“Hundreds of Miami Sex Offenders Live in a Squalid Tent City Near Hialeah
“ by Florida Action CommitteeAug 8, 2017
Cradling a heavy box of Budweiser against his flour-dusted apron, Mario Medina clicks open the door and greets two waitresses behind the counter at La Cascada, a retro Cuban pizza parlor in Northwest Miami-Dade. Besides the voice of a sports commentator on the TV and sporadic blips from arcade games in the back, the restaurant is quiet, and all five tables are empty. It’s 30 minutes into the lunch rush hour, but only three weary patrons in construction boots sit hunched over glasses of cold beer at the bar.
“Before, we got more than 200 customers every week,” says Medina, La Cascada’s husky, white-mustached 58-year-old manager. “Now it’s 90 at best.” Over the past few months, Medina has lost 40 percent of his regulars, including many families that are afraid to bring their children to the area or to park their cars out front, he says. Though the place used to make about $8,000 every week, it’s now down to $3,000, which must be split among the restaurant’s five employees.
Medina attributes the parlor’s drop in customers to one problem. Less than a block away, pitched along both sides of the road, are 28 camping tents. In them live scores of registered sex offenders.
The encampment is the result of a 2005 county law — much stricter than a similar measure passed by the state ten years earlier — that imposes restrictions on where sexual offenders and predators may live. It eliminated many residential neighborhoods, public housing complexes, and homeless shelters. So the offenders were exiled to live under a Dolphin Expressway overpass, then the Julia Tuttle Causeway, and a spot near the Miami River. In 2014, the colony moved to this block between train tracks in the warehouse district.
No one argues that their crimes, which include everything from sexting with minors on dating apps to raping children, aren’t serious. But critics of the camp consider it an outrage that human beings are forced to live in such horrendous conditions — in some cases, for several years. Although it’s been three years since New Times described the encampment as a sanitation and security nightmare where offenders are forced to defecate in public with no running water, occupants say it has only increased in density. Dozens of sex offenders now live there in donated tents, while an additional 20 to 40 drive in before dusk for curfew and sleep overnight in their cars. Residents and local business owners have filed complaints, yet county officials and local police departments have failed to act in any meaningful way.
“They’re there all day every day,” says Mary Grafton, whose family owns a custom furniture factory two blocks from the camp. “It’s affecting our business, but we’re at a loss of what to do.” Grafton and other business owners have filed complaints with the police and county commission, but she says the response is always the same: “Our hands are tied.”
See more photos of life in the sex offender tent city near Hialeah. Photo by Isabella Gomes
Initially, a 1995 state law prohibited offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, daycare centers, and playgrounds. Then, in 2005, a child-molesting drifter raped and murdered a 9-year-old 340 miles away in Homosassa, Florida. David Dermer, then mayor of Miami Beach, proposed an ordinance that increased the residency restriction to 2,500 feet, effectively making the entire city off-limits when it passed. Fearing that sex offenders would simply migrate from the Beach to the mainland, Miami-Dade commissioners a couple of months later unanimously agreed to extend the county’s distance to 2,500 feet as well.
“Now they put an ankle monitor and say to stay here. There’s no logic. He can’t even walk!” For years, sex offenders struggled to find addresses that satisfied the harsh countywide ordinance. Even when they found a place, they were often evicted and relocated once a new school was built in their vicinity. By 2014, probation officers called the warehouse district in North Miami-Dade one of the last few places in the county where sex offenders could live. Since then, many have reluctantly called it home.
According to the Miami-Dade Police Department, 233 sex offenders are registered to the area of NW 71st Street and NW 36th Court. Eighty-eight are on probation with ankle monitors tracing their movement.