DORAL, Fla. – Hialeah Detective Alexander Dorado suspected that a man who had beat up his girlfriend at a mobile home and had returned three days later to set her home on fire was on a crime spree.
Hialeah Detective Jason Couto suspected that the same man had likely been involved in a carjacking at knife-point. The victim was a Lyft driver who was in a silver 2020 Hyundai.
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Miami-Dade Detective Raymond Taboada identified the Hialeah suspect as the arsonist who had firebombed a 2012 Dodge Caravan and a house in the Richmond West area.
The detectives agreed Jay Stubbs — a convicted felon known as “Rampage” — had allegedly threatened his girlfriend: “If you don’t come back to me, I am going to kill your family!”
According to an arrest warrant released on Wednesday, the detectives managed to stop him with the help of deputies in Texas. The woman’s domestic violence nightmare was back in May 2022.
Stubbs, now 31, was at the Metrowest Detention Center on Thursday, near Doral. Inmate records show he has a U.S. Marshals Service hold since Miami-Dade corrections officers booked him on Tuesday.
According to the warrant, after the domestic violence and arson in Miami-Dade, he drove the stolen 2020 Hyundai to Texas and to Harris County where the victim was hiding with a relative.
The warrant also reported Dorado told the victim that Stubbs’s cellphone signal was pinging near her and he had contacted the Harris County Sheriff’s Department for help to protect her.
Stubbs “fled from the Sheriff’s Officers and ... crashed the stolen vehicle and was ... taken into custody after a foot chase,” Taboada wrote in his request for a warrant about his conversations with Hialeah detectives.
Harris County authorities recovered the stolen Hyundai and found Stubbs had five Molotov cocktails and a plastic container with gasoline, records show.
Stubbs was a fugitive of concern. His criminal record showed a Miami-Dade judge had sentenced him to 10 years in prison for manslaughter in 2013. The Florida Department of Corrections released him in 2021.
The initial domestic violence attack was on May 6, 2022, but the battered victim didn’t report it until after the arson on May 9, 2022, records show. The second arson and the carjacking were on May 22 and the chase and arrest were on May 23, 2022.
Stubbs’s new cases in Miami-Dade were for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, domestic battery by strangulation, first-degree arson, and second-degree arson.
Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler is set to preside over the felony arson cases. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Laura Maria Gonzalez-Marques is set to preside over the aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and domestic battery cases.