MIAMI – After his Friday court appearance, a 13-year-old boy who is facing a murder charge as an adult returned to Metro West, an adult’s detention center with a new juvenile section that holds 34 teenagers — mostly between the ages of 16 to 17 years old.
Attorney Dayliset Rielo asked Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Richard Hersch to transfer Derek Rosa, a former student at a charter school in Hialeah, to a juvenile detention center. Corrections was holding him in a cell by himself at Metro West.
The polite 8th-grade honor roll student called 911 at about 11:30 p.m., on Oct. 12, to confess that he had killed his 39-year-old mother at their apartment in Hialeah, police said.
Police officers responded to a second-floor apartment, just west of Amelia Earhart Park, and found his mother, Irina Garcia, dead just 14 days after she gave birth to his half-sister.
In the bedroom, the baby girl was inches away from her dead mother in her crib while her father, Frank Ramos, a truck driver, was traveling for work in northern Georgia, police said.
Garcia died of multiple stab wounds to the neck, according to the medical examiner’s autopsy report. Derek pleaded not guilty to the murder charge.
Relatives said Derek did not have a history of mental illness and got along with his family. He was transferred to Metro West Detention Center on Oct. 26. His biological father, Jose Rosa, was in court and has asked authorities for leniency.
Attorney Jose Baez, whose clients included Casey Anthony, Aaron Hernandez, and Harvey Weinstein, is representing him.