gun was kept.
``The next time the gun was seen was on the Grove crime
scene,'' O'Brien said.
Aguero faced closer scrutiny after the FBI crime lab, using
a laser beam, found his
fingerprint on the gun.
Between July and October, investigators arrested Jacobo,
Castello and Officer
Oscar Ronda for allegedly helping to cover up the incident.
On March 9, Jacobo
was sentenced to 364 days in jail after being convicted of
official misconduct. He is
out on bail pending appeal.
The other accused officers deny any wrongdoing, saying the
state is on a witch
hunt against them.
Miami-Dade prosecutor Bill Altfield, who is handling
Aguero's case, declined to
comment Friday.
The Grove throwdown incident prompted Warshaw to disband
the 12-year-old
street narcotics unit and reassign its officers to three
smaller tactical squads called
crime suppression teams. He said they would receive more
supervision and focus
more on narcotics stings.
The case also caused the department to review every police
shooting since 1990
to make sure the guns found had not been planted.
Investigators focused on two
cases they found suspicious -- one involving a
purse-snatching suspect in 1996 and
a second that killed a suspected robber on the Interstate
395 overpass in 1995.
No officers have been charged in either case.