Send us a text
On April 11, 1986, I was a reporter with the NBC station in Miami, Channel 7, WSVN. I'll never forget that morning with the police radio scanner crackling in the newsroom, "FBI agents shot," gunfight in the area of Miami called Suniland. My photographer, Phil Zarowny, and I jumped in the news van. I drove. As a former New York cab driver, I pulled out all the stops and never stopped for red lights, barreling down I-95 and then U.S. 1. The trip should have taken at least 25 minutes. I think we made it in 10-15. Suniland was really just a strip mall that had a parking lot on top of the buildings. With the streets closed off, we drove to the upper level parking lot. Looking down, what we saw next was unbelievable.
It was a battleground of bullets, bodies, agents and detectives trying to figure out what happened. By the time we got there, the shooting was over, but there were four dead bodies the ground, two FBI agents, and two bank robbers, ex-military men who saw casualties as the cost of war. There were also five agents shot and wounded, three very seriously. All would survive. On the one year anniversary, I asked the Miami Bureau of the FBI if I could do the first interview with the surviving agents. Three of them agreed. Through police contacts I also obtained exclusive video behind police lines and audio from police radios. The result was a documentary I did called, "Dark Day in Suniland." Here is the audio of that doc. The show can be seen on YouTube. To this day, I am still very close with those FBI agents, one, Eddie Mireles exhibited the greatest acts of heroism I know. It was he who killed the bad guys, despite near mortal wounds of his own. I salute them every day.
It was a terrible day for Murder in the Sunshine State.
