Cuban Coffee

I have been enjoying the local Cafe Cubano. It is like liquid crack... or what I guess liquid crack would be like. When we're filming in to the 18th hour a little shot of the black gold recharges our batteries.

Good Cop, Baby Cop

Brickell Area Bank

Miami is full of banks. My bank is everywhere... but with no parking!

Working Weekends

(L to R: Me, Sgt. Herrara, Detective John, Detective Rojas)

Sundays are never boring when you hang around with homicide detectives.

Miami Down Time

Sometimes it gets boring between stories. Fortunately I've met some nice people in my building.

Skinny Dipping

An elderly man in South Florida had owned a large farm for several years. He had a big pond in the back, fixed up really nice, along with picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some fruit trees. The pond was properly shaped and fixed up for swimming.

One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond, as he hadn't been there for a while, and look it over. He grabbed a five gallon bucket to bring back some fruit.

As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing. When he came closer, he realized it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his pond. He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end to shield themselves.

One of the women shouted to him, "We're not coming out until you leave!"

The old man frowned and replied, "I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the pond." Holding the bucket up he said, "I'm just here to feed the alligator."

Moral of the story: Old men may move slow but can still think fast.

Happy Father's Day

They LOVE the COCK

My colleagues were enthralled by the six foot tall rooster outside the Mexican restaurant where we ate lunch today.

The Swear Jar

Guayabera

I bought my first Guayabera. It's comfortable in the hot & humid climate... plus all the thugs think I'm a cop!

You'd think she got LIFE

Taste it!

Cell Phone Sights

Pretty sunsets taken with my itty bitty Razr.

Autopsy

Got ya! Well its been a hell of a week. We worked at least 80 hours in the last 7 days. We filmed two homicides which have both been resolved already. It looks like both stories will make it on the show.

The picture above is from Hofbrau Beerhall, a German restaurant on Lincoln road. Gotta eat!

My First Murder

At about midnight on Thursday we got the call that the homicide detectives had a murder. I had already been working on another story for twelve hours at that point. I grabbed my gear and headed for my truck.

My pulse quickened as I wondered how I would react to what I was about to see. I got to the crime scene rather quickly. It was a robbery gone bad at a cafe in a rough neighborhood called Little Haiti. A customer was shot because he stood up to the robbers.
I walked up on the scene with my camera in hand - filming (Thats me in the far left of the picture above). The yellow crime scene tape was stretched out for half a block around the cafe. Blue and red flashing light from the police cars bounced off of every shiny surface. I slid under the tape and got close enough to see inside the cafe. Blood was pooled on the floor around the body of a man covered by a sheet. I knew it was a man because his hands and feet protruded from the sheet.
He had been shot several times. After seeing the body I became surprisingly calm. I continued filming. I discovered a strange beauty in the scene. I hope it translates to the tape I shot.

We covered the story until around 2PM on Friday. The detectives had some leads but were becoming tired. Needless to say I was on my feet and filming for nearly 26 exhausting hours. Thats when they decided to take me to the medical examiners office to check out the progress on the autopsy... (to be continued)