Miami Dade Schools Police Department

Sergeant Lourdes Hodges was the person who opened the “Supplemental report” on the Dashboard of Detective Hadley after he completed sending the information requested to Sanford Sgt. Randy Smith.   Hadley sent Smith an 8 page report on Trayvon Martin from a Criminal Mischief complaint filed by School Resource Officer Darryl Dunn.

However, at the behest and instruction of Police Chief Hurley, the Mischief Complaint was only part of the behavioral issue from that day. The second aspect from the incident was Trayvon’s backpack containing stolen jewelry and a burglary tool. This part of the incident was intentionally mislabeled, and misreported, by SRO Dunn to eliminate the need for a criminal investigation.

Instead of attaching the Jewelry to Trayvon Martin, Dunn filled out a report of the jewelry outlining it as “found jewelry”, presenting the issues *as if* it were just found items with no ownership etc. As a consequence the jewelry was sent to evidence storage where it sat without investigation.

After M-DSPD Hadley sent the 8 page report to Sanford PD, the jewelry incident was noted as a case number associated with the Trayvon Martin file – but not attached to the file by name. Hence, Sgt Hodges opened a dashboard supplement so that Hadley could photograph the items and send an additional supplemental report along to Sgt Smith in Sanford who was compiling information for a victimology report.

The information Sgt. Smith eventually compiled, with support from the Miami-Dade School Police Force, never saw the light of day.  It disappeared down the rabbit hole, and was not included in the final victimology report filed by Sanford Detective Serino.

Sgt. Lourdes Hodges connects many of the dots associated with the process that was taking place in Miami-Dade  immediately following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

As we have  continued to outline, the Trayvon shooting was recognized immediately as a risk by the M-DSPD Police Chief Charles Hurley.

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Former Police Chief Hurley with his wife and son – Miami

Hurley had told his officers to avoid issuing criminal reports on young black males in High School, and to find alternate disingenuous methods of using the reports only for school discipline.   This process was an effort to support a false premise of improved statistics mandated by Miami-Dade School Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who hired Hurley.

Both Hurley and Carvalho were being heralded as heroes for incredible reductions in criminal student behavior. Unfortunately, the improvements they were taking credit for were merely due to manipulation of statistics and data.

The publicity surrounding the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the potential for investigative journalism, spooked Hurley who worried the scheme would be discovered.  As a consequence he told all police officers and leadership that no information was to be shared with outside agencies – the request by Sanford Police, and the fulfillment of part of that request angered Hurley who launched an Internal Affairs investigation against his own team.

Unfortunately the investigation backfired, because the officers within the General Investigation Unit (GIU) told Internal Affairs officers the truth about what was going on.  This expanded the investigation outside the GIU to include dozens of corroborative witnesses.

At the conclusion of the internal investigation Police Chief Hurley was suspended, and later fired.

What you are about to read is Sgt. Lourdes Hodges sworn affidavit to the Internal Affairs investigator outlining what took place from her perspective.

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