Early on authorities said a Miami-Dade police officer was killed and another was wounded in a shooting. A suspect was also shot. The two officers were working with a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force
A Career Criminal Task Force unit of the warrants bureau of the Miami-Dade police was looking for a suspect wanted for murder when a shootout occurred.
Witnesses heard four gunshots from a duplex apartment around 9:30 a.m. or 11:00 a.m. Thursday in a violent section of Miami known as Liberty CIty at the intersection of 69th Street and NW 6th Court in Miami, Florida.
The Miami Herald is reporting that the two officers killed were Roger Castillo and Amanda Haworth.
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The Liberty City neighborhood houses more than half of Miami-Dade County’s nearly half a million African Americans and Afro-West Indians (as of 2000 Census). Liberty City’s boundaries are roughly as follows: North 79th Street to the North, North 27th Avenue (Unity Boulevard) to the West, North 41st Street to the South, and Interstate 95 to the East. The neighborhood is just west of Little Haiti.
Liberty City is named for the Liberty Square Housing Project built in the late 1930s for Miami’s low-income African-Americans, the second of its kind in the South at the time.
In 1980, the infamous Liberty City Riots broke out after an unpopular verdict in a 1979 case of white-on-black police brutality. The acquittal of five white police officers that beat a black motorist to death sparked the violence. By the time the rioting ended the following morning, over 850 people were arrested and 18 people were killed. The dead included eight whites and ten blacks.
See also …
Wikipedia Liberty City (Miami) …