Listen to FLORIDA FILES investigation into a police shootout gone wrong
Loved ones for slain UPS driver Frank Ordonez will gather Monday at the site where the father of two young girls was killed after he was hijacked
“There is a light pole there just before you get to the corner of Miramar and Flamingo it’s a public light and there’s a picture of Frank with flowers and everything. There’s a vigil every year,” Ordonez’s stepfather Joe Merino tells Local 10′s The Florida Files podcast. Lucy, his mother, says Frank would have loved the vigil they hold every year. “People gather and they get together and remember him,” she says.
LISTEN TO LOCAL 10′S THE FLORIDA FILES: “POLICE SHOOTOUT GONE WRONG”
It was Dec. 5, 2019, when two armed robbers, Lamar Alexander, and Ronnie Jerome Hill, both 41, robbed a jewelry store in Coral Gables then led police on a 25-mile chase after they hijacked a UPS truck with Ordonez in it.
The truck went through multiple cities in Miami Dade County eventually ending up in Broward County in the city of Miramar. It became trapped at an intersection with people driving home from work at rush hour.
20 police officers from four departments, Miami-Dade County, Pembroke Pines, Miramar, and the Florida Highway Patrol, were involved in a shootout, as a preliminary investigation revealed that around 200 bullets struck the UPS truck.
Frank Ordonez, 27, Richard Cutshaw, 70, Lamar Alexander, 41, and Ronnie Jerome Hill, 41, died during a police-involved shooting three years ago in Miramar Parkway.
“There’s days that you need the motivation to get up, the support, to keep fighting, to keep finding out,” says his sister Sara Ordonez. After three years, the family still doesn’t know whose bullets killed their loved one.
Also killed was Richard Cutshaw, a man who was in his car, eight miles from his home in Pembroke Pines, driving from his union representative job in Miramar and stopped at a light. Cutshaw was caught in the crossfire. His brother, Tom, tells Local 10′s The Florida Files that his brother, Rick, was shot in the head. Tom says his brother’s death certificate reads “death by homicide.”
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), the entity that investigates police-involved shootings, handed over its findings to the Broward State Attorney’s Office on Sept. 15, 2021.
Lucy Apolinario, Ordonez’s mother, says in Spanish with her husband, Joe, translating for her: “It’s an embarrassment to the police that there was no direction, no protocol.”
Genevieve Merino was 15 years old when her brother was shot.
“I would love to talk to him and just tell him everything that’s been going on. What he’s missed out. He missed out on my graduation, he missed out on me getting my license, finally driving. It just really sucks because I would love to talk to him and just tell him how much I love him and how much I miss him.”
The shootout remains under review with the Broward State Attorney’s Office.
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