DOCUMENT: Florida, Crime

Ex-Cop Charged For Wild South Beach Joyride

Fired officer driving ATV severely injured beachgoers

ATV

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Miami Cop Charged

JULY 27--A former Miami Beach police officer who severely injured two people walking on the beach while taking a woman on a drunken ATV joyride has been charged with DUI and reckless driving causing serious bodily injury.

Derick Kuilan, 30, was in uniform on July 3 with another officer, Rolando Gutierrez, when they entered a South Beach hotel club and allegedly began drinking and posing for pictures with a Pennsylvania woman named Adalee Martin and her four friends.

In the above photo released by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, Gutierrez can be seen on the left while Kuilan is on the right.

According to a Circuit Court affidavit, the five females who were attending a bachelorette party “did not believe they were real police officers” since “the behavior of both officers was so unprofessional.” But that did not stop Martin from getting on the back of Kuilan’s ATV for a ride along the beach in the early morning hours of July 3.

Described as “driving fast on the sand” and primarily without headlights in the pre-dawn hours, two witnesses heard the ATV but were barely able to see it seconds before they heard “a loud impact” as Kuilan struck a man and woman walking on the shore.

The woman, 29, who remains hospitalized, suffered a broken femur and had to have her spleen removed. The man, also 29, suffered a broken bone that required surgery.

When officers responded to the crash they were shown a photo of the officers taken earlier by one of Martin’s friends who told a sergeant that the cops “had been drinking with them.”

Kuilan, who along with Gutierrez was fired earlier this month, was booked yesterday on the felony counts into the Miami-Dade County Jail where he posed for the above mug shot before being released on $30,000 bail. (3 pages)