Johnathan Hall’s life changed in an instant the night of Saturday, March 14, 2020, when Miami Beach police officers shot him with a barrage of bullets inside the Barbizon hotel on Ocean Drive.
Hall, who was 22 years old at the time, was visiting South Beach during the spring break season with friends from Albany State University in Georgia.
Now, Hall is suing the city of Miami Beach and the three officers who shot him after failing to reach a settlement agreement with the city. He filed a lawsuit in federal court in the Southern District of Florida on March 13 and filed an amended complaint on Thursday.
Hall’s attorney, Roderick D. Vereen, told the Miami Herald in a brief interview that Hall was shot 15 times and needed to have more than half of one of his feet amputated. This past November, Vereen said, Hall had another surgery to have a bullet removed from his groin area.
“They thought he was going to die,” Vereen said of the immediate aftermath of the shooting, when Hall was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital in critical condition. “Now, he has bullet holes riddled all over his body.”
A spokesperson for Miami Beach police, Christopher Bess, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
READ MORE: Police shoot man on Ocean Drive amid tensions with spring breakers in South Beach
Body cameras weren’t activated before shooting
The 2020 incident began when a manager at the Barbizon hotel bar told police that Hall appeared to be intoxicated and had a gun in his waistband. When officers arrived minutes later, Hall had left the bar and gone up to his hotel room. When he came back downstairs, several officers who had cleared a hallway of civilians near the hotel security desk saw Hall standing in the hallway.
Moments later, two or three officers shot Hall “multiple times,” according to an investigation by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office that concluded in April 2021 and resulted in no discipline for the officers. About 30 seconds later, officers were heard on a body-worn camera saying, “Let me see your hands,” and, “He’s still reaching for it,” before one of the officers fired another shot.
A total of 19 bullet casings, all from police officers’ guns, were recovered from the scene.
Exactly what happened in the moments before police opened fire remains unclear. The three officers who fired, Daniel Gonzalez, Alvaro Leon and Victor Silot, did not activate their body-worn cameras before they fired the shots, according to the State Attorney’s Office. Two of them, Leon and Silot, activated their cameras after the initial shooting, showing the immediate aftermath.
All three officers declined to provide sworn statements in the State Attorney’s Office probe. Hall also declined to provide a sworn statement. Surveillance footage from the hotel showed the officers firing the initial shots, but Hall can’t be seen in the video, the report said.
Because of the lack of evidence, investigators said they couldn’t conclude that the shooting was “legally justified,” nor could they conclude that any of the three officers committed a crime by shooting Hall.
Bess, the police spokesperson, said the officers were given a “verbal warning” for violating the department’s body-worn camera policy.
Hall was never arrested or charged with a crime.
The sound of the officers’ gunshots triggered a stampede on Ocean Drive as spring breakers ran away from the area. Tensions were running high between police and crowds in South Beach in March 2020, and several violent police interactions with Black tourists were labeled as racist by the Miami-Dade chapter of the NAACP.
One day after Hall was shot by police, Miami Beach officials announced an 11 p.m. curfew and public beach closures in South Beach to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
‘A fraction of a second’
Shortly after 8 p.m. on March 14, 2020, a bartender at Jalapeño Mexican Kitchen inside the Barbizon hotel told his manager he had concerns about a young Black man who was asking for water at the bar, appeared to be “severely intoxicated,” and had a gun in his waistband, according to the State Attorney’s Office investigation.
The manager approached a police officer at the corner of Fifth Street and Ocean Drive to report the concern around 8:23 p.m. The officer, Richard Lonergan, called a dispatcher. According to the investigative report, the dispatcher asked twice whether the man at the bar — later identified as Hall — was threatening anyone.
Before Lonergan could respond, another officer, Capt. Daniel Morgalo, told the dispatcher to report the incident under the code for an aggravated assault, the investigative report said. Lonergan subsequently told the dispatcher that witnesses had not claimed Hall was threatening anyone, but the dispatcher still “transmitted a priority alert tone and called all units available” to respond to an aggravated assault.
Police officers entered the hotel lobby at 8:25 p.m. and were directed by hotel management to a hallway area next to the front desk, according to the report. Police cleared several people out of the area, then encountered Hall at the end of the hallway. One minute later, at 8:26 p.m., the three officers reported shots had been fired and called for medical help for Hall.
A fourth officer who didn’t fire his gun, Leon Azicri, was the first officer to enter the hallway and later told investigators he saw Hall “down the hallway, behind a corner.” He said he ordered Hall to show himself and that Hall stepped into view and was shirtless with a bathing suit bottom and “a black firearm in his waistband.”
“He ordered the subject to show his hands, at which point his hands were near his midsection, and within a fraction of a second, Azicri heard a firearm discharge behind or next to him,” the investigative report said. “Azicri described the shooting event as happening quick, and stated that he gave the order for hands and the next thing he recalled was gunshots.”
Shortly after the shooting, the Miami Beach police union president at the time, Kevin Millan, claimed Hall had not complied with officers’ commands and took an “overt act” that led them to open fire, though he did not elaborate.
“The bottom line is that if you come out here and you have a gun and you don’t comply with officers’ commands, they are going to be forced to take action to safeguard themselves and the public,” Millan said at the time.
Hall disputes that narrative. In the amended complaint filed last week, he said the officers opened fire “without any provocation.”
He also disputes investigators’ finding that body-cam footage from after the shooting showed police recovering a gun from inside his shorts. In the lawsuit, Hall said he “had already placed his firearm inside of his backpack” when the officers confronted him.
That gun, a semi-automatic pistol, belonged to a friend of Hall who was with him in Miami Beach. The friend told investigators that Hall was carrying the friend’s backpack and that he had warned Hall to keep the gun inside the bag and stay near him.
Hall’s amended complaint frames the shooting as part of a history of alleged misconduct by Miami Beach police, citing incidents over the past 15 years including the fatal shooting of Raymond Herisse on Memorial Day in 2011 and the 2021 beating of a Maryland man in a hotel lobby that led to the arrest of five officers and, last month, the filing of a federal lawsuit by victim Dalonta Crudup.
“The city knew or should have known that there existed a widespread pattern of incidents where officers abused the civil rights of the citizenry, violated laws, and disobeyed departmental orders and policies,” Hall’s lawsuit says. “Nonetheless, the city remained indifferent, refusing to take adequate measures to remediate the culture of lawlessness.”