MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – A pasta sauce stain that didn’t match with a man’s story led Miami-Dade police to determine he was lying when he said he wasn’t responsible for a fatal crash on his way back from a strip club, according to an arrest warrant.
Police said after being caught fibbing, Brian Nathaniel Noel, of North Lauderdale, admitted to drinking before taking the wheel that night. Detectives said it cost someone their life. Authorities arrested him at the Broward County Jail Tuesday.
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According to the warrant, the crash happened just before 3:30 a.m., on June 12, 2021. That’s when police said Dayron Casa Chaveco, 27, driving a 2021 Honda Civic along Northwest 103rd Street, had a green light to go through the intersection at 17th Avenue.
Noel, now 33, driving along 17th, did not, police said. He blew through the red light in his 2015 Infiniti G37, T-boning the Honda, the warrant states.
Chaveco was pronounced dead on the scene and his passenger was seriously hurt.
Noel, telling fire rescue crews that he was the passenger, was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center with complaints of pelvic pain.
Detectives interviewed Noel at JMH, where he claimed his cousin was behind the wheel and a woman was in the backseat, the warrant states, telling investigators that they were coming back from The Office on Northeast 183rd Street.
Miami-Dade police traffic homicide Detective Michael Quinones wrote that he noticed the Infiniti’s passenger seat was covered in yellow pasta sauce, which Noel said was leftover food.
However, two things were off to Quinones, according to the warrant: The sauce blanketed the seat to the point that it looked like no one had been sitting there — and Noel’s shirt barely had any sauce on it, just a small stain.
The shirt “should have been covered in yellow sauce” if Noel was telling the truth, the detective wrote.
Quinones then told Noel he was now conducting a criminal investigation, which led Noel to come clean: he admitted he was behind the wheel and drank Hennessy and Coke at the strip club before the crash, police said.
Noel told police he stopped at a gas station on Northwest 183rd Street to buy cigarettes before the wreck. He still claimed there was a passenger in the vehicle, police said, but officers couldn’t find any evidence of that.
Toxicology reports showed Noel had a blood alcohol content of a little more than twice the legal limit, the warrant states.
He was later taken from Broward County to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where he was being held without bond on charges of vehicular homicide, DUI manslaughter and DUI causing serious bodily injury.