Witness Disputes Police Narrative in Death of Miami Graffiti Artist Demz

Last Tuesday I blogged about
Delbert Rodriguez Gutierrez, a graffiti artist better known as
“Demz”, who was hit by a Miami Police car after being
caught tagging at the art festival Art Basel. At the time, Demz was
in critical condition with a brain injury. He died Tuesday night, becoming the latest in a
long list of recent, suspicious fatalities at the hands of U.S.
police.  

Miami Police Officer Michael Cadavid, who was driving the car
that hit Demz, said the 21-year-old had fled from cops and turned
down a side street, where he crouched down and hid between two
cars. When Cadavid turned the corner in his car, Demz jumped out at
him, claimed Officer Cadavid. 

“It’s unfortunate that the young man tried to run from police,”
Miami Police Chief Manuel Orosa said by way of condolences.

But family and friends are skeptical of the police narrative,
reports the Miami New Times. Danny Garcia, a friend
tagging with Demz that night, said there’s no way Demz had time to disappear
around a corner and hide before police hit him: 

As Garcia was finishing up his tag, he says, he glanced over his
shoulder to check on his friend. That’s when he saw the flashing
red and blue lights from an unmarked silver Chevrolet sedan—a
patrol car driven by Det. Michael Cadavid—approaching. Garcia took
off sprinting. As he ran, he glanced back to check on Rodriguez,
only to see a flash of his friend’s white T-shirt as he abruptly
rounded the corner onto 24th Street, followed closely by the
Chevy.

Garcia kept running but then returned to the scene a few minutes
later after hearing ambulance sirens. He questions the police’s
suggestion that they lost sight of Rodriguez or that his friend
would have been able to hide between parked cars or lunge into the
street. There simply wasn’t time, he says.

“It was literally seconds,” he said of the time from when Garcia
began running to when he would have been hit as Cadavid’s car
turned the corner. “There wasn’t no ‘He was running and then he
hid,’ like they said. He tried to cross the street, and whatever
happened, the cop struck him.”

A widely circulated photo posted on Instagram seems to support
Garcia’s claims. In the photo … Rodriguez is splayed on the
ground in front of the Chevy, stopped midturn as it rounded the
corner. Only one parked car is visible near Rodriguez. “Where would
he hide, just on the road?” Garcia asks. “That whole story they
gave is baloney.”

“It looked like he was trying to run across,” Garcia adds. “And
the cop turned the corner really quick and struck him… I’m really
hoping it was an accident, but I don’t know if he purposely ran my
friend over.”

Officer Cadivad’s Internal Affairs file, reviewed by the paper,
shows a history of complaints about his aggressive behavior, road
rage, and use of force. Most of the complaints were ruled
inconclusive. In one, Cadivad was found negligent and guilty of
improper procedure for his role in an “infamous” incident involving
Miami cops getting rough with Halloween revelers.

A video allegedly from the hacker group Anonymous says: “Miami
Police, you have caught our attention. Art is not a crime, and we
will not tolerate fellow artists being in danger for expressing
their first amendment rights by the same people who swore an oath
to uphold and protect that very right.”