MIRAMAR, Fla. – Police say a worker at a south Broward car dealership took a high-performance sedan from his employer’s lot without permission and drove it at more than 120 mph when he slammed into another driver near North Perry Airport in April, killing her.
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Amun-Ra Caleb Earls, 23, of Miramar, turned himself in at the Broward County jail on Monday. Court records show he’s facing several criminal charges, including vehicular homicide and driving without a valid Florida license, causing serious bodily injury or death.
Police said Earls worked as a porter for Vera Cadillac, located at 300 S. University Drive in Pembroke Pines, at the time of the crash.
According to an arrest warrant from the Miramar Police Department, during the evening of April 26, Earls had taken a 2024 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing from the lot without permission to run personal errands. Car and Driver described the vehicle, which retails for around $100,000 or more, as having a “mega-power supercharged V-8″ packing 668 horsepower.
The warrant states that as he drove the vehicle at triple-digit speeds on Pembroke Road just before 8:25 p.m., he slammed into a woman making a left turn onto Island Drive as she headed home from work, splitting her Honda CR-V in two and killing her. The woman’s name was redacted from publicly-available documents.
A witness told investigators that after the crash, she checked on Earls and the woman, who was dead in the front section of the Honda, the warrant states. Police said she told investigators that when Earls got out of the vehicle and realized his victim was dead, “he raised his hands and said ‘s---.’”
Police said Earls, who had a driver’s license from his home state of Georgia, would try claiming that he was “cruising” around the 45 mph speed limit at the time of the wreck, but investigators said “it was evident that this was not the case” due to the extreme damage left by the violent impact.
They said vehicle data recorder evidence showed he was actually driving 122 mph just before hitting the woman.
The warrant states that investigators later determined that Earls “purposely removed the key section of the fob which contained the vehicle tracker and left that part within the key locker box” before taking the vehicle from the lot.
Vera Cadillac staff filed a stolen vehicle report with Pembroke Pines police following the crash, according to the warrant, and Earls was arrested on May 6 for a grand theft auto charge. As per Broward court records, that case remains pending as of Tuesday.
In a statement to Local 10 News, a representative from Vera noted that the dealership reported the theft immediately and emphasized that the employee was fired immediately.
Earls was being held in the Broward Main Jail on a $114,000 bond as of Tuesday afternoon.
Online records show that if he posts bond, he’ll have to submit to electronic monitoring and surrender his passport.