BY BRENDA MEDINA AND CHARLES
RABIN
A Miami-Dade police officer
faces four counts of driving under the influence, damage to property and
causing minor injuries to two people while driving under the influence.
Officer Ryan Louis Robinson was
arrested on charges of driving drunk and injuring two girls after crashing his
personal vehicle into a shopping cart Saturday at Cutler Ridge Shopping Center,
20445 Old Cutler Rd.
Video of the incident taken by
the father of the injured girls shows Robinson barely able to balance himself
shortly after 8 p.m., while standing up in the shopping center’s parking lot.
Robinson, who was off duty, was
outside the Publix Supermarket in the South Miami-Dade mall when he crashed
into another vehicle, then a shopping cart carrying Meah Garcia, 6, and sister
Geah, 3.
Manuel García, the girls’
father, desperately held on to the cart trying to prevent his daughters from
falling out. Garcia later said Robinson ignored him, then tried to leave.
That’s when the cart fell over and Meah and Geah hit the pavement, suffering
minor bruises and head injuries.
Garcia quickly ran after
Robinson, pulling him out of the car and snatching the keys.
“When I opened the door of the
car, I could feel a strong smell of alcohol,” García told El Nuevo Herald from
his Cutler Bay home. “I told him: ‘You’re going to have to wait here until the
police arrive.’”
Even when Miami-Dade Police
officers arrived, Garcia said Robinson was not tested for alcohol for several
hours.
“The officers went and talked
to [Robinson] for about 15 minutes and then came and asked me for my documents
and registration,” García said. “I had to tell [them], ‘Look, I don’t think you
understand what’s going on here — we are the victims.’”
García said other witnesses
offered to give their versions, but a female officer told him that his
statement was sufficient. Shortly afterward, García said, an officer told him
he could leave.
“But I told him that I wouldn’t
leave until I saw what happened with that man,” said Garcia. “Only then did I
learn that he was a police officer. I think they tried to cover up the incident
to protect one of their own instead of the real victims.”
García called a lawyer, who
advised him to demand that a lieutenant come to the scene.
The arrest affidavit says an
officer who arrived at 10:20 p.m. found Robinson without handcuffs, seated in
the back of a patrol car. He was arrested after failing to pass a field
sobriety test and refusing an alcohol breath test.
“I immediately observed the
following symptoms: Odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from his breath, and
red bloodshot watery eyes,” officer F. Kinsey Smith said in the arrest report.
García recorded part of the
incident on his cellphone. On it, two officers are seen giving Robinson
instructions to walk on a line. It took Robinson about 30 seconds to balance
himself before taking a few staggered steps.
Robinson, 41, who works out of
The Hammocks substation, was released from jail after paying his bond. The
county’s traffic homicide unit is investigating the incident. Police said
Robinson has been relieved of duty with pay.
The little girls were in good
condition Tuesday, though still frightened from incident. They complained of
headaches, García said.
“Imagine, they don’t want to go
back to the supermarket because of what happened, and now they get scared when
they see a police officer,” their father said. “I don’t even remember well what
I felt when I saw my daughters falling to the ground. My mind went blank for an
instant.”
This has been one of several
accidents that Robinson has been involved in since he joined the county police
department in 2003.
Robinson had a string of
accidents in county vehicles during a 21/2 year stretch between October 2004 and
March 2007 when he was a member of the department’s tactical robbery
intervention team — a detail in which it isn’t unusual for officers to use
their undercover vehicles in chases.
During that stretch, Robinson
was involved in nine accidents, three the department ruled were preventable.
But Robinson’s 10th accident,
in July 2013, was far more serious than the others. Investigators found
Robinson at fault for crashing his vehicle as he tried to avoid a head-on
collision on Old Cutler Road at Southwest 173rd Terrace. A bottle of alcohol
was later found in his marked vehicle.
A police department
disciplinary action report says, “You are hereby advised that this type of
conduct is unacceptable."
He was suspended for three
weeks in July and August over the incident” And last month, a police report
indicated Robinson also should receive a written reprimand for purchasing and
transporting alcohol in his vehicle.
In 2007, Robinson was involved
in a controversial double-shooting of two 21-year-old men in Little Haiti. The
incident spurred protests. Robinson and partner Michael Mendez had pulled over
Michael Knight and Frisco Blackwood at a dead end on Northwest 65th Street and
ordered them out of the car.
The officers said one of the
men put the car in reverse and smashed into their vehicle. The officers opened
fire, killing both men.
Fifteen months later,
Miami-Dade prosecutors cleared both of any wrongdoing after a female passenger
said the men rammed the police car on purpose in an attempt to get away.
