On the afternoon of July 26, 2013, Pedro Alberto Vargas, a 42-year-old resident of the Todel Apartments in Hialeah, Florida, called 9-1-1 to report that he was being followed and threatened by people using witchcraft against him. His 83-year-old mother, Esperanza Patterson, took the phone and described her son's strange behavior to the dispatcher, but told police not to come, later saying Vargas had left for a lawyer's office regarding a legal matter.
At around 6:30 p.m., Vargas poured combustible liquid on $10,000 in cash inside his apartment and set it on fire. When the building's manager, 79-year-old Italo Pisciotti, and his 69-year-old wife Samira Pisciotti ran to investigate the smoke, Vargas, identified by police as the gunman, stepped into the hallway and shot and killed both of them with a legally purchased Glock 17 9mm pistol. He then went to his fourth-floor balcony and fired multiple rounds into the street, killing 33-year-old Carlos Javier Gavilanes as he exited his car. Vargas subsequently kicked open the door of apartment 304 and killed its residents: 64-year-old Patricio Simono, his 51-year-old wife Merly S. Niebles, and their 17-year-old daughter Priscilla Perez.
Police responding to the scene exchanged gunfire with Vargas in the building's stairwells for approximately five hours. Vargas then entered apartment 525 and took two residents, Zoeb and Farida Nek, hostage for about three hours while continuing to fire at officers outside. After negotiations reportedly broke down, a six-officer SWAT team entered the building. The hostages were found praying in the living room while Vargas paced elsewhere in the apartment. Officers outside deployed a stun grenade to distract Vargas, allowing the SWAT team to rescue the hostages and fatally shoot him after a brief exchange of gunfire in the early hours of July 27, 2013. Both hostages were unharmed. Two fully loaded magazines were recovered at the scene.
The shooting was described as the deadliest in Hialeah's history and the deadliest in the Miami area in three decades, with a total of seven deaths including the shooter.
Vargas, a Cuban native born in Havana, had immigrated to the U.S. with his mother in the mid-1990s and was naturalized in 2004. He had no record of serious prior criminal offenses. He had worked at Miami Dade College's media services department starting in 2004 but was forced to resign in 2008 after downloading inappropriate files, including a hacking tutorial. He later worked briefly for other employers, including Bullet Line, a promotional company, from May to October 2012, after which he reportedly sent abusive messages to the company and retained an attorney, Angel Castillo, Jr., regarding the matter. On the day of the shooting, Vargas had gone to Castillo's office seeking to see him. Following the shooting, Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernández and the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise both issued public statements responding to the incident.
Credit: Koba-chan; cropped, marked and wording by Laszlovszky András at Hungarian WikipediaPublic domainSourceUNSOLVEDListen
