Florida's most(dead) wanted

A Florida Dept of Corrections website lists Benigno Guerra as wanted by police. He escaped a Belle Glade prison in 1994.

The Palm Beach reports today that Mr. Guerra died in 1994. An Arizona detective says he reported Guerra's death to the DOC in that same year. A Tuscon newspaper article at the time ran quotes by department and jail officials.

Don't you just love Florida bureaucracy? This is getting to be typical for the DOC, their former Secretary Jim Crosby resigned last month. He and the department were under investigation by both state and federal prosecutors. The ole boy network still reigns in Florida and at taxpayer expense.

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They called him Houdini.

Convicted of three murders and a string of other violent crimes in Miami and sentenced to three lifetimes in prison, Benigno Guerra escaped or tried to escape one lockup after another, earning him a classification of "extreme escape risk."

At various times, authorities put him in his own cell, watched him closely, dressed him in a bright red jumpsuit, and moved him only in cuffs and chains.

He escaped anyway, the last time from Glades Correctional Institution in Belle Glade.

That was a dozen years ago. And he's still on the lam, according to the Florida Department of Corrections' Web page. The DOC lists him as one of only 10 escapees still at large since 1990.

One problem: Guerra's dead. Has been since 1994. An Arizona detective says he notified the DOC soon after positively identifying the shot and burned corpse found near Tucson as that of Guerra. A DOC spokeswoman and the warden at Glades Correctional even commented at the time for a Tucson newspaper article about the slaying.

Despite that, the DOC still lists Guerra as being on the loose. Its Web page for him — updated March 12, for the first time since 1998, and just weeks after The Palm Beach Post inquired — asks anyone to call "if you have information concerning the whereabouts of this escapee." Prison authorities and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement traded memos on Guerra as recently as 2002.

"I don't think there's any follow-up," said Jerome Wolfson, a lawyer for Miami police officer Eric Burton, whom Guerra shot following a 1988 escape. "They list him and wait for all of their agencies to find him. It's like passing the buck."

DOC spokesman Robby Cunningham said the department has contacted Arizona authorities to confirm Guerra's death. It's impossible to reconstruct what the department did 12 years ago, he said. But, "I feel confident that all procedures in place at that time were followed," he said.