THE KILLER: GONE. WITNESSES: NONE. CLUES: ZERO.

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 8, 1982
Author: EDNA BUCHANAN Herald Staff Writer

He is watching television at 12:30 a.m. when the telephone rings.

It has been a long wait this time, nearly a week of edgy anticipation, of summer rain and waxing moon. "There it is," he says. "Let's go."

John Brooks knows a stranger is dead.

A friend, Robert Brojanowski, is with him. He too is accustomed to death in the night. The nightmares in their lives are true stories.

Brojanowski is like so many others: Policemen who escape their wearying, often soul-searing jobs to vacation in a far city -- and go directly to the nearest police station to be with other cops and watch them work. Perhaps it is healthy curiosity; more likely, an unspoken need to affirm that life and death at its worst is the same everywhere. Always.

Brojanowski is a homicide detective in Elizabeth, N.J. where 22 persons were murdered last year.

John Brooks is a homicide sergeant in Miami, a team leader in a city where 226 people were slain last year. Tonight he leads the team carrying the hot beepers, the team on call.

It is June 5th. An unidentified man has been shot to death in an apartment house. It is what the cops call a whodunit case. The killer: Gone. Witnesses: None. Leads: Zero.

Two years ago, only 24 per cent of these tough murder cases -- cases without smoking guns, motives or witnesses -- were solved. Now the figure is 60 per cent. In 1980, 54 per cent of all city homicides were solved. This year, 71 per cent have been solved.

Lt. Robert Murphy and Capt. William Starks took over the homicide squad in 1981, the year after the city's murder count had peaked with 244 slayings. The beefy pair, who look like aging football linemen, created the whodunit team concept: They organized the homicide squad into small teams of detectives who take turns on 24-hour call, to catch the killers who used to get away.

The detectives receive no extra pay like SWAT team members or motorcycle police, no four-day weeks like patrolmen.

"They work seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day," says Murphy. "They get nothing extra."

"All we can offer them," Starks says, "is lousy hours and an interesting job. They either love it or leave it."

On this hot, wet night, time is paramount -- trails cool fast, witnesses disappear, clues fade.

Murphy, in his battered 1973 Maverick is already en route -- he or Starks try to be at the scene of every whodunit. He drives the 13 miles to the station and switches to a city car. It is nearly 2 a.m. when he swings into a parking space near the murder scene, an aging, stucco apartment house on NW 20th Street. A huge pine tree towers high behind the building. Its stark branches seem to catch the clouds that sweep across the full moon's misty face. There are three apartments, front, rear and upstairs, all with separate entrances. From inside the screened front porch a number of silent women and children watch police with wary interest.

The team is already at work.

In addition to Brooks are Henry Izaguirre, Carlos de los Santos and Eddie Martinez. With them is Lou Davis, 43, identification technician for 14 years, honored by police in 1980 for identifying 120 criminals through fingerprints.

The detectives stride past three plastic sacks of garbage at a side door and up a narrow stairway with worn carpet. A bullet has shattered the plaster inches from an old mirror at the head of the stairs. A second bullet hole gapes from the ceiling, next to a light fixture.

All the action swirls around the landing at the top of the stairs. At its center, a man lies on his back, looking peaceful, oblivious to the attention, to the importance he has achieved in death. The third bullet hole is in his chest. He lies across a threshold, his bare feet, toes up, rest in what appears to be a child's bedroom. His new-looking blue jeans are folded up at the cuff. His shirtless body is scarred and sturdy.

A battered white hard hat lies near his outstretched arm. Two dirty construction boots stand side-by-side under a baby's crib in the bedroom where the man died. A doll with blonde hair lies on the blood-spattered floor. There is a crib full of baby clothes and a baby's swing. Blood smears streak the wall near the bedroom light switch, as though the wounded man clutched at the hole in his chest, then reached for the wall switch.

A Dominican family lives in the front apartment downstairs. The rest of the building is occupied by Mariel refugees. Izaguirre, de los Santos and Martinez mingle, question, canvas in rapid-fire Spanish.

When Starks took over homicide 18 months ago, he faced a murder caseload that was about 70 per cent Latin. He had three Spanish-speaking detectives. "We were definitely at a disadvantage," Starks says. Within a few months another five Spanish-speaking detectives were assigned to homicide. Now the number has grown to 12, nearly half the squad.

Henry Izaguirre talks to a half dozen possible witnesses and quietly reports to his sergeant: "This one is lying, that one is telling the truth, those two over there are lying." His sergeant nods.

Henry, a soft-spoken, gentle young man, is gifted with an uncanny ability to recognize a liar. He is rarely wrong.

"It's an exceptional sense," says his sergeant. "A knack, a natural talent for realizing when people are telling the truth. It's something you can't teach, you can't train. You're born with it."

Izaguirre, a young man in a hurry, was already married, and already a cop, while still a teenager. Now, at age 24, he has five years police experience and is a workaholic.

Eddie Martinez, 26, a policeman for five years, is the thinker. Carlos de los Santos, 24, is a street cop with "good instincts." His work as a patrolman led to at least one whodunit arrest. He is new to the homicide squad. Married, with two small children, he has worked a midnight shift for three years.

Brooks, their sergeant, is 30. Neat and meticulous, he looks like a stockbroker. Manager of a Winn-Dixie, he took a cut in pay to join the department seven years ago.

The job of investigating violent death accompanies them on and off duty. The lines between personal and professional lives often blur.

The son of a retired Connecticut cop, Lt. Murphy is married to his job, divorced from his wife. Capt. Starks' wife is a police officer. Brooks' pregnant wife Donna is a police dispatcher with streaming blonde hair and a cool demeanor. Her parents are police officers.

On duty, when a mental patient attacked and injured Brooks on a city street, she calmly dispatched help, and the paramedics.

Brooks' team has investigated 21 murders this year, and solved 19.

Only one other team has done better. It is led by veteran Sgt. Mike Gonzalez, who began solving murders 27 years ago, before most of his colleagues were born. Gonzalez' team has no unsolved cases.

Nothing is what it appears to be.

The apartment where the dead man lies looks looted. Stereos, TVs and appliances, even an office Dictaphone are balanced on furniture, stacked near doorways as though ready to be carried off.

They were, the detectives learn, just carried in. The tenants of the apartment are brand new, still in the process of setting up housekeeping. There are mops, pails and cleaning equipment. The apartment has been scrubbed as clean as any flat could be in an old building with screenless windows.

A young woman named Lourdes lives here, with her two babies, one a year old, the other an infant. Pale and pretty and very thin, she wears short shorts and a pout. She looks younger than 22, like a child, holding her baby. Then it is established that Lourdes has a husband, Alberto. And that she, Alberto, his mother and two young men, also refugees, moved in that day.

The dead man now occupying it was not one of them.

Lourdes looks weary: A stranger ran up the stairs, into the bedroom, she says, fell down and died. She shrugs.

A barefoot man happens to burst, mortally wounded, into her new home, falls down and bleeds on her newly scrubbed floor?

There is quiet talk of matching the mud on the construction boots to dirt in the dead man's rolled up cuffs. Are these his boots? And of subjecting Alberto, Lourdes' husband, to a paraffin test to determine if he has fired a gun. A logical presumption might be that the victim arrived to call upon Lourdes and someone took offense. It seems unlikely that the victim could have run up the narrow staircase after he was shot. In a closet hangs another pair of new blue jeans. The cuffs are rolled up.

In the kitchen a saucepan of milk stands forgotten on a cold stove. The cupboard is sparsely stocked with baby formula and sacks of beans.

On a wall hanging, one of the first items put into place in Lourdes' new home, are the words:

Bless this house
Oh Lord we pray
Make it safe
By night and day.
Unanswered prayers. In the next room, blood stains the wooden floor just a few feet from a baby's toys.

Henry learns that the dead man lives somewhere nearby. He was seen earlier, helping the new arrivals carry furniture up the steep flight of stairs.

The detectives trail across wet grass to a tiny tool shed behind the building. The shed is bordered by wildly blooming periwinkles, a cheerful contrast to what is inside. Damp sheets of cardboard and a wrinkled bedsheet have transformed an old and broken beach chair into a makeshift bed. Old clothes and a battered suitcase clutter the small, stifling shed. It is as warm as a slow oven. Somebody lives there, possibly the dead man. No, neighbors say, he lived in the back apartment. Nobody knows his name.

Brooks uses his mobile telephone to call a prosecutor and a medical examiner. A Yellow Cab driver who knows Carlos stops in the street outside. Two running men hailed him earlier but he waved them off. Another cabbie delivered them to a bar on the Trail minutes later. Officers are sent to find the pair.

Three carloads of possible witnesses are whisked off to headquarters for statements. The detectives instruct that they be kept apart. It is 2:35 a.m. Henry and Eddie Martinez take Lourdes to the station. Before driving off, Henry suggests that someone check out two cars parked nearby and points out two more witnesses to his sergeant. "They are lying," he warns.

The murder scene is sketched. The body, the bullet holes in the wall and ceiling and the bloody fingerprints at the light switch are all photographed by Lou Davis, the detectives and Assistant Dade County Medical Examiner Dr. James Ongley who has arrived from his Miami Beach home.

The body is bathed in flashbulb brilliance. Camera lenses mist over in the soft, damp heat.

The doctor and Sgt. Brooks begin a closer scrutiny of the body. Ongley examines the limp hands and arms for traces of gun powder, drug abuse or signs of a fight. The small and deadly hole in the man's chest quickly becomes a well of blood that spills over as the body is shifted slightly.

To make it easier to check his pockets, the blue jeans are unzipped exposing his white jockey shorts. In the right front pocket are three car keys on a metal ring, three folded $1 bills, four quarters, four dimes and two nickels. A total of $4.50. No identification, no personal items, no clues.

The doctor lifts each foot to examine the soles for any clue to the path of his last steps, then he and Brooks roll the body over. No wounds in the back. But there is something that might help.

"Want the bullet?" Ongley asks.

The autopsy will not be done for hours. It could help detectives now to know the bullet's caliber. The slug appears to be lodged below the left shoulder blade, a small protrusion just beneath the skin. Bullets slow down as they crash through a human body. Often the skin stretches out and cushions the impact, leaving the projectile lying just under the surface.

"Anybody got a pen knife?" Ongley asks cheerfully.

Better still, Davis, the technician, carries a scalpel in his work kit. Ongley slices a 1-inch incision. Blood spurts as he maneuvers an index finger into the wound, probing for the bullet. There is a sucking sound and the wound begins to bubble blood and gurgle loudly.

Ongley succeeds in extricating the bullet and the dead man is turned back into a supine position. The wound continues to sputter, emitting a loud and hideous hissing sound, air from a punctured lung, escaping the chest cavity.

Ongley holds up the slug, a .38 caliber short, in good condition. Its quick recovery and identification rule out a .25 caliber semi-automatic handgun Henry already has confiscated from a neighbor.

Ongley believes the slug tore through the victim's heart. Even so, he says, the victim could have run, even scrambled up a flight of stairs, after he was shot.

"I don't think he was shot here," says the doctor, turning to hand the bloodied scalpel back to Davis.

Davis declines. He had carried the knife for 15 years, to peel his oranges at lunch. "I don't think I need it anymore," he says quietly.

More visitors. Two men from the firm hired by Dade County to move bodies. They swing the dead man onto a metal stretcher. One carefully wraps the head in absorbent green paper, the same stuff used to make disposable hospital gowns. They shove the dead man's hands into his open blue jeans so his arms won't swing. Tucked in with more green blotting paper to absorb the oozing blood, he is covered with a green felt shroud.

Carlos thanks the young attendants, hoping aloud that they will not meet again this night.

Straining, the attendants maneuver the stretcher's dead weight down the narrow stairs. Dr. Ongley follows, home to bed for the rest of the night, unless there is another killing, another house call. It is 3:10 a.m.

Davis and the detectives measure the angles of the bullet holes in the ceiling and wall to determine if they could have been fired by a gunman pursuing the victim up the stairs. Brooks asks for a hammer. He wants that bullet in the ceiling. He steps up on a folding chair and pounds a hole in the ceiling. He curses, not because of the plaster and dust showering his hair and natty blue suit, but because the slug has apparently vanished between solid wooden rafters.

"It might have gone on right through the roof in this old house," says Davis.

A steamy pall hangs over the room. The lieutenant's face is red. The detectives peel off their jackets. It will be a long night.

Brooks asks for a fire department ladder. Fleeing killers sometimes fling a murder weapon onto a rooftop.

The neighbors warm up a bit to Henry, Carlos and Eddie. One points out the victim's car. The dead man's keys fit the black and white 1973 Coupe de Ville. A man with no shirt and another, wearing a 10-gallon hat, talk to the detectives. One claims he was "taking a walk," at the time of the shooting. "He's lying," Henry observes.

Inside the back apartment where the dead man dwelt is a small shrine to Santa Barbara. An offering of periwinkles wilts in a water glass.

More unanswered prayers.

An eager little dog, fluffy and pink-tongued, prances at the detectives' heels. She belonged to the dead man. Curled up asleep in a chair is her puppy. It blinks awake, toddles on shaky legs and tumbles to the floor. Now wide awake and frisky, he playfully attacks the strangers' cuffs as they search. They find a shotgun shell, Wild West paperbacks in Spanish, baseball cards, letters postmarked Havana, identification papers in several names and a black-and-white photo of the dead man. Three men are smiling in a Polaroid snapshot.

Just off the kitchen is another religious shrine, a shelf dedicated to Saint Lazaro, a stooped old man with leper's sores. No flowers here. The offering to this saint is pennies, and a fat cigar lying across the mouth of a water glass. In a closet nearby hangs a corduroy jacket, a handful of bullets in one pocket. They are .38 shorts. An ammunition box, with one slug in it, a .38 short, is found outside in the wet grass near the tool shed.

It is nearly 4 a.m. and the misty night vibrates with the groan and rumble of a huge fire truck. The search for the murder weapon is on, high above the street. A swaying cherry picker inches slowly through the damp air, two cops and a fire captain balanced in its mechanical maw.

The lieutenant is irate. He wants a ladder for a fast search of the adjacent rooftops. "They've been up there playing Sky King for 15 minutes," he grumbles. "They aren't even near the roof." A detective reports back that the fire captain is eager to use the gigantic machine because his men need training in its operation.

"We're not out here for training." bawls Murphy. "Tell him if they won't give us a ladder we'll get one somewhere else." An aluminum ladder is quickly unloaded from the block-long truck and officers scramble to the roof.

The two men picked up by the taxi are located. One is Honduran, the other Nicaraguan. One was exuberantly swinging around a street sign, in the middle of a night of bar-hopping, when they spotted the first cab. They ran only to try to catch it. The well-intentioned tip is a dud. There is no luck, and no gun, on the rooftops either.

At 4:45 a.m., the detectives return to headquarters. They drag stiff-backed chairs up to a table in the auto theft bureau. Henry's tie is loosened. Carlos spills coffee on his notebook. Brooks' tie remains perfectly knotted, his shirt crisp, despite the night, the heat, the shower of plaster. Nobody looks sleepy. Intense and eager, they brainstorm: The victim's bare feet, the work boots suspiciously close to the body; the blue jeans in the closet, the cuffs turned up like his. It is a common style, they note, popular among Mariel refugees.

Lourdes, her husband and the other new tenants are discussed.

"I don't think they had anything to do with it," says Henry. "I think he was shot outside, downstairs, and he just ran."

The doctor says that was possible.

Why would the victim run to the new neighbors he scarcely knew? "He was just running for cover," insists Henry.

The apartment where the dead man lived is apparently a "crash pad" used by a number of Mariel refugees. A teenage daughter of the Dominican family, first floor front, was studying in her room at the time of the shooting, next to the rear apartment.

Her story is consistent with Lourdes' unlikely tale.

Lourdes says she, her husband and his mother were fixing a bed in another room when they heard loud arguing downstairs. Her babies were in their room, the infant in the crib, the 1-year- old playing with her doll on the floor.

Shots. Footsteps pounding up the stairs. More shots. "There are babies in here." she screamed.

Her cries may have caused the killer's retreat. Lourdes stepped out of the bedroom. The victim was still on his feet, walking, clutching his chest. "I'm hurt. I've been shot." he told her and began to gasp.

Alberto ran downstairs to ask the Dominicans to call for help.

Henry has been told that one of the habitues of the rear apartment is a man named Froilan who parks a big brown car there every night. Tonight he is not there. Mail addressed to him has been found in the apartment though he reportedly stays with a Hialeah girlfriend.

"So we consider him a suspect," says Brooks, "somebody we have to talk to."

Papers belonging to several men were found in the apartment. More people who should be talked to.

A witness is discussed. "Another liar," says Henry. A tenant swore he slept through it all. "He's lying," says Henry. (Both men will change their stories later. One will admit he saw the shooting.)

Carlos will research records on everything: cars, tags, witnesses, suspects and the still-unidentified victim. "I want everything on everybody," Brooks says. "Every name that pops up."

A police radio interrupts, silencing the detectives for a moment. A bloody trail has been found six blocks from the murder scene. "Lots of blood on both sides of the street," radios an officer.

The trail of blood ends at an open telephone booth. It is never learned whose blood spilled and spattered along the moonlit pavement before dawn, up one side of the street and down the other.

Another unsolved Miami mystery in the full of the moon.

ID technician Davis travels to the morgue to fingerprint the dead man and he is quickly identified from police records: Freddie Ramirez Perez also known as Manuel Espinosa, born Sept. 9, 1961, arrested for burglary in both 1981 and 1982. He looks 30, he is only 20.

In small separate interview rooms, detectives take statements from each witness.

"The offenders are the easiest to break down," says Henry. "It is the witnesses who won't talk."

"They are just plain afraid," says Eddie.

Henry hits pay dirt. A witness now happens to recall that he heard the shots and looked out a window. A brown Cadillac drove up, he said, and he spoke to the driver. "Hey, they just shot a guy." he said. The driver shrugged, then hit the gas. A half a block away, he stopped to pick up a running man.

The driver, he says, was a man named Froilan. He describes him, then points him out: one of the three men in the Polaroid photo found in the rear apartment.

The tension intensifies. The sun rises, hot and hazy. Nobody notices. Henry and Eddie are back at the murder scene by 7 a.m., determining where the killer's car was parked, talking to witnesses, striding past the three bags of garbage, up the narrow stairs.

The tenants are back in their apartment. The blood smears are gone. Mopped away. The floor is still wet. Lourdes, her husband, the old woman and two young men continue to unpack as the detectives compare the views from various windows to witnesses accounts of what they saw or did not see.

Back down the stairs, past the bullet holes, the stacked garbage. Eddie shows the Polaroid snapshot of the three men to a witness. Without hesitation, the man points to the one named Froilan, fingering him as the man driving the car. The witness points to a second man in the same photo. That, he says, is the man who got into the car just after the shooting. The witness agrees to give a sworn statement.

"He is being honest," Henry says. He stops canvassing long enough to dash into the street and chase the victim's little dog back onto the sidewalk. The animal plays tug of war with a yellow police rope still tied at the scene, then scampers again into the street.

"It's gonna get hit by a car, I know it," moans Eddie.

At 8 a.m. Saturday, Henry and Eddie wolf down Cuban sandwiches at a coffee shop. Sgt. Brooks is escorting an assistant state attorney to see the apartment house. He wants a search warrant.

Detectives prepare four pages of detailed description, even describing the slant of the trees in the yard.

"No problem," says Prosecutor Leonard Baer. "I can get you a warrant in an hour."

Carlos is at the medical examiner's office at 9:05 a.m., to attend the autopsy. He shows no fatigue. Once he investigated a Friday murder straight through to Sunday night.

Lt. Murphy joins Carlos at the morgue. Freddie Ramirez lies naked on a metal tray, weighed, measured and prepared. A number is tucked under his chin and he is photographed for identification. Freddie Ramirez has been photographed dead more than he ever was alive. His arms, chest and face are decorated with what appear to be old stab wounds. A foot-long surgical scar stretches from his groin down his right thigh.

Dr. Ongley, wearing surgical greens under a pink apron, measures the bullet's path with a metal probe. With the man's chest open, he uses what looks like a soup ladle to dip out the blood. His guess, when he crouched over the body in the steamy apartment before dawn, was accurate. The bullet did rip through the heart, through the bottom of the left lung and through the diaphragm before lodging between the seventh and eighth rib.

The victim may have fled up a flight of steep stairs to seek help, but he never had a chance. "He was a dead man when he was hit," said Murphy.

Each beat of his torn heart spilled more of his blood into his chest cavity instead of circulating it through the vessels. It filled the space between the heart and the sac surrounding it. The pressure began to push on the outside of the heart so that it was unable to fill. It began to pump less and less, providing less blood to the brain and causing an irregular heart rhythm. He lost consciousness. His brain died and his heart stopped.

By 10:08 a.m. witnesses interviewed at headquarters are slowly becoming more cooperative. The man who climbed into the getaway car after the shooting is known as Olgo, they say. He is one of the two men in the color photo with Froilan.

Froilan is identified as Froilan (Pollo) Ginebra, 32, with a history of gun, burglary and prowling arrests.

Brooks sends Carlos home at 10:30 a.m. He wants at least one fresh and rested team member when they are due back on duty at 10:30 p.m.

Brooks asks other detectives and police departments if the unusual names, Froilan and Olgo, sound familiar. It is Saturday and Hialeah detectives do not answer their telephone. Their records bureau is closed.

"This is the interesting part," says Brooks. "The chase. We're narrowing it down."

Prosecutor Baer works busily at a nearby desk drawing up the search warrant. He specifies that the detectives are seeking guns, ammunition, photos, auto registration papers, identification and fingerprints.

Brooks confirms that patrol officers have all the updated information and are checking Mariel hangouts for the getaway car. He also tries to find the family of Freddie Ramirez. He does not succeed. No one claims his body.

A secretary on overtime finishes typing the search warrant at noon. A judge is found to sign it.

The man known as Olgo lived in a corner of the apartment, near the Saint Lazaro shrine, a witness says. A fingerprint lifted from the Saint Lazaro candle is fed into Miami's $500,000 Rockwell fingerprint computer. The computer spits back a name: Carlos Alberto Acosta. Detectives pull his records: burglary, stolen property and gun arrests. And his mug shot. The face is the same one smiling from the Polaroid photo. He is the man witnesses say they saw climb into the getaway car.

The corduroy jacket with the bullets in the pocket is his. It hangs in the closet where his rollaway bed is kept.

Detectives talk to witnesses, informants, colleagues. They learn the address of Froilan's girlfriend in Hialeah. Moved, says the manager, no forwarding address. Old files are checked, every person ever arrested with Froilan and Olgo. They are contacted, their addresses watched. A list of the suspects' favorite bars is compiled. They are in none of their usual haunts.

The search stretches into night.

Carlos reports back for duty at 10:30 p.m. A full moon rides high over Miami and all hell breaks loose on the streets.

A young, lovelorn Mariel refugee blows his brains out in a shabby car in a city park. Henry breaks away from the manhunt long enough to handle the case.

A young prostitute is dead, apparently of a drug overdose, in her room at a downtown hotel. Carlos investigates.

A man is stabbed to death in a fight outside a Miami bar. It is a "smoking knife" case. Eddie arrests the killer at the scene.

A hatchet-swinging attacker lops off several fingers and leaves ax wounds in a man's head and back. The victim survives but refuses to cooperate with police. Eddie investigates.

Brooks goes to each scene. Then he and the others resume the manhunt for Olgo and Froilan.

By 2 a.m. Sunday, Brooks' eyes are red-rimmed but he has not slowed the pursuit. All hot leads are exhausted by 8 a.m. Sunday. So after 32 hours, the detectives go home to sleep.

In a second round of questioning, the next day, another sometimes resident of the back apartment admits to Henry that he saw the shooting. A friend of both killer and victim, he had been reluctant to talk.

A casual insulting remark, he says, set off the encounter that killed Freddie Ramirez and spoiled the new tenants' first night in their new home. Olgo told Freddie Ramirez that he ate too much. Freddie took offense.

Freddie brandished a knife. Olgo darted into the back apartment for a gun, according to the witness. He says he intervened and disarmed both men. He walked away. The shouts resumed. He turned in time to see Olgo retreat into the apartment and snatch the gun off a table. Freddie ran. Olgo chased him around the building. As the witness ran after them, he heard two shots. He saw Freddie, still unhurt, turn to see if he was still being chased.

He was. A third slug caught him in the chest. "You've got me. I've been hit," he said. He ran toward the apartment of the new tenants, up the stairs. The killer followed.

Two more shots and the wild screams of a woman. The killer emerged, Lourdes' screams echoing down the stairway behind him. The witness dashed into the back apartment for a baseball bat. The killer followed, gun in hand. He picked up a box of bullets, saying, "I haven't finished him off yet."

Apparently reloading, he stepped outside, where he dropped the ammunition box and a single bullet near the tool shed.

Froilan was inside the back apartment during all the excitement, the witness said. He told Froilan: "I think Olgo just killed Kequeco," (Ramirez' nickname). He says that Froilan fled the apartment and drove away in the brown Cadillac, stopping only long enough to pick up Olgo, who ran into the street and jumped into the car.

As of mid-July, neither man had been seen by police.

On the Wednesday after the crime, a technician confirmed that the bullets from the ammunition box and in the suspect's jacket are the same size and weight as the fatal bullet. The same day, an expert identified the single fingerprint lifted from the bullet box dropped at the scene. It belongs, he said, to Carlos Alberto Acosto, also known as Olgo.

A warrant for Olgo's arrest, on first degree murder charges, was prepared the same day.

Froilan is wanted for questioning.

"For our purposes," says Henry, "the case is solved, although it is not complete until the arrest." The missing duo may have fled to New York or New Jersey. Robert Brojanowski, his vacation over, is watching for them in Elizabeth, N.J. where there is a growing refugee community.

Dade County paid to bury Freddie Ramirez. His murder was never mentioned in a newspaper or television newscast. "It is really typical of the cases we get every day," says Henry.

It took a few marathon days of effort to wrap up, but the team has no time for elation. There is still their nightly shift. There is the matter of a hapless motorist, shot dead at the wheel when he stopped for a traffic signal on 62nd Street. And the exact cause of the prostitute's death is still unknown. And the man maimed by the hatchet still refuses to tell who did it. Already it is their turn to take home the hot beepers.

The waiting begins again.

Section: TROPIC MAG
Page: 10
Copyright (c) 1982 The Miami Herald