MIAMI – Miami police have made another arrest in connection with a kidnapping that ended in a shooting on the Julia Tuttle Causeway in September.
Police took Kelly James Perpall into custody Tuesday on charges of attempted murder, armed kidnapping and home invasion robbery with a deadly weapon.
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Authorities arrested an accused co-defendant, Mercedes Latifah Green, on those same charges on Oct. 1. Both Green, 33, and Perpall, 39, live in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood.
According to arrest reports, they’re among a group of five people who kidnapped a woman from a home in the city’s Little Haiti neighborhood on Sept. 10. Authorities haven’t publicly identified any other co-defendants as of Wednesday afternoon.
Authorities said the group went to the home, located in 100 block of Northeast 68th Street, knocked on the door and asked for the victim, confronting her about money, drugs and a stolen gun; she denied any involvement and closed the door on them.
Police said they knocked again — and, this time, when the other person answered, they weren’t asking. The reports state Perpall, Green and the other co-defendants “barged into the home” and one of the perpetrators, while armed, “accused the victim of stealing his gun and asked where it was.”
The victim again denied stealing the gun, which led a co-defendant to pistol-whip and punch her “several times,” police said. Authorities said that the co-defendant handed the gun to another accomplice, who also pistol-whipped and punched the victim.
Green, police said, “struck the victim with a liquor bottle on the head.” The witness said Perpall then pulled out a gun “to keep anyone from intervening,” the reports state.
“The victim was then dragged out of the home by her hair and placed inside the vehicle,” a Ford F-150, by one of the co-defendants, police said.
Authorities said the woman told the group that the gun was at her father’s house and directed them there. Police said when her father answered his door, he denied knowing anything about the gun and the group left.
The reports state that at around 3 a.m., after driving around, the group took the woman to the Julia Tuttle Causeway.
Perpall, “along with both male co-defendants,” then dragged the victim out of the truck, police said. One of the men then shot her three times and left her on the side of the road.
The reports state that after being shot, the woman walked around the causeway looking for help. About 35 minutes after the shooting, someone called Miami Beach police to report “a body on the side of the road.”
Authorities said first responders found the woman with “severe injuries to her face.” Medics took her to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center for treatment.
The reports state that detectives were eventually able to interview the victim, who told police that she knew all of the culprits except Green, who would deny any involvement following her arrest.
Police said detectives located Perpall at a home on Southwest 103rd Court in Cutler Bay and took him into custody Tuesday.
Perpall “placed himself (at) the scene but denied touching the victim,” they said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, both he and Green were being held without bond in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.