5 February 29 - March 6, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | windows, and the windows were blacked out.” The son says police started firing despite his dad never pointing a gun at them. At first, he says, he didn’t know he was in the midst of a hail of bullets. “Because they were shooting from inside the car, it almost didn’t even sound real,” he adds. “I got hit by a piece of concrete from the cement electricity pole that we have out front. I looked at my shoulder, and I was like, ‘We’re not getting shot at. That’s not a bullet.’ And then when I looked at the window, I started seeing little bullet holes popping up in the window.” MDPD has not publicly released ballistics evidence on whether Cueli’s gun was fired. New Times will provide an update when that data is released. Once he realized gunfire had broken out, the teenager hopped the gate to sprint back to the house as bullets whizzed around him. Ga- briela noticed her brother running towards her with a panicked look on his face and rushed out with her mom’s phone in hand to see what was going on. “I noticed my dad’s car there, and it’s empty,” she tells New Times. “As I get closer, when I do see my dad, it’s him on the floor, struggling to breathe and blood coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his blood, and at that moment, I just pulled out the phone and started recording. They weren’t doing anything to help my dad.” The heavy-set officer in the grey shirt can be heard saying, “We identified ourselves, and he pulled out a gun on us,” before he strides across Cueli’s body. Another respond- ing officer dressed in street clothes tells Ga- briela that her dad is “fine” and to calm down, to which she responds, “No, he is not fine. He is not breathing.” While Gabriela continuously cries out and asks for an ambulance, the officers are look- ing on and do not immediately tend to Cueli. Pointing out that her father’s eyes are rolling into the back of his head, the daughter pleads, “No one’s helping my dad.” The video shows the officers moving the siblings away from the scene and putting the teenage son’s hands behind his back as he calls out for his father. The brother and sister urge the officers to airlift Cueli, but one officer reassures them an ambulance is on the way. Gabriela tells New Times the officers “left him to die” and “walked over him like a rag doll as if he didn’t matter.” “Their main concern was to get me and my brother out of the property and onto the road away from my dad,” she adds, noting that her infants remained inside the house while the cops tried to detain her in a police car. “They weren’t trying to help him. They had all of us detained for various hours along the road.” Following the shooting, Miami-Dade Po- lice said detectives responded to the area af- ter receiving a call about a possible stolen vehicle. They reportedly claimed they no- ticed a vehicle on the property matching the description provided by the caller and at- tempted to make con- tact with Cueli. “As the officers were simply trying to get off to be able to make contact with him, that’s when the subject armed him- self with a firearm, produced a firearm, and that’s when shots were fired,” Miami-Dade Police Detective Al- varo Zabaleta said in November 2023. Citing the active investigation, the Miami- Dade Police Department declined to provide further details. Early media reports suggested that the call to police may have been related to the man Cueli and his son spotted on the property, but the police department declined to elaborate when contacted by New Times. Seeking Justice Cueli’s wife was escorted down the family driveway in handcuffs and placed in the back of a patrol car after the shooting. His son says the officers had him and his mom handcuffed in the back of police cars on the street for hours. He tells New Times that he kept asking the officers why he was being detained but that they shrugged him off, at one point refusing to let him use the bathroom. “I needed to pee for two hours, and then like all of them kept on telling me, ‘Oh, just piss in the back of the cop car,’” Osvaldo says. Shortly following his mother’s release, Os- valdo says, he was freed around 8 p.m. — five hours after the shooting took place. The sib- lings say the police blocked off the ten-acre property until the family was permitted to go back home early the next morning. “It was like two or three in the morning,” Gabriela says. “They allowed us to back in the property. They gave my dad’s personal ef- fects, but that was it.” Osvaldo suspects he heard more than a dozen gunshots that day. Following the shooting, his family found multiple bullet casings strewn around the grass. The two officers involved in the shooting were both two-decade veterans in law en- forcement, according to previous reporting. FDLE declined to provide New Times with their names, saying it would be against policy in light of the ongoing investigation. The tragedy bears some similarities to other high-profile police shootings in which officers in street clothes were accused of fail- ing to identify themselves, such as the 2020 raid on Breonna Taylor’s apartment. In March 2019, Palm Beach Gardens offi- cer Nouman Raja became the first Florida cop convicted for an on-duty shooting in nearly 30 years in a case arising from the kill- ing of church drummer Corey Jones. In Octo- ber 2015, Raja drove up to Jones’ broken-down vehicle and confronted him wearing street clothes and no badge. When Raja saw Jones was armed with a firearm, he opened fire. He said he announced himself as a police officer, though audio evidence did not corroborate that claim. While questions linger about the call that prompted police to drive out to the Cuelis’ property, the family maintains there was no stolen vehicle on the property that day. “They were apparently looking for a stolen car,” Osvaldo states. “Realistically, for them to do anything, they should at least run the plate of the car and make sure it’s not just some random car.” The family’s attorney, Robert Pertierra, says Cueli’s gun was found in the shrubbery off to the side of the property near the road. Since their father’s death, the siblings say it feels different being at the property. Gabri- ela says she has since moved out of the house. Osvaldo tells New Times he would like to stay and does not want his family to sell the land because it was dear to his father and grandfa- ther — the last place they called home before they died. “My dad was the life of the farm,” Gabriela remembers. “Now, when we’re outside, it’s quiet. Before, there was always movement going around. There was life. He gave life to everything.” [email protected] Osvaldo Cueli and his grandchild Photo by Gabriela Cueli CUELI’S DAUGHTER SAYS ONE OFFICER “WALKED OVER HIM LIKE A RAG DOLL.”
