Miami Teen Allegedly Attacked With Machete, Buried Alive By Classmates
A Miami-area teenager was allegedly hacked with a machete and then buried alive in a shallow grave by fellow students in a premeditated attack.
Two of the suspects then allegedly decided to have sex near the murder scene.
The victim’s brothers found his partially buried, decomposing body several days later in the woods not far from the Homestead Job Corps facility.
According to multiple media outlets, Miami-Dade Police arrested Kaheem Arbelo, 20, Jonathan Lucas, 18, Christian Colon, 19, and Desiray Strickland, 18, and charged them with second-degree murder in the connection with the death of Jose Amaya Guardado, 17.
Strickland was arrested yesterday, while the other three were taken into custody last week. All four are being held without bail. Authorities are also apparently seeking a fifth suspect in the machete attack.
Strickland reportedly got into a scuffle with a detective and is also charged with resisting arrest and related offenses. According to cops, Strickland also “complained” about missing the initial machete blows on the victim because she left the immediate area briefly to urinate.
Cops say that the victim was struck so many times that his face “caved in,” Local 10 News disclosed. Citing a police source, the news station also claimed that “Guardado was sodomized, tortured, and buried alive.”
All five were students at the Homestead Job Corps, a live-in school for at-risk youth that enables them to obtain high school diplomas and learn a trade.
Arbelo, Lucas, and Colon have confessed to the crime that occurred on June 28, according to the Miami Herald, which they allegedly planned two weeks before carrying it out when they lured the victim into the woods.
“Arbelo, Lucas and Colon then ambushed Guardado and Arbelo struck him repeatedly with the machete, police said,” the New York Daily News reported.
If at all conceivable, the gruesome crime allegedly got even more disturbing.
“After the group of students buried Jose and cleaned up the bloody scene, Strickland and accused ringleader Kaheem Arbelo stayed in the woods to have sex before returning to the Job Corps campus, the [arrest] report said… Law enforcement sources have described the students as part of a group of bullies within the federally operated school,” the Herald explained.
The murder supposedly has its source in a dispute over money. “Arbelo is an alleged school drug dealer and attack is thought to have stemmed from a debt owed to Arbelo from Guardado,” the Daily Mail noted.
Charges against the suspects in the Miami machete attack could be upgraded to first-degree murder, given that they are all over the age of 18. Officials say that security at the Homestead center has been strengthened.
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