A woman who ran down and killed a security guard did so intentionally after her boyfriend instructed her to, police say.
By Elaine De Valle, The Miami Herald
Surrounded by an elderly security guard, a woman whose purse he had just grabbed, the woman’s friends and some passersby, Jason Chaveco called for his girlfriend to run them over with her car, police said Wednesday.
Teresa Padron, who had gotten out of her car to tell the group to release Chaveco, got back into the 1986 Chevrolet and struck the security guard, a 17-year-old female and Chaveco, according to her arrest report, which was obtained Wednesday by The Herald.
Padron, 19, drove away from the Tamiami Trail strip shopping center, dragging the 76-year-old guard for several blocks before his body fell away from the car.
Bienvenido Torres was dead.
The testimony from witnesses gave police and prosecutors the ability to charge Padron with first-degree murder, rather than felony murder -- when a death results during the commission of another crime -- because it shows some degree of premeditation, said Miami-Dade Police Detective William “Bill” Hladky, a homicide investigator.
According to the arrest report, Chaveco and Padron were sitting in the car while it was parked at the Trail Plaza Shopping Center on Southwest 67th Avenue on Monday night when a 58-year-old woman and some friends left the Chinese Buffet restaurant.
TAKES PURSE
Chaveco, 20, got out of the car and snatched a purse out of the woman’s left hand. The woman, her friends, Torres and passersby chased Chaveco and caught up to him in front of a beauty school in the shopping center. There was a struggle.
“Padron approached the group, telling them to release her boyfriend,” Hladky wrote in his report. “The civilians refused. Chaveco then told Padron to run over the civilians. Padron entered their car and drove over the civilians.”
“It was intentional. She’s a criminal,” said the guard’s son, Felix Torres. “We went and saw the blood stains he left behind.”
In addition to Torres, she also struck a 17-year-old girl, who was not seriously injured, and Chaveco, who was in stable condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s jail ward Wednesday, police said.
Detectives began taking sworn statements from about 10 witnesses Wednesday, Hladky said. “Several of the witnesses did say they overheard the male subject say to her to get in the car and run them over,” he told The Herald.
Investigators also were trying to determine if the couple are responsible for any other strong-arm robberies or unsolved purse-snatchings in Miami-Dade or Broward -- Chaveco’s last known address -- Hladky said.
MANY ARRESTS
Chaveco, whose criminal record includes arrests for robbery, burglary, theft, drug possession, larceny and other charges, was arrested in a purse-snatching incident with three other people in 2002, but charges against him were dropped when the victim could not positively identify him, the state attorney’s office said.
Padron, whose first court appearance is this morning, does not have any prior record, according to police and prosecutors. She listed her occupation as a dancer at Centro Espanol, a strip club on the Miami River.