Police – NBC 6 South Florida
A family member of a girl who witnessed her grandfather get shot to death at her Miami apartment has been arrested in the murder, police said.
Carlos Manuel Rosales, 38, is facing a second-degree murder charge in the shooting of 62-year-old Luciano Matute, Miami Police officials said Friday.
The shooting happened around 8:30 a.m. Thursday in the 700 block of Southwest 5th Street in Little Havana.
Officers who responded to the scene found Matute on the stairway of the building suffering from a gunshot wound to the chest.
He was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital where he died from his injuries.
Surveillance video showed a man walking up the stairs to the apartment and moments later, the grandfather is seen tumbling down the same flight of stairs, and stays motionless on the bottom of the steps.
The girl is seen running down the stairs, sees her grandfather on the ground, and runs away. A man with a covering on his head is also seen fleeing the scene as neighbors stepped out of their homes to see what was happening.
Police said Matute’s granddaughter was alone in the apartment and had called her mother to tell her someone else was inside.
The mother called Matute, who went to the apartment to check it out before he confronted the suspect, police said.
Miami Police are still searching for the shooter who killed a man who was trying to save his granddaughter. NBC6’s Jamie Guirola reports
Police said the shooting suspect fled the scene in a white Toyota pickup. A license plate reader picked up the tag of the truck, which came back to Rosales, an arrest report said.
Officers were able to find the truck and Rosales Thursday afternoon and he was taken into custody.
Rosales later confessed to the murder, police said.
Detectives learned that Rosales is the girl’s uncle, and is married to the sister of the girl’s mother.
Unrelated to the shooting, the police department’s Special Victims unit launched an investigation and Rosales was also arrested on charges of lewd and lascivious molestation on a child and exhibition on a child, police said.
The allegations involve an 11-year-old girl who said Rosales had inappropriately touched her on multiple occasions, an arrest report said.
Rosales was booked into jail, and was expected to go before a judge on Friday.
“Miami Police Homicide and Special Victims Detectives worked tirelessly throughout the day and night to solve and arrest this Murderer and Child Molester within hours of the murder,” the police department said in a statement.
