Associated Press
Miami-Dade Officer Killed, 3 Wounded
Associated Press 09.13.07, 4:14 PM ET

CUTLER BAY, Fla. -
A gunman killed a police officer and injured three others during a traffic stop Thursday, triggering a manhunt in a suburban Miami neighborhood, officials said.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez confirmed that one of the officers died. All four were taken to hospitals, but authorities refused to release further information because they were trying to notify the officers' families.

The officers were conducting burglary surveillance when they stopped the man because he was driving a car erratically, said Linda O'Brien, a police spokeswoman. The man opened fire with a high-powered weapon and fled. It was not immediately clear if the officers returned fire.

TV footage showed several officers briefly surrounding a house, guns drawn, before moving on. Others swept through a grassy area on foot and picked through a garbage truck.

Authorities were looking for Shawn Sherwin Labeet, 25. Authorities initially identified a different suspect as the gunman, but that person was actually hundreds of miles away in the Jacksonville area.

"It appears that we were being misled ... by somebody we were talking to who said they were giving us correct information," O'Brien said.

Investigators believed they had recovered a vehicle and a gun used in the shooting, O'Brien said.

No other details were immediately available.

Cutler Bay is a suburb southwest of downtown Miami. Several schools were locked down due to the search.

Two other officers were shot separately last month in neighboring Broward County. One was killed, the other badly injured.


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None of us can understand how someone can do such a thing. He was a routine traffic stop and he just started shooting everyone...

It doesn't matter how many times I see something like this, I hope I will never understand it....

i'll be damn. It had to be in Florida.
Everything happens here.

M-

Here's the worst part- they found, cornered and killed the man who shot those officers. He was ON PROBATION, he had warrents out for his arrest and he is suspected to have killed another pokice officer. His girlfriend and her family and friends hid and aided him.

Now he is dead, one of the officers is dead and the other three officers are wounded.

I am glad that the four who aided him are being charged...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MIAMI - Four people were charged Friday with helping a Margate man try to elude Miami-Dade police after he killed an officer and wounded three others, authorities said.

Renee Dangelo, Lazaro Guardiola, Alba Bello and Alain Gonzalez were booked on charges of accessory after the fact to first-degree murder, said Miami-Dade police spokeswoman Linda O'Brien.

They are accused of helping Shawn Labeet flee after he fired at officers who tried to stop his car in southwest Miami-Dade on Thursday.

Officers tracked Labeet to a Pembroke Pines condo complex and killed him after a shootout near a pool shortly before midnight.

Dangelo, 26, was identified as Labeet's girlfriend. She is accused of intentionally misleading police by giving them Labeet's alias when they questioned her, O'Brien said.

Details of how Bello, 47; Gonzalez, 24; and Guardiola, 35, helped Labeet were not immediately released. O'Brien said some of the accused helped Labeet get to Broward County.

"They helped him. They will face the music. They will face charges for assisting a murderer in trying to elude us," O'Brien said.

O'Brien said tips and "old fashioned really, really hard police work" led investigators to Labeet.

The Broward Sheriff's Office said it was testing a gun found with Labeet after he was killed to see if it was used in any other crimes.

"We're testing it, but we test every gun," said Elliot Cohen, spokesman for the Sheriff's Office. "It's just good police work to test this gun against other case."

The agency later said the weapon was not connected to the Aug. 10 killing of Broward Sheriff's deputy Christopher Reyka, who was shot in Pompano Beach while he looked for stolen vehicles. Authorities are still looking for the gunman.

Labeet fraudulently purchased six "high-powered assault weapons" and three pistols by using an alias between December 2005 and March 2006 using his alias, Kevin Wehner, O'Brien said. She said she did not know why he bought the weapons.

"He fraudulently obtained those weapons," O'Brien said.

Police say the officers shot by Labeet were working a burglary surveillance detail late Thursday morning at an apartment complex near Southwest 280th Street and 143rd Court in Miami-Dade.

O'Brien said about 40 officers were involved in an operation to investigate a rash of burglaries in the area. Officers spotted a red Buick LaSabre driven by Labeet that was going fast and they followed it to the home Labeet shared with Dangelo.

Labeet took off running and police pursued him, O'Brien said. When they caught up to him, he opened fire.

Officer Jose Somohano, 37, was killed. Three others were injured, and one remains hospitalized with a shattered leg.

Labeet fled in his girlfriend's white Honda Accord, which was later found abandoned near Southwest 216th Street and 129th Avenue, along with a "high-powered military-grade type rifle," O'Brien said.

Miami-Dade police later found out Labeet was in Pembroke Pines.

At about 11:30 p.m., officers from both agencies found Labeet in the pool area of an apartment complex that is being converted into condos at 8471 Southwest 5th St., according to Pembroke Pines police.

After a "confrontation" between Labeet and police, the Miami-Dade Special Response Team shot him, a Pembroke Pines police statement said. No one else was injured.

Labeet was found in possession of an extra clip of ammunition and body armor, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez said.

Joann Rivera, the building's property manager, said Friday that Labeet was not registered as living in the condos, but his cousin was. She said she did not have the cousin's name.

The pool area where Labeet was shot was roped off with yellow police tape.

"This area is usually safe, but incidents like this make you feel a little less safe," said Rivera.

Staff Writer Joel Marino and Brian Haas contributed to this report.